So… there are more nerdy technophile males than nerdy technophile females, but when normalized for this sad state of affairs the other differences trend away?

Clearly, we are facing a nerdy girl gap – you could write something up for DARPA, maybe get a grant.

I’d also be curious about the volume of content generated, and whether there’s any difference. Are we talking about “have you ever posted a video” or “have you posted a video in the past month”/”how many videos have you posted in the past month?”

Others of you ask about how we measure skill. Doug (#14), thanks for trying to explain. The examples you list could work, although some of them are, again, more about actual participation than skill per se. It’s complicated, they overlap quite a bit (as the paper itself shows).

I have been studying how to measure skill for years and have published several papers on the topic (here’s one example, an update of which is coming out soon – accessing the latter requires subscription). It’s going to be hard to summarize all that in a short comment.

Basically, people are asked to rate their level of understanding of various Internet-related items on a five-point scale. These items range from widely-known terms such as bookmark and reload to much less understood items such as widget and malware. I then create an index of the sum of these terms constituting a skill measure. While this still relies on self-perception of abilities, it is more highly correlated with actual skill than asking people to rate their own skill and it also gives us a bit more nuanced understanding of people’s familiarity with the various aspects of using the Web.

RickM, thanks for posting to Reddit. I know the site well and use it often.

http://www.xkcd.com/385/ As usual, XKCD describes this really well.

I’m glad to hear that you’re following up on the gender-specific possibilities of privacy concerns: certainly my experience in working with a woman-oriented dotcom taught me that women were far more worried than men about posting their images online. Can’t wait to see that follow-up study!

Look, after several years of teaching, I can say with a fair degree of confidence that (well, at least among college-age individuals), males are a lot more willing to blurt out the first thing that comes into their pretty little heads, whereas females—even those who regularly have exceptionally good points to make—tend to hold back for some reason, seemingly until they are more sure about their points. Females tend to be more…(roughly) circumspect. Guys are more likely to just blurt it out, for better or worse.

Anyway, a big part of blogging is blurting out whatever BS happens to be flitting through your head at that moment. Maybe “online skill” has something to do with it, but I’ll bet you a big wad o’ cash that that’s not the most important factor. I mean, cripes, how hard is it to use Blogger?

Does this apply even for video? I would expect a part of the difference to be due to the kind of nasty responses women tend to get when they make pictures of themselves available online, and I wouldn’t think online skill would change that (unless there’s some effect of knowing where to post things or something. As someone really low on the “online skill” scale, I imagine there are some aspects here that I don’t understand.).

How do they measure skill? Especially at something like sharing photographs online! That factor seems inevitably subjective.

Also, what does “online skill” actually mean?