sinéad's lifestream

Irish Blog Research 2009, Survey Goes Live

As part of the M.Sc Cyberpsychology at IADT each postgraduate student is currently in the process of conducting a major research project. My own is focused on blogging, but from an Irish perspective, looking at the attitudes and behaviour of Irish bloggers and Irish blog readers. (Related Article)

Online Survey

At the very heart of this research study is an online survey which you can find here. I’m hoping to recruit a large sample of both bloggers and non-blogging readers. If you’re reading this, I’m assuming you fit into one of these categories and would very much appreciate it if you could spare 10-15 minutes to fill out the survey. Most of the questions are multiple choice, a small number are essay based but you can write as much, or as little as you like. This questionnaire is 100% anonymous, confidential and for research purposes only.  Even your IP address won’t be stored.

Prize Draws!

At the end of the survey you will have the opportunity to enter a prize draw for either a €50 Amazon voucher or a €50 Ticketmaster voucher – if you win, you can choose either prize.

I’m also going to run a separate prize draw for another €50 voucher for anyone that posts a link to this survey on their blog, or on a messageboard – anywhere really! To enter this separate draw just leave a comment on this blog post, this can be in the form of a trackback or a comment telling me where you have posted the link.

Thank You!

Thank you in advance for your help, without the Irish blogging community on my side this research won’t be complete. The hard part will be finding non-blogging readers to complete the survey, so if you know anyone that would fit that category please pass the link for the survey onto them.

As a way of giving something back to the blogging community I will be publishing summaries of the most interesting findings here on this blog. If you would like to be notified when the entire research document is available for download  – this will be a masters thesis of approximately 15,000 words, with an introduction to the psychogical aspects of blogging – you can enter your details on this form.

I’ve been following Stephen Fry on twitter, much to my own amusement, and to celebrate reaching 50,000 followers he is running a very Fry like competition, it’s wonderfully complicated and devilishly playful.

“L=50 in Roman. The best tweet containing exactly 50 Ls will win. All tweets to contain the tag #L and none to exceed 140 character limit SF” (link)

The Roman numeral for 50 is L, so the task is to use 50 letter Ls in one 140 character tweet. Quite the challenge. Directly after the tweet posted by Stephen Fry someone else in my stream posted a link to the Ryanair baggage story from this week and thus my first attempt was born.

Ryanair left my leather luggage in limbo with little likelihood of lawful retrieval. Lovely challenge #L

Unfortunately, this only contained 15 letters L. After much consultation with various online dictionaries I found a few prize words with numerous Ls, callipygian being my absolute favourite. Somehow the tweet evolved into a completely different monster and thus, my final tweet reads like a little story that could have been taken directly out of Stephen Fry’s autobiography.

Parallel multiple syllabic callipygian lads.Willfully polysyllabically lulled.Lawful release?Little likelihood.Lullllllllllilllllllllloo! #L (link)

Translation: Numerous young men with beautiful bums, sitting an equal distance apart from one another. They have a taste for syllables, and allow themselves to be calmed down by words with many syllables. Their release from prison very unlikely. “Lulliloo!” cried Stephen, joyfully welcoming them.

If you’re interested in entering the competition, it’s open to entries until Saturday the 24th of January at midday. Also, the twitter user ghijklmno has created a great utility to double check your entry. You can track the competition entries using the assigned hashtag of #L. The majority of them make little sense (not that mine does!), but I’ve found a few creative, witty and interesting entries. Looking forward to seeing which vocabulary genius from the twitterverse wins this one.