We have now surveyed 1000 plus Amazon Mechanical Turk users about personal journals. Here are some interesting about those who keep a personal journal:

• 48 percent of personal journals are still written by hand.
• 26 percent are kept on a Mac or PC.
• 24 percent are now kept online (mostly blogs).
• 1.6 percent are kept in other ways (calendar, on PDAs…)

The Amazon Turk crowd is a fairly tech savvy group of people. Anyone who spends their day going through and answering turk questions understands the Internet very well.

I would assume that the number of handwritten and PC/Mac journals would go up if we had a more broad survey demographic, but I was still surprised that almost half of personal journals are still kept by hand.

Of the 900+ Mechanical Turk users that we have surveyed, 1 out of 4 personal diaries/journals (26%) are kept on a Mac or PC.

pyxlin vs Mac or PC

Last week I spoke with Debbi, a lady while promoting pyxlin at BYU Womens Conference. Womens Conference is about 18,000 women (mostly moms) from all over the world gathered on BYU campus.

When Debbi saw pyxlin, she could hardly contain her excitement. Debbi explained that she kept a regular journal on her home computer for 4 years; diligently recording family memories, photos, lessons she had learned, and everyday life events. Unfortunately she never backed anything up. Debbi was devastated when her computer crashed just a few months ago. She lost everything!

Apparently Debbi’s situation is not unusual. According to our survey, 13 percent of those who keep a personal journal said that they have lost a journal due to a computer crash. Another 3 percent said they have lost their journal to an accident (i.e. house fire, flood…) or natural disaster.

Personally, having lost one of my own journals, I believe that their are very few things more important to keep safe in this life than our personal journals.

Pyxlin will solve this problem faced by 16 of 100 journalers. Pyxlin will be secure & private with a permanent archive online to keep it safe from house-fires, floods, natural disasters, computer crashes, terrorists, tsunamis, kids, spouses, and even siblings.

Two weeks ago, we did a random survey of 575 (our stats class says that anything over 480 in any demographic is indisputable) BYU students for pyxlin. We learned three things:

1. BYU student are regular journalers - Out of the 575 students, over 40% of them write in a personal journal at least once a month. Over 20% at least every week. The interest was phenomenal. We were surprised at how many people loved the pyxlin idea.
2. BYU students don’t have a sarcastic bone in their body.
3. BYU students LOVE pyxlin - 38% of those surveyed at BYU left their personal email address requesting to be contacted when pyxlin is released. That is unbelievable! Neal (President of FamilyLearn) explained that this is how you know that someone is really interested. Most people don’t just pass out their email address to strangers. We can safetly assume that 38% of those surveyed are VERY interested in a pyxlin journal.

BYU Journaling Survey:

Click here to take the survey

Real-Time Summary Report Preview

Today we relaunched the Turk survey. Turk is a service provided by Amazon. They call it the “artificial artificial intelligence”. People from all over the world can submit and complete little tasks for pennies. We are paying people $.05 to $.10 per survey taken. It will be interesting to see if we can get accurate data from Turk. It is amazing to me that people on Turk will actually take a survey for less than a dime.

In the past two hours about 30 people have taken the survey. I was worried that all we would get from this survey is foreigners. It seems like a dime would be worth it for someone from India, but in the US it would have to be more of a hobby. Happily 80%+ have been from the US.

Real-Time Summary Report Preview

(once you scroll through all the countries it is less boring)

For all of you who are dieing to take the survey and haven’t click here to take it!

Over the next few days I will be discussing questions and comments from the Turk survey, just like you can see from the past about the BYU Student Survey. I will also be giving more peeks and updates about pyxlin. Please let us know if we can answer any of you questions.

After creating the Survey for my Managerial Economics class at BYU, we needed some way to get students to take it. Using the email system on BYU’s BlackBoard we started our email campaign to get anyone we could find to take our survey. Luckily BYU students are kind and helped out tremendously.

In our brainstorm for ideas, Mari (my awsome girlfriend) and I were trying to think of something to write in an email to her marriage prep class. We made an impetuous decision. We came up with this completely sarcastic email:

SUBJECT: Marriage Prep: PLEASE HELP ME KEEP MY BOYFRIEND!

Hi Everyone,

My boyfriend is doing a VERY SHORT survey for one of
his classes at the business school. He needs as many
BYU students as possible to take it. He promised me
that if I get 300 people to take it, he will
propose; and I am really trying to apply what we
have learned in this class so far. It would be great
if you guys could help out.

http://www.questionpro.com/akira/TakeSurvey?id=677631
(click this link to take the survey)

If it works out, I will thank you in the wedding invitation

Thanks a million,
Mari

Our devious plan worked! Loads of people from her class took the survey! I thought sarcasm was dripping off this email. Apparently, we were not sarcastic enough for our sober BYU peers. Here are ten hilarious responses that Mari got back from her marriage prep class:

“why do you want to marry a loser who will only propose if you do his homework for him?”

