Tim Luckhurst on The Daily Mash - Satirical Statistics: The War on Stupid
This is getting tedious, and slightly annoying.
Early in July I had a little go at Joy Lo Dico for suggesting that differences of 1 or 2% between website “unique user” statistics of national newspapers were of significance, when in reality any differences of less than 5% or maybe even 10% in Unique Users are smaller than the likely amount of noise on the figure.
Last weekend we had a repeat of exactly the same embarrassing mistake in exactly the same place - the Media Column of the Independent on Sunday.
In this case we had a case of major statistics abuse in an article about the superb satirical website the Daily Mash by Professor Tim Luckhurst.
(Illustration Credit: Wellington Grey)
Can Political Blogs encourage Local Politics?
There’s been an interesting conversation going on over at Liberal Conspiracy
This was my contribution, which is my current high level thinking about political blogging abd how far it has reached.
The quotes are from the author of the post Mike Killingworth, who was commenting about the website Political Betting.
This stuff is very Marmite - you either love it or hate it.
Poligeeks: A new site about Politics and Technology: Blog Platform
This week Blog Platform is about a new group blog that is being launched about now. A number of bloggers with a technical background on the Internet have got together to start a new blog called poligeeks.co.uk. This is the description:
“A collective of geeky people that are into politics too. We help other bloggers like Guido and Iain Dale on the right as well as LabourHome and and others on both sides with their geeky stuff. We thought it might be nice to have our own collective blog where we could speak geek and share ideas.”
Here is the introductory article by Mike Rouse.
The Power of the Commentariat. Or Perhaps Not: Blog Platform
A couple of days ago I drew your attention to a seminar to launch a report by Editorial Intelligence called “The Power of the Commentariat”. Or rather, they have launched half of it and expect the public to buy the rest from Amazon.
It’s an interesting document and I’d like to do a review of the whole thing. I have asked Editorial Intelligence for a review copy of the whole document. If one is not forthcoming, I shall review the half of the report that they have seen fit to release.
Listening to the podcast of the seminar, there are a number of moments of “Don Quixote” incongruity. However, if you want to skip the fun, and just hear what I think - then go to the next section.
Has Google canned the Economist in Search Rankings? Blog Platform
The Google Page Rank figure of the Economist has been reduced from 8 down to 5 - a huge reduction. It may be down to a punishment from Google for the Economist displaying questionable “paid-for” text links as “classified adverts”. Here’s my take.
What to do when a political blog is banned at work
From time to time Political Blogs are found to be inaccessible from within certain organisations. Here are a few ideas about how to get your blog to be accessible again.
Growing Pains: What happens when your blog becomes a little bigger?
There’s an excellent short interview with a “Blog Producer” from Weblogs Inc. by Darren Rowse over at Problogger. It points up a few of the issues that arise and skills that are needed to take a blog from being the “voice of one person” to being a slightly larger enterprise - with a range of […]
Columnists and Reporters are the new “bloggers”
I’m coming to the conclusion that one of the biggest threats to the accuracy and reputation of news-based blogs is when bloggers quote “mainstream” newspapers and websites verbatim without doing the necessary fact checking to make sure the newspaper reports are accurate.
The problems are precisely those of which bloggers are accused (sometimes with justification) - […]
