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

[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).