Collaborative Web Sets Stage for Prodigal Women

By Marisa Peacock | Published Jul 19, 2007

Summer certainly seems to be the time for revelations. First the Washington Post embraced Web 2.0, and now print magazines have figured out that women are going online in droves to shop, read, communicate and collaborate.

Gasp! Horror! When will it end?

When Conde Nast pulled Jane Magazine earlier this month, the print world asked, “Where have all the girls gone?”

Where have we gone? We've been on the Web, writing blogs, for instance.

Advertising Age explains that “young women's attention is being diluted by new media properties and refocused toward social media.” Yet, a study released by Burst Media suggests that women's lives are being enhanced by these new media properties.

The study revealed that women not only outnumber men online, but also “rely on the internet for the conduct of their daily lives - so much so, that two-thirds (66.1 percent) of online women say their lives would be disrupted if they were left without Internet access for a week.”

And women are not just online to shop and network; women also blog more. (Something to consider when seeking the perfect candidate for your enterprise blogging initiative.)

According to Initiative's proprietary InVision 2.0 study, the percentage of women 18 to 34 who blog at least once a week rose to 30 percent from 25 percent in the last year. However, Nat Torkington of O'Reilly Radar is so concerned about the shortage of women in open source he is encouraging men to seduce a woman today.

That's not to say there aren't resources for finding tech-savvy femmes out there. Online groups like SFWoW (San Francisco Women on the Web) and WebGrrls (a girl-tech smörgåsbord) betray a strengthening community of prog-savvy females.

Women are tricky, complex beings, but no more so than the average man. The Burst Media results are not just for advertisers trying keep up with women’s changing media habits.

These results, as fascinating or mundane as they may be, encourage marketers and developers alike to “take advantage of advanced technologies such as rich media, video units, and retargeting” to deliver content to a demographic that has already admitted to being dependent upon it.

And they're not just dependent. Slowly but surely, they're also contributing to the back-end underpinnings of the Web. And considering the muscle they've already flexed on the user end, that's something that merits taking note.