I’m filling out a survey on blogs being conducted by MIT’s Media Lab as I write this… It’s very interesting… in addition to asking me the basic demographic details, it asked for the URL to my blog… then scraped five links from it for me to classify (is it a link to another blog, my own blog, a newspaper story, etc…) and give deep details (do I know the blog author, have I ever met them, when was the last time I talked/IM’ed with them, etc).
Unfortunately, the survey creator thought a bit too narrowly, at least for the links they pulled off of my blog. One was to a MSFT Channel 9 video (on the new MSFT mapping solution) and another was a book title link to Amazon; neither are reasonably supported by the survey options given, and, really, seemingly distort the data set.
I’ve emailed Cameron Marlow to find out if they’ll be publishing the raw data set (obviously this will be very interesting data); I’ll update when I get a reply. If you didn’t get an invite (don’t feel bad, it appears to be pretty random) you can request one here.
Update: The end of the survey says… “Results for the study will be posted to this website (blogsurvey.media.mit.edu) as soon as the study ends and the results are compiled, probably sometime in mid-July.”
Update 2: The MIT Weblog Survey results have been posted. Worth a review. Most striking to me? The most popular answer to “How much longer will you maintain your weblog?” was “Hard to tell”. Hmm… Cameron, would still be nice to get the “raw” result data, so that we can do cross-tabs by age, gender, etc.