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All of a sudden, it seemed like everyone moved over to Plurk. This was about the time I took my little summer vaca from SL, and so I haven’t even given a serious look to Plurk, but my superficial examination has left me thoroughly confused. I guess it’s like Twitter on steroids, with all the pressure to microblog and keep up with other folks’ microblogs, but with the added pressure of a reputation rating called “karma”! No thanks.

I don’t Skype, for the same reasons I don’t use voice. I’m not much into machinima, so I don’t post videos to YouTube. I’ve given Lively a quick try and it crashed for me about ten times in half an hour, and besides I’m not happy about the fact that you can hit and slap (assault) other avatars without their consent. I still use Google chat occasionally to talk with Lanna when we can’t be in-world, but as I’ve noted before it’s a sorry substitution for SL. I belong to a few Ning groups, such as SL Bloggers and Fashion Finds, but to be honest I rarely use them.

Then there’s Facebook. I will admit, I have two Facebook accounts, one for RL and one for SL. (And no, my Second Self is not friends with RL me, so don’t bother checking!) I enjoyed using Facebook as Kit at first, but what I’ve since realized is that what I really enjoyed was using the Scrabulous application on Facebook to play Scrabble with friends, and that’s it. Which, besides being a time-waster and a huuuuuge copyright infringement, really doesn’t have anything to do with Facebook as a platform in and of itself. And the platform just started to annoy me, with all the invitations to install new applications, half of which I don’t understand and don’t really care to. (Why do I care to be a zombie? Or buy and sell my friends?)

The results of the analysis of gender and age indicators reveal that the numbers of males and females, and of adults and teens, are roughly equal, especially in the later sub-sample.

There is also a skewed distribution of the gender and age of blog authors in relation to blog type. In a recent study, Herring, Scheidt, Bonus and Wright (2004) found evidence of three basic types of weblogs: the content of filters is external to the blogger (links to world events, online happenings, etc.), while the content of personal journals is internal (the blogger's thoughts and internal workings), and k(nowledge)-logs are repositories of information and observations with a typically technological focus. In the present study, we coded each blog in the sample as journal, filter, k-log, or mixed (a combination of two or all of the first three types).

Are weblogs inherently “democratizing,” in the sense of giving voice to diverse populations of users? The empirical findings reported for gender and age at the beginning of this essay suggest that they are. Yet public commentators on weblogs, including many bloggers themselves, collude in reproducing gender and age-based hierarchy in the blogosphere, demonstrating once again that even an open access technology—and high hopes for its use—cannot guarantee socially equitable outcomes in a society that continues to embrace hierarchical values.