[Air-L] Characteristics of online posters

[Matthew W.]

I have a friend who is producing a story on online commentary. He is looking for "statistics or data of some sort that describes people who tend to make comments on line about newspaper articles, blog posts, etc.

What I want to know is this: are such people more representative of an extreme position on an issue? In other words, is it mostly the crazy nutters [sic] with not much else to do who do the most commenting?"

So has anyone done any quantitative research that I can direct him towards that attempts to tackle the issue of representativeness in online commentary? I recognize there is a lot of qualitative that has been done and most, if not all, of us could provide him with many useful quotes. But what about numbers?

Matthew Wysocki
Assistant Professor
Flagler College