Saturday - December 05, 2009

Interesting New Metric, the TWI

This meme is running around the intranets today. It’s a focused update on the old giveashitometer ( or whatever you call yours ) ...

... which has been with us since analog days.


The TMI is focused because it deals with the Tiger Woods brouhaha, and ranks what people really do find important with what the media tells us is important. Big difference there. I haven’t posted anything on the Tiger tales ... because it ranks a big fat ZERO on my personal meter. Oh sure, I considered it, just for eye candy purposes. I don’t know the guy. Don’t know what he’s like as a person. But he’s young, he’s athletic, he’s got a goofy disarming smile, and he’s got a BILLION DOLLARS in the bank. Is that all it takes to have legions of gorgeous women throw themselves at him? Um, dur!

Kind of makes you wonder if the “important” news stories aren’t based on cheesecake appeal, the old “Q factor”. Because pretty is more newsworthy than important?

OK, I was distracted by what statisticians call a “double blond test” for a moment ... where was I? Um, ah, got it. The TWI.

Right. So this guy Richard North at EUReferendum analyzes the comparative frequency of various stories written about on the internet vs. their MSM online news coverage, and uses the Tiger Woods thingy as a baseline. He’s counting up the Google hits and categorizing them, while ignoring any bias Google might have built in to their search engine. And just like that, a meme is born, and the web is all over it and soon thereafter so is the MSM. Or at least FoxNews. And away we go ...

s the public more interested in Tiger Woods than Climategate? And does the media coverage reflect the public interest? Those were the questions posed yesterday by Jan Corn in an obscure publication called Associated Content.

Corn had her own ideas, using Twitter searches as a measure, suggesting that Tiger Woods is grabbing the lion’s share of attention while issues like Climategate get a far smaller amount of interest – from the media at least.

Twitter may or may not be the best measure but, over the last two weeks, the measure most constantly referred to is the number of general web pages on Google compared with the number of news reports recorded.

This provides a measure in respect of one subject, but allows no comparison with other issues. Thus, as an experiment, I started trawling around, taking the stats on other issues in the news. To make the figures comparable, I then worked out the ratios of web pages to news pages reported.

On that basis, Tiger Woods delivered 22,500,000 web and 46,025 news pages, giving ratio of 489. That is the “Tiger Woods Index” (TWI) against which I chose to measure a raft of other issues.

“Climategate” was the next obvious choice and that produced 28,400,000 on the web page search, compared with 2,930 news items, delivering a ratio of 9,693. Using the TWI as a comparator, the public in general are more interested in “Climategate” than Tiger Woods, by a factor of nearly 20 times.

Cheese Whiz, there goes Drew, with the 3rd level meta-blogging again. But it’s true. His bit was picked up by the Telegraph, a UK online paper that is running the Climategate story, to which they add their own snark and observations, and bring Al Gore and Sarah Palin into the mix. And that post got picked up by David Horowitz. And so on and so on. It’s going viral. And they all print the same thing:

He explains the formula thusly:

Tiger Woods delivered 22,500,000 web and 46,025 news pages, giving ratio of 489. That is the “Tiger Woods Index” (TWI) against which I chose to measure a raft of other issues.

Here are the results:

1. Climategate: 28,400,000 – 2,930 = 9693
2. Afghanistan: 143,000,000 – 154,145 = 928
3. Obama: 202,000,000 – 252,583 = 800
4. Tiger Woods: 22,500,000 – 46,025 = 489
5. Gordon Brown: 12,300,000 – 37,021 = 332
6. Climate change: 22,200,000 – 68,419 = 324
7. Sally Bercow: 25,000 – 86 = 290
8. David Cameron: 545,000 – 4837 = 113
9. Meredith Kercher: 261,000 – 3,471 = 75
10. Chilcot Inquiry: 125,000 – 4,350 = 29

Climategate has received less coverage in the fringe media than Meredith Kercher or the Chilcot Inquiry, of whom/which I’ve never even heard, but I’m sure they’re just fascinating. More surprisingly, Climategate is a bigger story from a consumer standpoint – 20 times over – than Tiger Woods.

Almost all the posts have some comment about how the data has been checked, and how it isn’t hacked, lost, thrown out, modified, managed, or had any “nature tricks” applied to it. Great fun. A bit of Saturday Snark.

And yet, every single one of these guys is DEAD WRONG. They have NOT checked their data, or at least not done any proof reading.

You’ve spotted the error already, yes? Good for you. No? It’s glaring. North developed a RATIO. How many of one thing compared proportionally to how many of another thing. Let me introduce you to some “ultra-advanced” html code (by which I mean it’s as basic as breathing):

AMPERSAND. D. I. V. I. D. E. SEMI-COLON written as “÷”
As in “1. Climategate: 28,400,000 ÷ 2,930 = 9693”

Or for our less advanced blog brethren, SLASH. “/”.
As in “1. Climategate: 28,400,000 / 2,930 = 9693”

Because otherwise it’s subtraction. And that doesn’t give you a ratio at all, just the number that’s left over. And I’m the only person who has noticed. Because I’m a total twit. And also because I have standards. I want my fake-but-accurate to be accurately fake. Not inaccurately fake. That’s sloppy work, which will only get me a job at CRU, when what I’d prefer is one of Tiger’s cast-offs. Well, when she isn’t busy banging actor David Boreanez when his wife is pregnant. Classy! Um, 2nd thought, maybe not ...

Posted by Drew458     on 12/05/2009 at 12:36 PM   
Filed Under: • Celebrities • Climate-Weather • Humor •  
• Comments (4) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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