Prospecting the Blogosphere

about the UCI blog survey.

all opinions express herein are only makko's and ocean's, and do not necessarily reflect opinions of any of the other UCI blog survey team members

Name:
Location: Irvine, California

Wednesday, July 28, 2004

Goals

Here's the running count:
  • Chinese (simplified): 94
  • Chinese (traditional): 23
  • Japanese: 58
  • Korean: 21
  • English (non-Flash version): 166
I've been contacting various Korean bloggers, but their numbers still seem low. Korea is one of the most wired countries in the world, so I must be doing something wrong. Any ideas? Or do they just play StarCraft with all that bandwidth?

On another note, it's really tough getting the popular bloggers to respond. This is understandable, since they are busy and probably get a whole of bunch of emails, but, nevertheless, it is frustrating. I'll keep trying. I've been posting to blogger forums as well--we'll see how that goes.

Someone asked me what our time frame is and how many participants we need. Well, ideally, we'd like 1,000 participants for each survey. At the very minimum, 500. Maybe I'm being too hopeful...

According to this article in Asia Times Online, "China has seen a significant rise in the number of web logs with an estimated 10,000 active bloggers and more than 600 web logs". Let's use statistics. Suppose I want to be have a 95% confidence level and a confidence interval of 10. Assuming a normal distribution, independent sampling, we need about 100 people to answer the survey. In other words, if 25% of people answered "yes" to a particular question in our survey, we can be 95% sure that 15 to 35% (25-10, 25+10, respectively) of the total population would've said "yes" as well. On the other hand, if I want to reduce that interval to 20 to 30% (an interval of 5), I would need about 400 participants. You can calculate this here and here's an easy to understand slide [powerpoint] about confidence intervals.

As for the time frame, we'd like to get results by the end of August, so that we can analyze them in September. As usual, comments and advice are welcome. Special thanks to Mengjuei for helping to clean up the traditional Chinese version of our blog survey. Zot! Zot!

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home