The blog iceberg
A little late, but still interesting statistics for anybody interested in blogging: The Blogging Iceberg, a white paper by Jeffrey Henning at Perseus . This study puts this post by Danah Boyd at misbehaving.net into perspective.

The perseus results may indicate a potential error in the fact that people online can register and appear to an other gender than in the flesh world, but I personally don't think crossdressing bloggers are a statistically significant group. More interesting is the information that men don't maintain their blogs the same way women do. I keep hearing mentioned in passing that blogs are a women's medium. Yes, according to this research, 56% of the blogs surveyed were created by women. When the majority of the estimated 2,72 million abandoned blogs out there are abandoned by men, that makes blogging even more of a female dominated medium, with only 40,7 % of the active blogs created by men.

One likely explanation for the perception Danah Boyd has of men dominating the blogosphere, may originate in a male behavioural pattern online. That is likely, seeing that she is a Ph.D. student in Information Management and Systems at UC-Berkeley. To reach that far she needs to be socialised to have certain interests and disregard others - we all are by the time the educational system is done with us. Her perception of a male dominance of the blogosphere is in that case not a perception that holds true for the world of blogs, but for the world of accepted, academic writing and her own idea of what is interesting and important reading.