Ideas.Think.Share

I’ve came across an interesting journal regarding how gender contributes personal tendency to  frequent blog posting. The journal titled “Gender differences in reasons for frequent blog posting” was done by Hsi-Peng Lu and Kuo-Lun Hsiao, from the Department of Information Management, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Taipei, Taiwan and published in Online Information Review Vol. 33 No. 1, 2009 pp. 135-156 at Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

Just for your memory recall, A weblog is defined as a web site that contains entries in reverse chronological order (Thelwall and Hasler, 2007). weblogs, or blogs, have become very popular, according to a survey conducted by Technorati (2006), there are more than 70 million blogs worldwide and about 120,000 new weblogs each day (Sifry, 2007).

So the main purpose of the research is to improve understanding of what motivates individual blog owners to post information frequently on weblogs, and whether gender affects those motivations.  An empirical study involving 525 subjects was conducted to test this model.

The research findings shows that subjective norms have a stronger effect on the intention than personal outcome expectations or self-expression. Women’s intention for blog posting was strongly influenced by self-expression while men’s intention was strongly influenced by personal outcome expectations.

The research implications verified the effects of subjective norms, personal outcome expectations and self-expression on the intentions of weblog owners. The research found that these factors are important determinants of the intention to update weblogs. Moreover, it was found that gender moderates the relationships between factors and the intention in the research model.

While for practical implications especially for weblog service providers, the results can be used to develop tools to enhance people’s intentions to publish according to gender.

Another interesting researches that found significant differences exist between the electronic communication styles of women and men are:

1. Gefen and Straub (2000) demonstrated that women tend to use electronic communication for rapport building and men tend to use it for reporting;
2. Herring (1996) showed that requesting and providing information are more common in female-oriented than in male-oriented discussions;
3. Wallace (1999) found that women may feel freer in real-time chats, while men may be more comfortable in asynchronous forums;
4. female bloggers share more personal information on their blogs (Kennedy et al., 2005; Herring and Paolillo, 2006; Herring et al., 2006); and
5. Gender plays an important role in determining technology use and behaviour on the internet (Gefen and Straub, 1997; Venkatesh and Morris, 2000; Ong and Lai, 2006).

So at least I got the idea on how women blog to express their feeling while men do blogging for personal outcome expectation. Interesting.