Blog survey invites you...

The MIT media lab (MIT) sent an invite to "an important academic study regarding weblogs". Seeing as this weblog belongs to a number of people, it's visitors as much as anyone, am posting up the invite here for anyone who's interested (not intending sabotage of MIT's sample, but bloggers like to share things).

Hi there,

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is conducting an important academic study regarding weblogs. We are investigating the role of weblogs in the lives of their authors. Does your weblog make you more connected to the rest of society? Does it increase your chances of getting a job or finding information that you are looking for? To answer these questions, which are very important to our research, we ask for your help.

Your weblog has been randomly selected as part of a small group among millions to represent the entire community of weblog authors. We obtained this email address from what we assume is your weblog:

http://iraqblogcount.blogspot.com

If this is NOT your weblog, we would appreciate it if you could tell us by clicking on this link:

http://blogsurvey.media.mit.edu/optout (NA - this is all of our weblog.)

This is not a commercial marketing survey, but scholarly research to be used in academic publications such as journals, conferences and books. By participating in this study you will be assisting scientific research and contributing to a better understanding of how weblogs are influencing people's lives. We would like you to please fill out our short survey (about 15 minutes or less, on average).

To take the survey, either follow this link:

At this point the email gives a link and login key - but it only looks like one person can use it. I went to their info site and read more. It says "Everyone who maintains a weblog is welcome (and encouraged) to take the survey... Your responses are extremely important to us, and we thank you greatly for your time!" There's a consent form here and you can request a survey login key here.

Your help is greatly appreciated. If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to contact me, or consult the link at the end of this email.

Yours Sincerely,
Cameron Marlow
MIT Media Laboratory

http://blogsurvey.media.mit.edu/help

Iraq Blog Count randomly selected? Well, perhaps. Oddly, I found the exact same MIT Weblog survey Information at http://www.radiovoxpopuli.org/help as well. Here's some other bloggers who've been randomly selected;

blog quebecois
proxientunit
Multiblog

And lastly but maybe most interestingly, a worthwhile reading bit by Fernanda B. Viegas, Media Lab MIT.