I filled it out

Take the MIT Weblog Survey

·:· Posted 22 June 2005, 18:49 by Jason Hoffman to Elsewhere  |  

  1. I bailed on the last page. The questions answer were flawed; often I couldn’t answer truthfully. Which IM clients do I use? Gaim on Win XP and Fire on Mac OS X, and they are not listed. The answers to the questions about links in my blog were horrible. How did I found out about link X? One of the links was RubyGems, which I originally found out about on the ruby-talk email/news group. Not one of the choices fit. What does the link point to? The only choices are weblog, weblog entry, personal home page, part of my blog, or other. That’s ridiculously limiting. All of my links were “other”.

    Sorry for the rant, but I HATE poorly-designed surveys. They can only lead to meaningless results.

    — Jim Menard    22 June 2005, 19:35    #
  2. Rant away. I wanted to start out impartial …

    — Jason Hoffman    22 June 2005, 23:09    #
  3. Well, I bailed as well because I used this weblog address (weblog.textdrive.com) and the questions were getting to specific for me to answer with the accuracy the survey deserved. I haven’t had a “blog” for awhile now but thought the questions might be general enough to answer based on previous experience.

    I’ll be interested in their findings.

    — Ray    23 June 2005, 01:18    #
  4. I agree that the links section is the most ambiguous, especially for weblogs with multiple authors. I didn’t have any group-blogs in the pilot (even though a few were invited), so that’s why it’s skewed.

    I tried to include more categories for links, but basically after many discussions with my pilot subjects, the main distinction came down to social/nonsocial. Any other categories just obfuscated the decision even more.

    As for the IM question, unfortunately no one brought that up in the pilot either. It should say “protocol,” and since the survey is already in motion it’s hard to change it.

    Finally, I have to draw offense to the “poorly-designed survey” comment since I spent a lot of hours making it work and piloting the questions. Any survey is bound to exclude some portion of its respondents, and I’m sorry both of you entered the category of “subject attrition.” It’s good advice for the next take.

    — cameron    23 June 2005, 16:16    #
  5. Cameron,

    Just to make sure I’m being clear. I bailed when I realized it would not be reasonable or fair to continue with the survey when I haven’t maitained a weblog for a number of years. In actual fact, I found the questions thought provoking and wished I could have completed the survey. I too am sorry I fell into the attrition category. Is there any chance of taking a look at the whole list of questions without doing the survey. Again… I no longer maintain a weblog but that’s another story :/

    Good luck with your survey 8 )

    — Ray    24 June 2005, 02:31    #
  6. No problem. It’s great to be able to get realtime feedback on the survey even if it is distributed across a few thousand weblogs.

    We’ll see how the data falls.

    — cameron    25 June 2005, 20:07    #