January 5, 2006 – Jarrett House North

Last summer’s blogging survey by Cameron Marlow, who created the Blogdex tool at the MIT Media Labs in 2001, has become this week’s backlash story. Marlow promised to publish the results of the research at the end of the summer, then didn’t, and has indicated through an interview with the Bostonist that he’s just too swamped with work at his new job at Yahoo! to publish it. The reaction from the blogging community, who put out a bunch of buttons and banners to encourage people to fill out the survey, has been annoyed at best, angry at worst (as in the headline from Universal Hub above).

I’ve requested a copy of the thesis from the MIT archives. Copyright will prevent me from republishing the whole thing, but I hope to at least get the abstract on line. But I’d like to do better. Cameron, if you’re out there, I’d like to offer my services as a stats savvy MIT (Sloan) grad and blogger to help get the summary of the survey results on line. After all, it’s our collective alma mater’s reputation on the line. Plus I want to see the data too. How ’bout it?

Egolinking: The process of linking to things you find when you egosurf.

Today’s egolinks are to two unlikely sources. The first is to an interview in a Sloan School of Management publication about Sloan bloggers. Which reminds me: I need to add the other folks in that article to the Sloanblogs list.

The second is to my first mention in the New York Times—or more properly on the New York Times website. Not because of the Boycott Sony initiative, as one might think; this is as an addendum to an article about authors reading what bloggers say about them. My blog is linked from a page that summarizes bloggers’ discussions of Julie and Julia by Julie Powell. Ah well. Cool to see one’s name associated with the Grey Lady, no matter how it got there.

FWIW, I don’t think I invented the term egolink, but there aren’t many people using it. Spread the word!