Do men and women blog differently?

Margaret Wente says the main difference is: men blog! She writes, in an article (not a blog post!) entitled, "Why are bloggers male?":

People often ask me why I don't start a blog. . . .

The answer is pretty much the same as why I don't get a souped-up snowmobile and drive it straight up a mountain at 120 kilometres an hour into a well-known avalanche zone. It's more of a guy thing.

Guys seek thrills and speed. They go for the adrenalin rush. They get pumped by going higher, faster, farther than anyone else. They want lots of action and instant gratification. That's also why guys like blogging – instant opinions, and lots of them.

Men clearly have an urge to blog that women lack. Like extreme snowmobiling, the blogosphere is dominated by men. Not many women are interested enough in spitting out an opinion on current events every 20 minutes.

That presupposes that the essence of blogging is instant, timely opinions. I'd like to think it isn't.

She goes on:

“Do you think men are more opinionated than women are?” I asked my friend Sarah the other day. (Sarah is 24, and several of her male friends have started blogs.) “No,” she said. “They just don't feel the need to think before they open their mouths.”

Sarah and I believe the urge to blog is closely related to the sex-linked compulsion known as male answer syndrome. MAS is the reason why guys shoot up their hands first in math class. MAS also explains why men are so quick to have opinions on subjects they know little or nothing about.

Of course, her quote of Sarah is an instant opinion. As I said in one of the first posts on this blog, men and women are both susceptible to what's called "male answer syndrome" -- but it's been branded as "male" because there's this weird rule that you score social points by putting down men. The willingness to say things without knowing what you're talking about seems to be a universal phenomenon that transcends all social categories, so I'm not convinced it accounts for why any one group blogs more than another.

Susannah Breslin generally agrees with Wente about blogging and adds that there are three kinds of female bloggers (via):

“mommybloggers,” “ladybloggers,” and “women who blog like men.” The first category includes those who have made careers out of writing about the perils of raising a family, being married, and getting stuff off the kitchen floor. The second category includes the group of blogs that self-describe as “feminist” and which seem to have decided that blogging about purportedly widespread sexism and instances of misogyny in our pop culture a neo-feminist movement makes (NB: it doesn’t). The third category includes those few women who blog about politics, technology, and other more “male” topics with a scathing wit and piercing gaze that put their male blogger rivals to shame.

Breslin also has a manifesto:

What the blogosphere needs is fewer Martha Stewarts and more Danica Patricks, more real debate and less positing women as the victims of a patriarchal society gone bloggy-wild, more men that blog like women and more women who blog like men.