Yes, they did a survey, and the results show the French have plenty of sex, but are among the least satisfied for all that activity. Russians (80%), Brazilians (82%), and Greeks (86%) appear to be the most likely to get it at least once a week, while in Japan it appears both infrequent and unsatisfying. New Zealand distinguished itself for being the only country where women averaged more partners than men.

The U.S. stats were middling at best, though 37% of Americans reported their “sex lives have been negatively impacted by daily stress.”

Even if you don’t like the results, you do have to respect the company for doing the research. Or, you could just laugh at their ads.

Lorelle and Samir both point to a number of plugins to do surveys within WordPress, but neither of them say any of them are that good. And Samir is pretty disapointed: “at the end of it all, I never did find my ideal online survey tool.”

Survey Fly is the best recommendation from both of Lorelle and Samir, but it isn’t WP2.5 compatible and was las updated in summer 2006. It’s also limited to tracking only one survey at a time. Ugh.

iblee points out that students want libraries.

libraries, students, survey

Just when you thought I was done talking about how the internet really does touch everything, Lichen posts some details from the most recent University of New Hampshire Res Life student survey and it gets me going again. In order, the top three activities are:

• socializing (15.8 hours/week)
   
• studying, excluding in-class time (12.5 hours/week)
   
• instant messaging, (9.3 hours/week)

Lichen also points out that IM activity was reported separately from “personal internet use,” which got an additional 8.4 hours/week.

The survey doesn’t appear to be online, so I can’t tell how many other computer-related activities are reported or how activities like “studying” may (or may not) also include computer use.

AIM, campus computing, computer use, IM, instant messenger, online activity, social networking, social software, student life, survey, unh, university of new hampshire, usage survey

Where are the MIT Weblog Survey Results? They were supposed to be out September first, but they’re still missing… All I can find is this older page from Fernanda Viegas.

survey, blogs, web usage

Ken (I wish he had a blog to link to) pointed out Bloggers Need Not Apply in the Chronicle Of Higher Ed over the weekend. The story is to some a highly cautionary tale:

A candidate’s blog is more accessible to the search committee than most forms of scholarly output. It can be hard to lay your hands on an obscure journal or book chapter, but the applicant’s blog comes up on any computer. Several members of our search committee found the sheer volume of blog entries daunting enough to quit after reading a few. Others persisted into what turned out, in some cases, to be the dank, dark depths of the blogger’s tormented soul; in other cases, the far limits of techno-geekdom; and in one case, a cat better off left in the bag.

…and there’s more juice in the full story.

I had a lot of thoughts in response to the piece, including some scatter about changing modes of communication, the Google Economy, and whatnot, but in the middle of it I stumbled across Ryan Eby’s post about the MIT Weblog Survey. Upon completing the survey, respondents are allowed to view their standings in the preliminary results.

That’s where the graph above comes from. It turns out that of the 38,220 respondents so far, 88.71% report blogging about personal matters 20% of the time or more. I claimed that I posted on personal matters less than 10% of the time here at MaisonBisson (hopefully I correctly self evaluated that).

With those numbers, it’s easy to make the leap to presuming that the Chronicle author was seeing a lot of personal detail — much more than I would be comfortable with here.

David Rothman picked up on this story at TeleRead, where he sees some big upsides in blogging. For my part, I believe that blogging is the most open form of social bookmarking and that bloggers play a vital role in helping Google and others properly rank and organize the world’s information. While the Chronicle piece makes a good point about being careful about what we say and how we say it, I hope nobody sees it as an admonition against blogging.

Update: Had we known before hand what we’d get from TV and radio as those technologies were developing, we might have smartly given up. Technology, be it in the form of newspapers, blogs, or broadcasting can do little to change the problem that has troubled us since the birth of language: very little of what is written or said is worth paying attention to — even here at MaisonBisson.

That said, the technology is enabling new and different modes of communication. It’s worth alerting readers that old-media expectations don’t work with blogs. It’s not the publishing that matters, it’s the linking. The vetting process is in how and where a blog post is cited and the value is in the distributed conversations that develop.

tags: blogger, bloggers, chronicle of higher ed, many2many, modes of communication, personal matters, survey, weblog

Napster — the legal, reincarnated music download site — essentially invented the concept of incumbent campus download services. They loudly touted deals with schools “anxious” to stop the p2p music sharing problem. Trouble is, according to this story at The Reg, it’s not working well. A survey at one client university paints a sad picture:

Not a single University of Rochester student admitted to buying a song via Napster during the Fall 2004 semester. Instead, eight per cent of the students turned to the likes of iTunes and Musicmatch to buy songs they enjoy. That’s an ominous sign for a company spending millions to seed the university market with music in the hopes of unseating Apple as the clear leader in online music.

The Reg notes that “Napster has put a new twist on the notion of being a loss leader,” but I’d say the opposite. So long as universities continue to cut Nap in on the student fees and the students continue to ignore Nap, it should be very profitable in the short run.

tags: itunes, music download, music download services, music sharing, musicmatch, napster, new york, ominous sign, p2p, rochester, survey, the register, university of rochester