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Introduction

People seek to define who they are near the beginning of the 21st century, their forums for self-discovery have expanded. One place that people now spend a considerable amount of time is in online settings, and these online venues such as multi-user domains, have been linked to a new form of language. One of the newest venues for exploration is the weblog, an online journal, which is used in a variety of ways, but often as a personal journal or ongoing commentary about oneself. The hypothesis is that the gender difference will affect the language that is being used in weblogs.

Aim

Our purpose here is to examine how people use weblogs to express themselves. In particular, we examine the language and emotional codes that people use and how gender affects the style of language.

Problems or Limitations

The research examines issues of online language use among male and females on weblogs. Although research will be carried out, the research will focus on weblogs in English, which will limit the amount of data needed to present this research to a global scale. There will also be problems with the reliability of weblogs as people may have created weblogs as a joke, an aspect which occurs a lot in weblogs.

Literature Review

The Article “The Identity of Bloggers: Openness and gender in personal weblogs”
By S. Nowson and J. Oberlander. A thorough research has been carried out in this article and we see that young females use weblogs more than any other sub-group. “Blogs, by contrast, are personal and individually written, closer to situations in which women were
reported to participate to a greater extent.” (quoted by S.Nowson and J.Oberlander) In fact a recent study (Herring et al. 2004) found that while each gender accounts for about half of all weblogs, personal blogs are dominated by females. This means that females actually enjoy...