Bostonist prefers the tried and true method of shaming people into doing the work they’ve promised. That was our sole intention in calling out Cameron Marlow publicly on not sharing his Weblog Survey data with us (well, us and the rest of the ‘net). It was an idea we’d picked up from Xian. We posed some questions and the seeming lack of substantive response was noted as it quickly made way to other local channels.

Over the weekend, a message popped into our inbox: “Check out our new badge.” It came from an MIT Media Lab insider and we love it, so much so that we’re posting it here. Cameron has been freed from the chains of chasing a PhD (first badge, above) and is now gainfully employed, but he's left the blogosphere with some questions. If Cameron wants some help synthesizing his dissertation into something worthy of taking the place of a stale notice dated August 2005, that help has been offered. The Internet is full of probably hundreds of thousands of lost and abandoned pages, sitting on servers never to be updated again. Thankfully, many of them are tributes to pets who have moved on or remnants of a high school or college computing class, but the MIT Weblog Survey page grabbed our attention. The lack of publicly published results has prompted some to question if a ripple effect might exist: Perhaps participants will be less enthusiastic to participate in university questionnaires, maybe the MIT brand will be effected. We know the dissertation exists, the data was used to support a thesis, or disprove it, we just want the fruit of our labor shared as promised. Once we see the results of the survey (the questions of which we honestly can't remember), Bostonist is sure that all will be forgotten. On a related note: the $20,000 question of the day is will Technorati show us the goods?