By way of Madame Levy I found an interesting article about linking habits of bloggers. It appears to be divided along gender lines with males overwhelmingly favoring male blog authors and females with the same trend towards their own gender. I counted my own blogroll and found I have links to 29 sites (as of today and could have more but I’m lazy about updating my MT templates…) and ten of those are to female authored sites, two that belong to gay writers (at least I know those two are) and the rest are links to male authored blogs. An almost 50/50 split. Not sure what that says about me as a person but it seems I’m not completely following the pack. Perhaps it has to do with what I like to read; what calls my attention in writing style, beliefs and ideas. I am not concerned about reaching any artificial “readership top” by strategically linking to other sites. Most of the sites I link to are sites I comment in and try to get to know the person behind the writing. Mind you, I have experienced some backfires by my habits but is all in a life’s journey of learning. In any case, I’ll be watching that space as social trends is something I find fascinating.
Keep up the good work!
apophenia: the biases of links
I began this investigation curious about gender differences. There are a few things that we know in social networks. First, our social networks are frequently split by gender (from childhood on). Second, men tend to have large numbers of weak ties and women tend to have fewer, but stronger ties. This means that in traditional social networks, men tend to know far more people but not nearly as intimately as those women know. (This is a huge advantage for men in professional spheres but tends to wreak havoc when social support becomes more necessary and is often attributed to depression later in life.)