Polls

“Do readers of liberal and conservative blogs live in two different countries?” (Part II)

by

I put up a post a couple of weeks ago about the BlogAds survey of blog readers.

Now there’s an updated graphic from BlogAds, based on data from the same survey, providing information about liberal/conservative blog readers’ positions on some questions that weren’t addressed in the initial survey report:

Survey of Blog Reader Attitudes, Part II

There certainly are some strong patterns here, not that this comes as a shock to anyone. (Of course my caveat about self-selected data samples applies to these results as it did to the initial results.)

(Chicago Boyz is a BlogAds affiliate.)

Care to Bet?

by

British Bookmakers William Hill and Ladbrokes both have these odds on the US Presidential race:

Barack Obama    1/2
Mitt Romney  13/8

That means people putting real money on the table are saying that as of today the odds are 2 to 1 in favor of Obama, 8 to 13 in favor, i.e. 13 to 8 against Romney.

This is consistent with the steady 60 on Intrade in favor of Obama.

Disregard the polls.

The betting money says Obama wins.

It is an uphill race for Romney.

“Do readers of liberal and conservative blogs live in two different countries?”

by

The results of a survey of blog readers taken by the BlogAds company. (Some of the survey questions are still running in the upper left sidebar of Chicago Boyz.) The people who responded to the survey are self-selected and it’s not clear how big the sample is, but the results are interesting and worth a click.

(Chicago Boyz is a BlogAds affiliate, in case this is not obvious.)

Blogging Is for Old People

by

Is this true? Do younger people now mostly use Facebook, Twitter, phone P2P apps etc?

Chicagoboyz seems middle-aged; the median age of contributors and commenters here appears to be fifty-something. (Perhaps the age distribution of readers who don’t comment, which is most readers, skews older or younger, but it’s difficult to know.)

Why is that? This blog has been around for about ten years. That’s a significant chunk of time in anyone’s life. There has been turnover among contributors but those of us who have been here since the beginning are now ten years older. Maybe blogs, or at least blogs that are both 1) around for a while and 2) don’t expand into large enterprises age with their contributors. Blogs, including group blogs, are personal and it’s plausible that the people who read a blog tend to have something in common with the writers. Maybe there’s a cohort of readers aging with the writers, or maybe writers as they age tend to attract older readers. My guess is that it’s a combination, mostly the latter.

So, is blogging the new TV news, something that mainly older people engage in as either writers or readers? Are older people more likely to blog and comment on blogs because they have free time? Or is reader/writer age an irrelevant variable?

Feel free to discuss in the comments.

BTW, here’s a poll:

How old are Chicago Boyz readers? Please tell us your age (anonymously)…
Age 20 or under
21-30
31-40
41-50
51-60
61-70
71 or older
  
pollcode.com free polls 

Michael Barone weighs on the Wisconsin showdown.

by

Follow the money, Washington reporters like to say. The money in this case comes from taxpayers, present and future, who are the source of every penny of dues paid to public employee unions, who in turn spend much of that money on politics, almost all of it for Democrats. In effect, public employee unions are a mechanism by which every taxpayer is forced to fund the Democratic Party.

RTWT