Personality attributes of bloggers from Science Blogging forum on Nature Network

This is quite interesting, Helen. Since I am not sure that the article itself is very accessible, I just copy out the definition of the five because I didn know really what neurotic meant. That predicts NN use pretty well! And they get quite often back to the fundamental question why do you blog? Back to you, Helen! The article itself is subscription-only so I can read only the abstract. As well as their definition of with which one might take issue, one can also question how they assigned these personalities to their subjects (we all know how intrinsically unreliable these types of study are from many notorious examples, for example how superficial are these apparent personality traits and were they assigned by self-assessment which is even more notoriously inaccurate than external assessments?). I have never met anyone who isn in some aspect, whether that person is apparently (that day) introverted or extroverted. (And yes, I do know a little about these definitions.) I wondered about the sample sizes and composition. There were two studies reported, Heather notes that one of them is of 25 male and 57 female US undergraduates. Enough said. I don believe a word of any subsequent conclusion based on a sample of that size and composition. I suppose this is covered in the article itself, but how long had these people been blogging for, how regularly did they post, what level of content, etc? As I listed in my presentation at Sci Blogging, and was discussed at another parallel session; as Martin Fenner has written in a subsequent post; and many others have written and said people for all kinds of reasons and for many different purposes. Blogs themselves are a medium not (only) a message: they can and are used for a host of different purposes. I do not attach any value to this study based on what I can see of it. I would be hesitant to draw a too wide conclusion based on undergraduates who blog as in the among everyone sure, it might be true that females who blog are more neurotic. Although, all those fashion blogs written and maintained by women seem to be less neurotic and more at this lovely cardigan/shoes/hat think, although I have no proof of it, that it will depend on the of blog if the woman behind it falls into the neurotic category or not. Then again, it the age old thing that men tend not to show their insecurities as much as women so I don know if the attribute erally is a relevant one.