Monday, July 03, 2006

Powerful tools for social research

Graham questions the value of blog statistics, he says its better to listen to people. Arti questions why we measure at all. Though we can waste a lot of time with vanity statistics, now that we are electronically interconnected, we can do research that previously seemed impossible. On insufficient data, I have analysed the national interest in game programming using Clustermaps and Google Trends, with questionable accuracy I can say that Australia is a world leader in educational use of game programming.

See http://www.blogviz.com/blogviz/ for a statistical analysis of the transmission of memes.

There was a study which looked at guild size in MMOG's like World of Warcraft to test Dunbar's theories of human organisation.

Yes I spend too much time massaging my ego looking at my cluster map and Googling myself, but we have a powerful research tool there too.

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3 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Tony, I'm glad to hear that I'm not alone in Googling my name and seeing what turns up. Sometimes it's the only way to track down a comment I know I left somewhere on someone's blog. I'm still working toward's Leigh's common goal of just googling my name "grahamwegner" and getting all of my significant online presences lined up down the page. Also check out Brian Lamb's post in the same vein, Ego Run Amok Department: I am The Brian that is a great read.

Monday, July 03, 2006 2:29:00 PM  
Blogger Unknown said...

Thanks for the comment, nice to know someone's reading this

Thursday, July 20, 2006 3:54:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Interesting post Tony. I will admit to also being curious who is reading my blog and posts.

I use the odd name Plakboek (Dutch word for Scrapbook) for my webblog and user name. It isnt commonly used in assocation with English words, making it good candidate to use when I search with Google for items that I have posted.

Sunday, September 10, 2006 4:44:00 PM  

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