more on gender

Two great posts about gender and blogs (via Pedablogue):
Gendering the Blog 1
Gendering the Blog 2

I find "inconsequentiality"'s comments about diaryland/livejournal vs other blog formats very interesting. I wonder if Blogger's increasing range of templates etc (and increasing visibility b/c of merger with Google), plus the membership changes at typepad, are causing some shifts in the blog world. But clearly, in her terms, I'm a blogger rather than a diarist. (NB: I do keep a journal, in ink and notebook form, and have for years. This space is something altogether different.) Whenever I read diaryland blogs, for instance, I feel more like I'm eavesdropping than when I'm reading a Blogger-formatted blog. Which is interesting, given the faux privacy of any of this: the conversations between commenters, for instance, which look like (and indeed function like) dialogue -- yet performed in front of a potentially infinite (but realistically much smaller) audience.