“Is blogging kept alive by office-bound shirkers?” Jeremy Wagstaff asks.

Computing based on a single blog post (not enough time to do a survey for more, I guess; but the post had 250+ comments, which is enough for some statistical analysis), Jeremy comes up with an estimate of the times of the day people have made their comments. And he infers that people usually leave comments during work hours.

Allowing for time zones, and based on precisely one blog entry, I’d say the latter. Commenters generally seem to be doing it from work.
…
This is what it looks like, starting at midnight:

0-8 6.6%
8-12 20.3%
12-2 16.2%
2-6 39.0%
6-10 7.5%
10-12 10.4%

Based on this very limited example (where comments — as usual — deteriorate into a slanging match between a few individuals) it’s clear that most commenting is done on work time, with the Post-Prandial Surf the most popular period. Despite the generous two-hour lunch window offered in the survey, fewer people made comments during that period than during the pre-lunch morning period, suggesting lunch time is too important to waste on reading blogs. And even if you only take the 8-12 and 2-6 periods as worktime, that still accounts for nearly two thirds of the comments. I’d say, based on this, the workplace seems to be the preferred blog-reading/commenting locale.

I’d be interested in seeing a larger-scale study of whether bloggers and blog comment-posters are, indeed working on company time. Are bloggers shirking on their employers?

Of course, for those of us who blog as part of our jobs or businesses, this would mean a good thing, won’t it?

Do you blog from work?

I wanted to setup an informal, online poll here, but our (blogflux) polling system is currently unavailable. I’d appreciate hearing from you on the comment threads if you do blog while at work. Then I’ll update this post with a poll when the service is up. Don’t worry, we won’t tell your boss!

Update: Here’s the poll!

Note that by “blogging from work,” I also mean commenting on blogs from work–sorry ’bout that.

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