Blog survey results

March 18, 2004 3:30 PM

MIT's blog survey results are in. Some highlights: 55% of respondents use their real names on their blog, 63% of respondents are male, 36% of respondents have gotten in trouble because of things they've written, and almost no one has a good idea of who's reading their blog.
posted by Vidiot (5 comments total)

An interesting survey with some interesting results. I'm curious as to where their sample came from because a skewed sample will invalidate the results.

I would have liked to have taken part in it.
posted by fenriq at 4:39 PM on March 18, 2004

Respondents to this survey were not selected on a random basis. Announcements for the online survey were posted to mailing lists within MIT as well as on a few high-traffic blogs published by people known to the author of this survey. The viral nature of blogs meant that the links to the survey page quickly spread to many other blogs. Nevertheless, this does not qualify as a random sample of the blogger population and, as such, the results from this survey cannot be generalized to the entire blogging community; instead, these results are representative of the state of affairs in certain portions of the blogging world.
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Imagine how many more they would have gotten if they'd posted this here before hand.
posted by tiamat at 4:44 PM on March 18, 2004

I was one of the respondents, and I'm trying to remember where I saw the notice. I think it was BoingBoing, but I"m not at all sure.
posted by Vidiot at 4:48 PM on March 18, 2004

Well, at least now we know a lot more about how people at MIT blog. This is pretty meaningless given the way the respondents were selected.
posted by briank at 5:41 PM on March 18, 2004

I participated. Yay.
posted by grabbingsand at 5:55 PM on March 18, 2004