Podblack Surveyisims-ish – G’day My Readers!

This is a very overdue post – but as I said, sometimes real life just gets in the way. The results of the survey I did have come in – those who sent an email, I’ll send stats that I have and you can see how generous I’ve been with the interpretation that follows!

I’ll be upfront and say that I didn’t expect much of a response in the first place: all of the studies I’ve done on statistics indicate that internet polling is in fact one of the worst ways to poll and self-selecting has all sorts of issues associated with it. Bias and manipulation is easy to do, allowing people to win competitions unfairly by getting additional influences outside of the ‘rules’ and make polls distinctly weighted in favour of a group by multi-votes – since many of my readers also read Pharyngula and know how sometimes poll-manipulation is raised, I’m certain that comes as no surprise!

But I do appreciate the effort and it does indicate certain patterns about the audience who have chosen to respond. The small sample size only shows a certain vague correlation, so the following should not be seen as completely accurate of my readers or their opinions – and of course, false responses can be a part of these. But I think it was a useful exercise to try. Although whoever keeps obsessively ego-searching for the terms ‘sandra dickinson’ and ‘chloe marshall’ will continue to find themselves the object of frank bemusement on my part.

First – as I suspected was true of most internet sites that have an element of investigating topics on pseudoscience and the paranormal with a more skeptical bent – my audience is primarily male, Australian and about my age. 31-40 and 41-50 make up the bulk of readers, both male and female (and ‘prefer not to answer’, which is something I chose to add on purpose – being too divisive in terms of gender can lead to people being less keen on surveys, in my opinion).

You can see this reflected on forum boards, comments, other blogs and at conferences – we are an aging generation in the main and younger years take time to adopt technology, have less time to attend conferences and have online practices other than blogging – like Facebook, MSN-chat and MySpace.

In fact, rather than blogging, social networks like ‘Friendster’ were more of a trend amongst many of my students for some time and that was probably as close as they got to blogging – blogging is a public activity and it was rather unpleasant for a few of my students to discover that if you were not aware of this, that anyone (including teachers!) could read your blog! The shocking lack of regard for internet safety, eventually resulted in a significant deterrent from blogging in school culture over the past few years that I taught. We had several government-sponsored lectures and workshops (CyberNetrix, NetAlert, WiseUpToIT and the like) over the past three years about internet safety which directly drew upon evidence from select members of the school community; demonstrating how easy it was to access photos, phone numbers and social behaviour (which party, when, where they would be) from the information they put online and it had a sobering effect on many of the young people in the audience as to how they could be tracked. I could demonstrate myself how a casual Twitter comment about a restaurant in their neighborhood in conjunction with a photo of what’s out their window on Flickr, could then be confirmed by photos on Google Maps as to where a person was likely to be living in a major city!

I’ve got a couple of additional theories why my blog contents led to the response they got, not discounting the notion that my writing about generalist topics might more appeal to men rather than women – who in their case might prefer more specific issues raised.

So, what do my mostly male, my age, Australian respondents additionally blog-read? Well, here’s some interesting trends:

Pharyngula is most popular with my readers, followed by the Bad Astronomer blog (heh, how many of us remember that being pretty much established over the years anyway in terms of joshing ‘blog-wars’?). Then, fairly well back in the pack, is the Neurologica blog. On the less-popular side, people are then less likely to read my Australian blog-mates, Thinking Is Real and Skelliot’s Blog, but are more likely to check out a Skepbitch than ‘Chick, when it’s updated.

Mind, we have to recognise that some blogs (like Pharyngula, the BA and Neurologica Blog) are several-times-a-day writers which should influence their results, whereas others like Skepbitch, Skeptimedia (aka Dr Bob Carroll’s site) and most of the Australian blogs write when they wish or perhaps when ‘the muse is upon them’.

Which kind of makes the frequency difference interesting, as there are distinct differences… quality versus quantity comes to mind too, in that aspect. I know that over the last few days I’ve thrown in a bunch of posts but none are particularly lengthy or more depend upon reader’s opinions rather than voicing my own. Is a blog meant to be about the writer’s views or prompting reader commentary, I wonder? Does traffic really equal intellectual engagement or do people record by checking out systems like Sitemeter which tells you just how long someone reads your blog for, as thirty seconds to a minute certainly doesn’t indicate much reader engagement for a post!

People are not readers of (in most ‘never to less likely’) Digital Cuttlefish – but if you’re a Pharyngula comments reader, you’d be familiar with their work by proxy, really. Digital Cuttlefish, like the Science Bloggers, is published in the Science Bloggers Anthology too, which indicates something of the intellectual regard that blog has. Yet it’s interesting considering how many posts I have done that directly urge readers to go to that blog! I would have to ask DC whether there is a recorded stream of regular traffic from my blog to theirs.

However, it’s equally less likely that you’d read Neurologica blog and SkeptiMedia – both well-known figures in skepticism. Then it’s less likely that you’d read another more recent addition to the Science Blogs stable, the Science After Sunclipse blog; which makes me wonder how many read a range of Science Blog-mates like the ones I enjoy: Thus Spake Zuska, ScienceWomen, Neurophilosophy, Greg Laden’s Blog, A Blog Around The Clock, or even the popular Orac (aka Respectful Insolence). Personally, I like to hit the Science Blogs ’24 Hour’ button, so I can scan a bunch of blogs to see who is chatting about issues that intrigue me and thus get a range of writers’ opinions in one go.

I should in future, ask how many people use an RSS feed for such an option and whether they have online comics (like XKCD) and sites that share my interests in subjects like gaming (like SeanBaby) as well, but that might have made the survey additionally unwieldy. I didn’t want to overburden people as it was with all of my questions.

Bad Science has an interesting mid-ground, which surprised me, as it is filled with information much like Pharyngula but features distinctly more science than atheism in comparison. Does that translate into what people would like me to write about? I did not add Translucent Science or the bloggers that co-contribute to that, but I should think that they are quite popular – I should investigate that another time.

Winner of ‘we like you writing about’ – Superstitions, Belief and Psychology – not surprising since that’s what my sidebar primarily features as my forte! Second most popular are Scams, Frauds and Urban Myths. Then it’s Science and Technology News, Computer and Internet, Activism and Social Change and a mixture of others fairly equally. These should influence which blog-carnivals I take part in as well, I should think.

Probably least popular is Literature and Non-Fiction (ooh, there go my book reviews! Funnily, my series on Skepticism, Children and Books and my Review Of Stephenie Meyer’s The Host were bit hits in terms of blog-traffic) and Parenting and Practical Tips. This was something I suspected for a while and thus I’ll make that more of a focus with a different demographic, where they will be more likely to appeal. I will not, however, reduce my writing on the issues regarding feminism, science and STEM, since I find a lot of that comes from my more popular topics as well. Besides, ‘stuff you, I enjoy writing them’.

Other than that, comments were few but encouraging and some people did ask for the raw data – they can then see for themselves how much of what I’ve written here is fairly liberal in nature but do give me some tips in terms of future direction! I would certainly urge people to continue to comment (as I have made my comments policy far more flexible) and in a similar spirit – do check out the new podcast SkepticZone in order to see if in the future, we can do an investigation on how to improve further.

Tagged as: activism, Bad Astronomy, Bad Science, belief, feminism, frauds, Gaming, Literature, non-fiction, Parenting, Pharyngula, podblack, Psychology, results, scams, Science After Sunclipse, science and technology, science blogs, Skepbitch, Skepticism, skepticism and children, social change, superstitions, survey, urban myths