Blog Study

Below is a portion of an email that I got a couple of days ago from a Ph.D. student at USC:

I’m interested in how the thoughts and experiences written by people like you on weblogs and other social media can be used to make conclusions about society as a whole. I am contacting you because I am trying to collect reliable data about bloggers’ opinions, experiences, and characteristics in order to refine and evaluate my analyses. 

If you are at least 18 years old and interested in helping me, please take the brief survey linked in this email. It should only take about 15 minutes of your time. Your responses will be kept confidential. 

In the course of this study, we will also be analyzing the public posts on your weblog using natural language processing technology. The goal of this analysis is to correlate your responses to this survey with what you write about your life on your weblog. 

His email contained several links that I wasn't about to click on . . . yet . . . because, you know, you just don't do that.

I googled the guy's name instead and was eventually led to the video below. It shows him interviewing various blogger people. They intrigued me . .  . mostly because they WERE me. 

When I first started blogging I was a bit apprehensive. Putting myself "out there" for the whole world to judge was intimidating. But the days, weeks and months flew by, and here I am today, 9 years from the start, being asked to participate in a survey about blogging. Who woulda thought?