A trend that I predict since 2008 has been validated by Sysomos: women blog more than men, even it is by a tiny margin. And it  is similar to the gender spread in the overall population. I have been advocating that the Web will be populated more and more by women and that fact will change the nature of the Web. The rise in women participation online is due to the advent of social media and a wide access to easy to use publishing tools.

Let’s look at the statistics from an analysis of more than 100 million blog posts done by Sysomos.com for a study published June 2010. We can get a better grasp of the current state of the blogosphere by noting that:

• Bloggers aged between 21 to 35 years old account for 53.3% of the total blogging population
• 50.9% of bloggers are women
• Almost 30% of bloggers are from the USA, 6.75% live in UK, 4.9% are in Japan and Canada arrived fifth with 3.9%
• The study confirmed what I already knew, looking at my regional statistics. California is the US state with most bloggers (14%), followed by New York at 7% and Ontario ranked third (5.6%) before Colorado and Texas.
• More than half of the tweets come from U.S. Twitter users, while only a third of blog posts are from the USA. Find more data about Twitter demographics around the World (January 2010).

+ Get all the details at Inside Blog Demographics by Sysomos

Even if that news is a few weeks old, I want to make sure that you did not miss it. The reason is that it is a good news for serious bloggers and for media planners. Before this announcement, small publishers did not install the tagging system of comScore due to their excessive costs.

Typically, small publishers who sell direct can only afford to supply Google Analytics data or data from concurrents of comScore who were already offering free measurement reports. Some may argue that not having comScore data further put at a disadvantage small publishers who want to attract big advertisers since big publishers typically supply that data. I cannot tell you the validity of this assumption but one thing is sure: this news could level a level field of measurement.  I would need to get access to my comScore before I can tell you if it adds value for me, as a blogger.

How it works?

Tagging your pages enables comScore to compute a more accurate reading of your traffic. This is why it is a good news that comScore announced at TechCrunch’s Disrupt conference in New York City that it will provide for free tagging to all sites. comScore tagging means you put a code in each page of your site to track your traffic. Plus, start ups with less than 1 million unique visitors per month will get access to basic reporting features.

The free tagging program is in beta in the US right now.  It will launch globally this summer. The tagging setup cost used to be $5000, which is too much for most SMB and bloggers.

I read a good analysis of this news on eConsultancy.