“doesn’t sound to stable”

“I dont know who you are but if he’s bribing you with a ring then there may be some very serious issues that you two havent discussed. i think that you should seriously look at and examine your relationship before you go doing his bidding. sincerely, concerned”

“If the only reason he’ll marry you is if you help him out with a school project, then I wouldn’t marry him. Haha, sounds like you can do better.”

“hey, yeah of course i’ll take the survey, but you should probably drop him. anyone who will only propose to you on a condition that you get him what he wants isnt worth your time! he should propose to you if he loves you and wants to be with you, not if he gets 300 surveys taken. think about what we’ve learned in class…it kinda sounds like he’s got you on a leash hun! best of luck- [name]”

“I took the survey. There’s one less person to get! Good luck!”

“I hope it all goes well! [name]”

Here is one comment from the survey:

“to the dude whos making his girlfriend do this for a ring. you are freakin whacked!”

LOL! Yes, I can agree that I am a loser and I can’t figure out why Mari is dating me. And as you have learned reading this blog, I am probably not the most stable person either. BUT the email was just a distraction to get you to take the survey! I suppose I owe an apology to those who though the joke was real. But thanks for taking the survey! You’re the best!

This survey stuff is a hoot. We need to do this more often.

We are running two surveys right now, one here at BYU, and the other is on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (Turk is a system that allows you to pay people all over the world to do little tasks for pennies). Here are the links to take the surveys and the links to see the results:

BYU Journaling Survey:

Click here to take the survey

Real-Time Summary Report Preview

Amazon Turk Survey (almost the same):

Click here to take the survey

Real-Time Summary Report Preview

Here is a comment that should be addressed:

“This sounds like a great idea, but I hate getting roped into stuff that I have to pay for more than one time (like monthly or annual fees). If it was a one time fee, and then a fee every time I wanted to publish my journal, I would totally go for it!”

Response: Let me know what you think of this?

16% of those surveyed so far say that they journal every 6 months or less. It would be hard to justify a monthly or yearly fee for just 2 journal entries a year. One possible solution would be to have you “pay-as-you-go”. You pay a small fee that buys you unlimited journal entries and a couple of GBs of photos, all of which pyxlin’ would store indefinitely. When you run out of photos in a year, or ten years, you just pay a little more once again for some more photo storage. For the occasional journaler this could be very helpful. For anyone else this would be a solution to avoid “getting roped into monthly or annual fees”.

Once again, let us know what you think.

Privacy & Security: here are some more comments from the survey

“My journal is very personal, I don’t think I would like it to be available online, or to have workers that would put it together for me look through it”

“I would be concerned about the privacy. My journal isn’t something I want the whole world to have internet access to.”

“What are the chance of someone hacking into the system? It may happen!”

“I would not want an online journal, because if someone found out my password, they could break in and read my journal. I would literally rather die! Also, I think a journal is the best when authentic. Sometimes i type my entried when pressed for time, but actually writing down my entry, I believe is more valuable. Good idea about the pictures though. I would be interested in some kind of online, photo journal, with each photo put a little snip it about where it took place, or what you did, and then have it bound, in book style, now that would be cool. Interesting survey!”

Response: Privacy and security are super important. We are building into pyxlin’ a 128 MB encryption password login. We will be writing a blog post about this issue later, but that encryption is the same encryption used for online Banking.

Handwriting Comments

“I think that this is an interesting idea with great potential. However, to me, half of the value of journal writing is having it handwritten. Also, some feelings cannot be expressed in a typewritten record like they can be with a pen and paper. If my journals were put into a book, or online, I would feel like the personal and human side of it was lost.”

“i think this is a really great idea! i love the fact that you would be able to pull it up at anytime and see all the past entries! the only thing i would miss but i am grown up now would be to see the handwriting and how it changes but i guess it wheres out so i love this idea!”

Response: Yes for many, handwriting is a huge deal and yes I think that it looses something. I suppose you just have to weigh out the pros and cons. Handwriting vs Speed, Photos, Security, Usability, and Archive. pyxlin’ will not be for everyone.

Here is another great comment:

“This differs from Google’s services (blogs, sweet email(aka: journal), etc) by making it printable into a book, but I’m not going to pay money for stuff Google already provides for me. I think what you’re doing is great, but unless I am capable of customizing the book PRECISELY (before printing), then quite frankly I’m not really interested. I would suggest that you get into the AJAX programming that Google utilizes to create little web apps so a person can interactively position pictures, text, etc. Particularly Google Notebook and Google Docs, as they already have a built-in publish to PDF feature. If I could send you a PDF and you could print my book exactly as the PDF looks and then send it back to me (including several options for page sizes, etc) then you have yourself a customer.”

Response: I loved this comment. Everything this person talked about from customizing PRECISELY to AJAX are already in the works. We are currently building the world’s first online typesetting system (meaning you won’t be stuck with internet fonts). I think you will be pleased.