Comments on: “New” Environics Poll Confuses Me

By: social media group corporate blogging » Blog Archive » Toronto Star: Blogging Good for Business - sort of

Tue, 30 Jan 2007 03:29:09 +0000

[...] There’s an article in today’s Toronto Star that I would like to claim a bit of responsibilty for. As it happens, I emailed the reporter in question regarding the apparent disconnect between the Environics numbers recently released and an earlier Ipsos-Reid poll on the number of Canadians blogging. She called back and we had a nice chat on the phone about blogging. The result? Depending on whose figures you believe, somewhere between 30 and 40 per cent of adult Internet users in Canada have read at least one blog in recent months. [...]

By: LAINEY

LAINEY — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 17:10:13 +0000

Excellent post oh, and happy to be a morale booster.

By: Maggie Fox

Maggie Fox — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 17:31:50 +0000

Thanks for pointing that out, Rob – I’m going to have to go back and have another look at the wording of both poll questions. You may have something there!

(And thanks also for the updated link!)

By: Rob Cottingham

Rob Cottingham — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 16:48:44 +0000

Hi, Maggie –

Interesting question. Part of the answer could lie in different methodologies, ways of phrasing the question, population modeling, etc. — the same way that election polls often vary widely from pollster to pollster.

But if I’m getting your point correctly, I’m not sure these results are actually inconsistent. Ipsos-Reid asked how many Canadians have read a blog at all, and Environics asked how many have read one recently. Wouldn’t the inconsistency have been if that number hadn’t been significantly lower?

The thing that got me about the Ipsos-Reid poll (see the full news release) were the questions about whether “blogs” are a reliable news source, whether you trust them, etc.

A plea to pollsters, reporters and pundits: can we move past the idea that blogs are some kind of monolith? Some are trustworthy, some aren’t; some are people regurgitating whatever talking points they heard somewhere else, some are written by die-hard partisans, and some are actually useful, well-researched sources of great information. (Not that different from a lot of the media, really.)