MIT Weblog Survey Results Fail To Appear

It seems a little bit hyperbolic to rap a grad student for being tardy in getting an (already published) thesis up on the web for everyone in the blogosphere to tear apart. Given that most of the (very few) people who are lamenting its absence are really more interested in getting the free, high-quality data, I'd say it won't hurt to wait things out a little while longer.

The much bigger danger to academia is the incessant publishing of obvious results that any six-year-old could deduce ("eating 10 pounds of butter a day is bad for you!") and presenting them as singular academic achievements.

As an exercise: Name another major university that has (1) collected data from a wide population sample for a PhD project and (2) not published the results on the initially-announced schedule for that project. I bet it's true of every single big-name school, but hasn't been noted simply because the research being done wasn't in the area of blogs or social media. That's more a result of the disproportionate amount of attention paid to blogs than it is to any egregious, MIT-brand-endangering shortcoming on the part of a single researcher.

I don’t want to blow this out of proportion, its not the biggest issue in the whole world. But the name of this blog is blogsurvey. If we are not going to write about a survey on blogs what are we going to write about? :-)

I don't think it’s unreasonable for a participant in the survey to wonder what happened to the results. I have taken the step of sending an email to Cameron, but he has not returned my email.

The Backbone Media team worked hard on pulling together our corporate blogging survey over the summer of 2005. In no way would I imagine leaving the participants hanging about the status of the results. When this survey was promoted with the MIT badge, a lot of people joined the study because of the MIT brand and promoted the survey. Sticking the MIT brand on a survey brings the expectation that we will see results when promised. After all, why shouldn’t I expect an MIT graduate student to be able to keep to their promise to publish something within a timely manner? Are you suggesting that we should not expect high standards from MIT students?

Really, I think it would have been fine for Cameron Marlow not to publish the results if he communicated with his survey participants on the status of the results. What I was concerned about is that Cameron has been silent on his progress. If some communication had come earlier in the fall of 2005 I don't think we'd be discussing this issue.

Maybe one issue here Anil, is that the world has changed, and if you as a graduate student or a Nobel Science winner researcher put your name to something and promise your community you are going to do something and don't, a community of bloggers now has the ability to self publish their comments on the web. If I did not have this blog, I would have thought the same way about Cameron Marlow and his lack of response in updating participants on his research results. It's just that now I do have a blog, and so everyone can read my opinions on the issue. And as long as we keep this server going for this blog the discussion is going to be recorded on the web. That's scary, and gives great responsibility to anyone when they criticize another person, but it also gives other graduate students pause for thought when they develop surveys and not publish their results. I don't know if as you suggest most other major universities start research and never publish the results. But I would hope that there would be less of that happening in the future because of this discussion about the MIT weblog survey.