MIT blog survey

[nancylebov]

This is a link to a social connections of bloggers survey.

The image is so boring that I'd skipped past two or three of them before I registered what it was, but I'm hoping that I've given a clear enough description that some of you might fill out the survey. It's a meme, but at least it isn't a random-stuff lj meme.

Comments

[madfilkentist]

The description of the survey says, "In addition to those webloggers that choose to help us voluntarily, we have also randomly selected 5000 weblogs to act as a representative sample of the greater weblog community. If you received an email which said you were selected, you are part of this group."

In other words, the person running the survey is a spammer. I certainly wouldn't give such a person my email address, let alone any other encouragement.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I think you're definitionally correct, but emotionally speaking, it doesn't feel like spam, probably because it's a project that I think is reasonable and because they presumably won't send out multiple copies (slightly varied) of that email for years.

I grant that if one of them had showed up in my email, I might well have deleted it unread.

I wonder if they'll be allowing for that sort of thing in their survey results.

[cellio]

Wow, I didn't notice that. I wonder how that got past the research-practices screening. Or don't they do that any more? (Or is this somebody's side project, not sponsored research or work for a class?)

[stoutfellow.livejournal.com]

You might be interested in commodorified's comments, here (http://www.livejournal.com/users/commodorified/63535.html) and here (http://www.livejournal.com/users/commodorified/63938.html).

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Thanks. I agree that it wasn't a well-designed survey. In addition to the other complaints, that last section about the people I know didn't allow for my knowing a number of IT people, some of whom I've met online, and some offline.