Here are the questions that you sent to me via email or left in comments when I asked for questions for an Irish blogger survey. I threw all the questions together, removed duplicates and bunched them into groups that cover the same area. Feedback again is appreciated on these. I was aiming for 30-40 questions and these seem around the right number though to be honest I think we could lose a few of the questions.
- Use an aggregator yes | no | aggregators | other | more than one
- How many blogs subscribed to
- How often do you read blogs
- How much time
- What type of blogs do you read
- Breakdown: Irish| Other , Male|Female
- How many blogs do you have?
- Do you use dial-up or broadband.
- How long have you been blogging?
- Do you use your own domain or blogspot, blogger etc?
- How often do you blog?
- Do you class your blog as a personal blog or as a business blog?
- Would you have a political affiliation. What would it be?
- How many subscribers do you have, if you know?
- How many visits do you get per day?
- Have you considered stopping blogging or taking a break?
- Have you modified your standard template and added features?
- What do you use your blog for?
- Why did you start blogging?
- Have your reasons changed?
- Do you have comments and are they pre-moderated i.e. you approve all comments before they are live?
- Do you get a lot of comment spam?
- What is your inspiration for a blog post?
- Preparation time: How long does it take to prepare/write your post?
- Do you check and verify sources?
- Do you link to other blogs and newssources? In every post, sometimes, not really.
- Do you use other media like audio and video in your posts?
- How have you improved your blogging? How? Listen to feedback, watched other bloggers, asked for help
- Do you think there is a need for training classes in blogging?
- Have you received a legal letter/threat or a threat of another kind?
- Do you know how to respond to legal threats?
- Do you know the law about blogs and defamation?
- Gone to blogger meetups/conferences?
- Friendships through blogging?
- Do friends know you blog?
- Read your blog?
- How do you promote your blog ? Email signature | Link Swapping | Advertising
Blog Reading
Blogging
Act of Blogging
Threats and legal issues
Blogs and the blogging community
Blogs to non-bloggers
Blog promotion
Quite comprehensive. Which questions would you lose?
shouldn’t there be a few more personal ones to build a profile of the blogging demographic?
Otherwise, comprehensive indeed.
Una, which questions would you suggest? I guess having one of those generic demographic sections at the start would work. Just make it optional if people don’t want to answer.
Good set of questions. I would be interested in knowing how many people blog anonymously and how many blog under their actual name and how their choice affects their blogging.
yeah, just age, sex, profession, income range, location, education, that kind of thing. I think it would be interesting to get those kind of stats – like 20% of Irish bloggers work in the circus, 40% are millionaires, or something more realistic.
If you press released it with stats like that, the survey would get wider coverage IMO.
You will see a thread running through my comments, which is that for a meaningful survey that produces useful results, you need to tighten the wording to remove ambiguities. (Oh, and my tone gets more tongue in cheek the further down my comment I go!)
“How much time is both an ambiguous question and potentially difficult to answer. Ambiguous because it doesn’t say over what period — how much time: per day?, per week?, per blog you read or subscribe to? Potentially difficult to answer because the answer for an individual might not be stable. That is why other similar surveys typically ask “ in the last [specified period], how [often | much time] did you [do activity x]”
“Do you use dial-up or broadband.” Again, amibiguous; do you mean when I blog at home, at work, at college, in a cafe, and what am I supposed to say if I use a combination?
“How often do you blog?” would be better as “How often in the last [specified period of time] have you blogged?”
“Do you class your blog as a personal blog or as a business blog?” One doesn’t have to be Ray Burke to wonder if everybody would have such a clear distinction.
“Would you have a political affiliation. What would it be?” Use “Do”, not “Would”. (What circumstances do [“would”?] you intend me to infer apply to the word “would”?)
A paair of questions here: “Why did you start blogging?” and “Have your reasons changed?“. Eh, not unless I can travel back in time, my reasons for starting to blog have not changed. Of course, what you probably mean is: “Are your reasons for continuing to blog the same?”
“What is your inspiration for a blog post?” Hmm … What do you mean by an “inspiration”? And which of my blog posts would you be referring to?
“Do you use other media like audio and video in your posts?” What are the standard against which “other” are defined? Actually, quite apart from the pure and applied pedant in me being expressed, I think the answers to this question as currently worded could present some interesting contrasts. I could see young whipper snappers who have never known the Internet without audio or video wondering what hot technology they have missed out on [says a man who came out on the Internet in the days before the world wide web was available.]
“Do you check and verify sources?” On Tuesdays and Thursdays but not at weekends. But I know I don’t need to if the item was published in National Enquirer or the Sunday World: then we know it’s true, so I don’t need to bother. (Or if ComReg said it in a press release.)
> “Do you link to other blogs and newssources? In every post, sometimes, not really.” Much better than other questions: options make it easier to classify answers afterwards, although my “sometimes” might be your “not really”.
Two together: “Do you know how to respond to legal threats?” and “Do you know the law about blogs and defamation?” Real and important issues raised here, but I don’t know if the questions uncover the truth. Based on, say, a set of 100 answers, how would you distinguish between those who really know and those who think they do but don’t?
“Gone to blogger meetups/conferences?” A personal grumble: what happened to the word “meeting”?
“How have you improved your blogging? How? Listen to feedback, watched other bloggers, asked for help” Too many hows is that, and the first one is particularly ambiguous. Does it mean “What changes to your blogs did you make to improve it?” or is it a general opening to the specific examples which cover “How did you find out about ways to improve your blog?”
Bugger. My faux html code that read “Flippant tone off” and was supposed to show the angle brackets didn’t work. You can probably figure out where.