Polls, polls and more polls

by Eszter Hargittai on September 28, 2004

In case you haven’t seen it yet, Mystery Pollster is a new blog for “Demystifying the Science and Art of Political Polling”. I didn’t find it through Kausfiles or Instapundit, I got the recommendation during a phone conversation with a friend who barely reads blogs… but who does work with surveys herself. The blog should be of interest to data & methods geeks and political junkies alike.

UPDATE: Since a reader completely misunderstood why I happened to mention how I got information about this blog, I thought I should clarify. I mentioned that I did not get it from reading another blog, because I found it interesting that people who do not read blogs are still in the position to recommend blogs these days. For those of us interested in who knows about blogs and who reads them, this is an interesting tidbit.

{ 8 comments }

1

Chris Bertram 09.28.04 at 7:28 am

The UK equivalent is “Anthony Wells”:http://anthonywells.typepad.com/anthony_wells/ . He recently wrote a guide to the methodology of the the leading polling organizations (for the UK) “here”:http://anthonywells.typepad.com/anthony_wells/2004/09/index.html .

2

Richard 09.28.04 at 8:33 am

Is there a point to writing “I didn’t find it through Kausfiles or Instapundit”. Are you supposed to get some intellectual purity points for this? Are you above reading Kausfiles or Instapundit?

I love Crooked Timber, but the manners here can occasionally be atrocious.

3

eszter 09.28.04 at 2:59 pm

Richard, you missed the point entirely. The point was to suggest that people who don’t read blogs still know about blogs and recommend blogs. For those of us who think about who reads blogs that may be an interesting observation. Maybe, on occasion, you should not try to read so much (so little?) into what’s said on this blog.

4

eudoxis 09.28.04 at 5:01 pm

Does this mean, eszter, that the occasional blog reader is rare? Am I wrong in assuming that there is a fairly normal spectrum of blog reading habits?

5

dsquared 09.28.04 at 5:46 pm

I love Crooked Timber, but the manners here can occasionally be atrocious

They certainly can; get stuffed.

6

eszter 09.28.04 at 7:58 pm

Eudoxis – There are very little generalizable data available about blog readers or the average Internet user’s blog reading habits so it’s hard to answer your question. The little data I have seen suggest that just a small portion of Net users read blogs at all. But these data don’t address their reading habits (e.g. frequency of blog visits).

7

John Bragg 09.28.04 at 9:22 pm

I don’t think it’s any kind of breach of etiquette at all.

Kaus is “Mystery Pollster”s blogfather, and Instapundit probably linked to him as well (I’m too lazy to check). It is worthy of note that the recommendation came from a non-obvious source.

Second, it speaks to the professional credibility of the blog. As a high school teacher (and heavy blog consumer), if an acquaintance in the District Testing Department mentioned a website that provided links and daily running commentary on educational testing issues (avoiding the term blog because they don’t know the word), that would be worthy of notice, both in terms of testing policy and in terms of blogosphere anthropology.

8

eszter 09.29.04 at 1:06 am

Thanks for the interesting example, John. And yes, both Kaus and Instapundit linked to the blog, my links to their sites are to the pages where they mentioned Mystery Pollster.

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