The wacky folks over at Pew Internet, the same people who constantly bring out bizarre and contradictory surveys on blogging, have found in their latest survey that despite the high-profile cases such as “Rathergate,” the influence of blogs on the American political landscape was mostly circumstantial, and mostly confined to moderating discussions of news events rather than driving them.
Reuters reports that Michael Cornfield, a senior research consultant at Pew saying that the study dispels the notion that blogs are replacing traditional media as the public’s primary source of information at that Bloggers follow buzz as much as they make it.
But just before you take me to task for referring to Pew as whacky, guess how big the sample of blogs was, remembering that there are over 50 million blogs in the blogosphere and at least 10 million in the United States alone.
No, not 10,000….1,000 wouldn’t be close either. 100? close but not cigar. No folks, the sample number of blogs used for the study: less than 40. Indeed the “40” figure included not just blogs, but “forums, newspapers and television”. Potentially the number could have been 20 or even 10 blogs. Now I’m no scientist and I’ve only formally studied statistics briefly, but blind freddy can work out that such as small sample of blogs can never be accurate, in ANY field of measurement. Indeed, you’ve nearly got to ask yourself with joke studies such as this: does Pew have a hidden agenda?
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