mortiz057

Seems that research on blogs are plentiful these few days. First we had Universal McCann doing the survey on netizens with marketing and branding, with focus on blogs in particular , and now we have an international online survey, Blogging Asia: A Windows Live Report by MSN Live Spaces, analyzed by Harris Interactive . Not that I'm complaining, of course ^^. According to full report in The Star (30 November 2006) Page N33: MOST BLOGGERS ARE WOMEN If you are a Malaysian and you have your own blog, the odds are that you're a woman, aged 25 or under. Sixty-four percent of local bloggers are female and 74% of them are in that age group. This is a finding of an international online survey involving more than 25,000 Microsoft MSN web portal visitors in August and September. The survey, Blogging Asia: A Windows Live Report , was conducted in Hong Kong, India, South Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan and Thailand. It is found that 41% of Malaysians who went online also blogged. Malays...

This is the URL to the survey: http://www.my3q.com/go.php?url=junetan/malaysianblog This is the preamble: I am a Master's student studying in University of Malaya. This survey is part of my thesis, titled "Is blogging an effective tool to democratize Malaysia?" The questionnaire is composed mostly of Multiple Choice Questions, and is divided into three parts: Part I: General Demography (12 questions) Part II: For Blog Readers (14 questions) Part III: For Bloggers (11 questions) (*Respondents without a blog can skip Part III) Important: Please fill in this questionnaire only if you are a blog reader/blogger residing in Malaysia, or a blog reader/blogger of Malaysian nationality residing abroad. My blog on research is at http://blogger-research.blogspot.com. =) You can also reach me at my email: june.tan@gmail.com. I will try to reply all mails as soon as possible. Your participation means a lot to my research and the Malaysian blogosphere at large. Thanks for your time! I ...

Excerpts from "Internet no longer niche media" (29 November 2006) B11, StarBiz Section of The Star : With 10 million active users in Malaysia, the Internet can no longer be considered a niche media, said Universal McCann managing director Gaurav Bhasin. "The scope and influence of the net now offers fresh opportunities for advertisers," he said in a statement. "There's an exciting dynamism in advertising, with bloggers, gamers, social networkers, and podcasters charting a new reality for brand building." A recent research study conducted by Universal McCann, based on a sample size of 4670 respondents, revealed that 40% of Malaysian netizens (regular Internet users) spent more than three hours daily on the Net. Specifically on blogs - The survey also revealed that 35% of Malaysian netizens are active bloggers with about one-quarter responding of writing about brands and services experienced. "These bloggers can actually influence the fate of brand...

I've updated the survey - took away some questions and amended the preamble. Please feel free to preview Version 2 of the survey here . The final survey will be launched tomorrow, and will be in the form of an online form. As always, comments are appreciated. Previous version was here .

I am going to launch the online survey for Malaysian blog readers and bloggers latest by tomorrow morning. For now, feel free to have a sneak preview of the survey in Microsoft Word format and any comments would be very much appreciated . The final survey will be in the form of an online form. It will rely on word-of-mouth for dissemination.

I have been looking around for civil society movements - i.e. self-initiated movements from civilians, non-government and non-profit making, for certain causes. ( Please see the Updated section at the bottom of this article ) From the information that I have collected, there seems to be only one big-scale activity which was held on August 6th, 2005. It is called " Bloggers are morons ", which is a charity blogathon to raise funds for Hospice-at-Home Programme, Penang. Popular bloggers, such as Kenny Sia , Minishorts , Suanie , Peter Tan , Paul Tan and Shaolin Tiger blogged for a full 24 hours, passing the baton one after another. Apparently there was also 11 guest bloggers (buangmasa, Eyeris, Jaime Shun, Jean, JFE 8555, KY Speaks, Lucia Lai, Marita Paige, Sashi, Wingz, Wuan) too. No links for the guest bloggers because I got it a comment in ViewTru 's blog and they were not hyperlinked. The "Bloggers are morons" site was taken down after the event. According t...

I am having two interviews today, with James Wong at 1:30pm at Subang Parade, and Rockybru at 4pm at Bangsar Shopping Centre. Last Saturday when I met SKThew , he very kindly hooked me up with Suanie , TVSmith and Fong Po Kuan . I am in the process of scheduling interviews with them.

Political culture: a set of values and orientations which determine and influence the public's perception of politics. In determining whether blogging is an effective tool for democratization, it is probably important to have some idea of the current political culture of bloggers and blog readers. Are they politically aware? Do they vote in the General Elections? Do they plan to vote? Do they frequent blogs with strong socio-political content or blogs which are primarily entertaining? In what manner do they blog about political content? (Critical and constructive, neutral and mainly reporting, ranting and whining?) Political culture in Malaysia is fragmented across ethnic lines, education level, social classes and more. Are we able to come up with categories that would provide an idea of the heterogeneity of political culture in bloggers as well?

Image from kottke.org, from a post on Weblogs and Power Laws Some observers have noticed that the popularity of blogs follows the power law distribution, i.e. the graph that you see above. This graph was plotted from the Top 100 most linked to weblogs in Technorati on 24 Jan 2003. As you can see, there is a vast difference between the #1 popular (at 6000 links) and the #8 (1000 links), for example. However, #50 doesn't show a lot of difference from #100. This concept is similar to the 80/20 rule, i.e. 20% of the population holding 80% of the wealth. Here are some interesting quotes from Clay Shirky's article of Power Laws, Weblogs and Inequality . "Diversity plus freedom of choice creates inequality, and the greater the diversity, the more extreme the inequality." "In systems where many people are free to choose between many options, a small subset of the whole will get a disproportionate amount of traffic (or attention, or income), even if no members of the syst...

I've decided to keep a separate blog for documenting findings and development of the thesis. It will probably serve me better than the crummy notebook with unintelligible scrawls all over, or lacing scraps of information along happenings and rants in my personal blog . Firstly, today was a good day for soliciting interviews. I sent out 4 emails this morning and got 3 positive replies, from Rockybru , SKThew and James Wong . That's like a 75% success rate! Pretty encouraging. Therefore, the interview respondent count right now is 6 (Including Jeff Ooi , Tony Pua and Sharizal Shaarani whom I have already interviewed). I will need another 4, and those 4 will hopefully contain races other than Malay and Chinese, and a couple of women. I discussed the online survey issue with Wiun and YKent just now. I am starting to realize that it is probably necessary for me to conduct two online surveys, one for the bloggers and one for blog readers. To rely on the same survey for bloggers to...