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Why Good Data Can Be Hard to Find Online
WSJdpatton writes to mention that Carl Bialik has an interesting look at why good data can be hard to find, much less understand, online. He cites a couple of examples, both Google's first-quarter performance numbers and Alexa's revamp of their number-tracking process. "Now Alexa is incorporating other sources of data -- though it says the prior ranking 'wasn't wrong before, but it was different.' Some sites saw big changes in their rankings following Alexa's move: The tech blog TechCrunch said it fell far from its prior position in Drudge Report territory (rarefied air in Web-traffic terms). On Friday afternoon, Drudge Report ranked 545th, compared with TechCrunch's ranking of 1,784th, according to Alexa's new math."
The article and the slashdot story seem to say the same thing - the numbers produced are just numbers out of a hat. They don't represent anything meaningful and indeed can't because the participants are self-selecting and therefore not a random sample of the population. This is obvious and always has been. The popularity of a site (or a TV show or anything else) cannot be measured by any simple means, if it can be measured at all.
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I read online somewhere that 70% of statistics online are made up. This article seems to prove the point. 4 out of 5 slashdotters agree! ;)
Just observing the Internet and then reading this ... just wow.
Good data is HARD to find ANY FUCKING WHERE, never mind limiting your search to just online. Seriously!
News online? read the same story from 8 sources, form your own opinion. MSM sucks worse.
Scientific data? Well, unless it's peer reviewed, you know it's probably suspect and need to verify it with other data. Damn, even peer reviewed scientific data should be compared to other data these days.
How about Encyclopedic data.. There is wikipedia, but make sure to corroborate the data, right?
Read it in a blog? Check the data before you make up your mind.
Hmmmm this sounds a lot like trying to find good data before the Internets were active. Damn, all that data is proffered up by humans... Humans are not infallible so I'm guessing that data provided by humans is going to be a bit 'not infallible' also.
Where does the assumption that data online should be good data come from? wtf?
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