Update On The MIT Weblog Study

Cameron Marlow is the MIT student who developed the MIT weblog study, I had recently written an article about Cameron not publishing his results within the time scheduled published on his blog. But I thought it would be the polite thing to do to contact Cameron directly and ask him some questions about the background to missing the deadline. Cameron wrote a post on his personal blog about the MIT Weblog survey issue, he just got slammed for time with his new job at Yahoo! He apologizes to the community for not publishing the results and also realizes he should have done a better job of informing the participants of what was going on. Well the good news is that he has been working away analyzing the results and hopes to publish them in the next few weeks.

One interesting factor in the success of getting the word out about his blog is that initially Cameron did not get much response, once he developed some nice looking web buttons the number of respondents increased dramatically. So maybe it was not the MIT brand after that helped Cameron to get thousands of respondents but a cute button. I am sure it was a combination of factors, but great looking images that people can put on their websites is a great way to increase your exposure and coverage when it comes to non-representational research.

Posted by johncass at January 27, 2006 3:54 PM