scary stat of the day

[cos]

Earlier today, for reasons I'll leave out, I found myself wondering how much less use of LJ there is in Iowa than in California, which led me to the raw livejournal stats page. On the way, I noticed that Massachusetts is the #6 state by number of LJ accounts, even though the rest of the top 10 have significantly higher populations. So I pulled up census.gov and divided some numbers...

• Approximately 4.8% of residents of Massachusetts have LiveJournals
• For California, it's about 2.5%. Iowa, 1.4%, and Idaho, 1.0%.
• I think MA has the highest LJ percentage of any state, and perhaps any country. Almost 1 out of 20!

... but I didn't have time to check any more states, or write a script, so I'm not sure :)

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

You could probably correlate the raw emo capacity for a state using the same numbers. :)

[fyfer.livejournal.com]

I bet Massachusetts has a higher concentration of college students than anywhere else.

[cos]

I think that's true, but the LJ age distribution bell curve peaks around 17-19, so high school student population should be at least as important, if not more, than college. There must be something else besides raw percentage of college students to explain this.

[fidgetmonster.livejournal.com]

I think LJ spread through our community like a virus. If you want to know what's going on, you've got to be on all the forums that distribute information. I read long before I signed up, but got frustrated with missing friends-locked posts.

Does the census factor in college students and other transients? Because someone might have MA listed as their LJ location because they live here, but be registered in another state census-wise. That would skew your numbers.

[cos]

People aren't "registered" for the Census. The Census doesn't try to pin down each individual in the country, because that would systematically undercount certain types of people (like the homeless, and the poor, and transients) who are harder to track down. They send surveys to a representative sample, but they also canvass, use statistical methods, and try to determine to the best of their demographers' and mathematicians' abilities, how many people (and what sorts of people) actually are in each local area (known as a "census tract" and roughly a little under the size of a city ward). And because federal money gets distributed in proportion to census figures for many programs, and Congressional representation is based on census numbers, any state that thinks they may be getting undercounted for any reason, makes sure to raise the issue rather forcefully. So I'm pretty sure the census accounts for our college population reasonably well.

[aerynne.livejournal.com]

Actually, the census does try to pin down each individual in the country; they just try to estimate the people who don't or can't respond. What they do with the representative sample is send those households a much longer survey. https://ask.census.gov/cgi-bin/askcensus.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=1025&p_created=1133810040&p_sid=aj4ZLeZh&p_lva=&p_sp=cF9zcmNoPTEmcF9zb3J0X2J5PSZwX2dyaWRzb3J0PSZwX3Jvd19jbnQ9MiZwX3Byb2RzPSZwX2NhdHM9JnBfcHY9JnBfY3Y9JnBfcGFnZT0xJnBfc2VhcmNoX3RleHQ9ZXZlcnlvbmU*&p_li=&p_topview=1

[jennylisa.livejournal.com]

I was a college student at 17. I wonder what that percentage is?

And, overall, I find this whole phenomenon to be one of the most disturbing things ever. Mostly due to it's addictive qualities...

[ellipticcurve.livejournal.com]

I'm thinking that your fair state's overwhelmingly urbanized character might be part of the answer. Higher population density -> more Internet access -> more freaks like us wasting precious electrons. Also, you guys have a more educated populace than... well, anywhere, I think, and we educated folk are more likely to fritter away precious minutes of our lives on LJ.

[summerrose.livejournal.com]

It may be related to how very many colleges and boarding schools Massachusetts has.

[tylik.livejournal.com]

WA comes in at 3.3%...

[cos]

Yeah, I'd have guessed WA would be near the top of this ranking, but still well behind MA. But that's just intuition, I don't think I know the reasons for it.

[tylik.livejournal.com]

It's about what I would have expected -- I was more suprised (though not really suprised) that MA has more LJ accounts total. We have a reasonable tech concentration, and were one of the earlier areas for LJ to get critical mass... But we don't have as many universities, and I suspect we have a much higher population of people generically unlikely to get LJ accounts.

[barking-iguana.livejournal.com]

It may not effect the rankings, but all the numbers are probably misleadingly high. Some folks have more than one account.

[cos]

I wouldn't presume to guess which direction the numbers skew, which is why I said "approximately". Some of the skew factors I thought of are:
- Many LJ accounts don't include a location, or just say "USA", so they may be in MA but not included in the states
- Some people have multiple accounts whose location is in the same state
- People sometimes don't update their location when they move - which could skew in either direction
- The latest census figures are from 2000, and I don't know which direction the state's population has gone, or by how much, since then (I suspect MA is pretty stable, and possibly down somewhat, while CA is up significantly).

[kirin]

Huh... so I suppose people with no birth-year listed get sorted into the "as young as possible" bin in order to implement age-filtering in the most conservative manner. Which would explain the 1.7 million 5-year-olds. (Especially as compared to the mere five thousand 105-year-olds.)

[cos]

Yes, that was my guess. When I saw that number, I looked for the numbers for ages around it, like 4 and 6. I noticed that from 6 up to 10, the numbers were very low, and below 5, they weren't listed, so I figured 5 was a collection bin for the unknown.

[bike4fish.livejournal.com]

Or 5 is the median age for cats with blogs.

[lil-brown-bat.livejournal.com]

So, do we get some kind of a prize or discount or something?

[cos]

I think we either get bragging rights, or mild humiliation, depending on how people look at it. I'll go for bragging rights, that sounds like more fun :)

[ocschwar.livejournal.com]

Apparently everyone on Pitcairn has an LJ. Now we know what they do the 8 hours a day they have the generator on.

[bike4fish.livejournal.com]

I'd love to see the OKCupid demography. I might be tempted to write a program...

[cos]

Post on okcupid and suggest it. I know at least one of the OkCupid trio reads it.

[blucrew3.livejournal.com]

I like how under the 'interests' in that text file sleeping and sleep collectively beat out sex by over 130000

[bluesleeper.livejournal.com]

Perhaps there's a study to be done on the relation between things that people are deprived of and what people list as their interests.