War of the gender reborn on the internet: Women socialize, men gather information

I’ve seen it coming for some time, and now I’ve documented it: while men and women are equally represented online, both in terms of the number of users and the amount of time they spend, you find significant differences when you scratch the surface.

In my new “digital view”-report (se below) I find that 1,3 million Danish women spend nearly 14 million hours updating and reading status messages in August 2009, while 1,1 million Danish men spend nearly 7 million hours in the same period. And I find that men used a little more than 8 million hours keeping themselves up to date on news-site, while women spend only nearly 4 million hours.

The analysis clearly draws up the image of a divided internet, in which women networks while men gather information.

It’s almost like taking a time-machine back in time to the first human societies, where men went out hunting, while the women stayed back home taking care of bringing up the kids etc. The differences are so huge, it’s bound to create conflicts of some kind. And they’re so significant we’ll have to ask ourselves what this means both to the way we conduct business and arrange our society.

Read on:

War of the gender reborn on the internet: Women socialize, men gather information

[Download as pdf]

Danish facts: Twitter is a small, elitist niche-site (Digital view, week 37 2009)

In this weeks issue of Digital view: Life on the Danish internet I put the spotlight on Danes’ use of twitter.com and reveal the number of users and demographic profile of the popular social networking service.

The analysis shows twitter.com to be a small (5-10 percent the size of Facebook) and elitist niche-site (users living in larger Copenhagen area, around 30 and with a university-degree). And although twitter is still growing, I don’t expect it to have a potential for more than a doubling. Read the analysis for more figures, graphs etc.

I also highlight why I think this is actually a fine spot to be in for Twitter, exhausting the potentials given to it by it’s own concept. The thing is that the the two factors that makes Twitter cool (actually constituting the concept of Twitter) also limits Twitters potentials for growh, namely i) the naked, pure-thought substance that twitter endorses and ii) the uni-lateral nature of the follow-me twitter-relationsships. You can find a more detailed explanation in the analysis.

More graphs, facts, analysis, background and methodology available here:

Danish facts: Twitter is a small, elitist niche-site

[Download as pdf]