I am a little surprised I haven’t seen more published by researchers re-analysing datasets about US Internet use provided by Pew. The reports issued by Pew are great but they don’t always include analyses that I would have made. Here are a few such observations about bloggers which I have made and which will (probably) be in my upcoming thesis:

• 46.4% of bloggers posted every few weeks or less often. 42.1% believed they blogged an hour (or less) a week. (late 2005 survey of bloggers)
• 59% of those who created (self-defined) political blogs in the US were college educated (N=16), no political bloggers had less than a high school education. 63% of blogs that got media attention were by the college educated (N=12), again none were by those with less than a high school education. (Late 2006 survey). Note that 27.7% of the US population had less than a high school education in the 2005 US census.

It’s great that Pew is one of the few organizations that makes its data available in this way, and if anyone else has done interesting re-analyses of Pew survey data please let me know.

The New York Times summarises its findings and legislator reactions though the NYT’s summary of its summary rather overstates matters - the report does not say, “the sexual solicitation of children online is not a significant problem” but it does conclude it is a problem for a small minority of children who are likely already to be exhibiting other risky behaviours.

The full text of the report (and the executive summary etc) is here.

Hal Roberts at The Berkman Center for Internet & Society has made a startling discovery:

Three of the circumvention tools — DynaWeb FreeGate, GPass, and FirePhoenix — used most widely to get around China’s Great Firewall are tracking and selling the individual web browsing histories of their users.

(further details here)

Of course we all know that attention is unequally spread among bloggers - now it emerges that people’s blogs are being judged by the platform they choose to use to host them. In the interests of research I joined “PayPerPost” and I discovered that they have recently decided not to offer to pay people whose blogs are on certain services to post about products and services. The blog platforms in question are:

MySpace, Vox, Xanga, BraveJournal, LiveJournal, Yahoo360, and Blogsome

This decision was made based on the usability, navigability and overall quality that we have seen from blogs on these platforms.

Please understand that we do not mean to say that ALL blogs hosted on these platforms are bad blogs. However, the majority of these blogs are just not what the advertisers or our Marketplace are looking for at this time.

Of course some of these users will doubtless be delighted to find out that advertisers don’t think the people they speak to are worth marketing to or (more likely in the case of sites like LJ) that the norms expressed by users of these platforms are strongly anti-commercial.