David Huffaker posted his thesis, “Gender Similarities and Differences in Online Identity and Language Use among Teenage Bloggers”.
Overall, the results indicate that teenagers reveal a considerable amount of personal information in their blogs, including name, age, and location, as well as contact information in the form of an email address, an instant messenger name or a link to personal homepage. The content of blogs typically reflects what is expected to impact a teenager?s life. While almost half of teenage blogs are abandoned, active blogs demonstrate high levels of loyalty in terms of frequency of posts (daily or weekly) and length of posts (which average 2000 words per page). Contrary to prediction, the results indicate that there are more gender similarities than differences in blog use. However, some gender differences were noted, regarding emotive features, sexual identity, language use, and some components of personal information.
The paper takes a look at the teenage segment to understand the methods used for establishing online identity.