ARTS & FARCES internet

Take a look at this bar chart from the New York Times purporting to show the percentage of interest-only mortgagtes in the US. What’s wrong with this picture is that the ‘05 number, pegged at what appears to be 23%, represents only the first quarter of the year compared to the other bars that represent total years. The New York Times is woefully misleading when it says, “fewer people are turning to riskier interest-only mortgages, which do not reduce a loan’s principal.” That’s not at all what this graphic indicates, and since the Q2 2005 numbers won’t be released until 1 September, there’s no way anyone—including the New York Times—can make such a statement.

To be accurate, the Times should have compared first quarters of the five years it’s reporting on.

This is exactly the kind of chart junk that Edward Tufte has been warning us about for more than two decades. The New York Times should be ashamed of itself.

But the Times is in crowded company. This morning coming out of the shower I heard a gas-bag pundit on CNN—on a program sponsored by a mortgage company, of course—railing about how “the real estate market always comes back; real estate is an appreciating asset.” Stock brokers are required to disclose that past performance is not a guarantee of future results. Why not real estate brokers?

Here in Minnesota we refer to something called “Minnesota-nice.” Rather than contradict an individual’s statements, a Minnesotan (male or female) will usually declare the statement as “interesting.” Seldom does one even hear the admirable follow-up, “On the other hand….” The idea is just declared as “interesting.” And if the respondent is asked in what way the idea is interesting, it’s then perceived as a “challenge.”

Well, someone should educate those poor Baghdad Shiites that there are simply more polite ways to dispute political elections than to go barging in to an office-holder’s building and simply “installing” a new mayor, as reported in the New York Times. The act betrays a failure to understand that if one wants to “install” a new office-holder, it’s much “nicer” to have a Supreme Court in place that happens to be in agreement with your ideas. At least this way, one avoids all appearances of a coup, and besides, it’s less expensive.

comScore Media Metrix has released its “Behaviors of the Blogosphere” marketing study sponsored by SixApart and Gawker Media, two of the largest players with skin in this particular game. Surveying more than 1.5 million US internet users at 400 individual domains, comScore found:

• 50 million US internet users—fully 30% of all US internet users—visited weblogs in Q1 2005
• Five hosting services had more than 5 million unique visitors in Q1 2005; four individual publications each had more than 1 million visitors
• Political blogs were the most popular (43% visitor share), followed by “hipster” lifestyle blogs (17%), tech blogs (15%), female-author blogs (8%), media blogs (8%), personal blogs (6%), and business blogs(3%)
• Weblog readers live in wealthier households than average internet users, visit almost twice as many web pages, are much more likely to shop online, and are more likely to have broadband connections

The survey indicates that some of the publications with the most unique users do not have loyal audiences. freerepublic.com, for example, had more than 3.6 million unique visitors in Q1 2005, but those users visited an average of only 1.6 times during the quarter. Some publications have smaller, but more loyal audiences. boingboing.net, for example, had 849,000 unique visitors during the quarter but they visited more than 1.2 million times.

Weblog readers are disproportionately likely to be affluent (11% more likely than average internet users to have incomes of US$75,000 or more) and young (30% more likely than average internet users to live in households where the head of household is 18 - 34). A whopping 41% of blog readers had annual household incomes of US$75,000 or more.

We don’t need another top-100 list based on link rank, writes Mary Hodder in her Napsterization weblog. Instead, we need a metric for identity, affiliation, community, or influence. Instead of measuring the number of links or connections, we should be measuring the “depth and impact of those connections… and… engagement over time.”

Counting links, Hodder writes, is like counting magazine subscriptions to sell ads; an artifact of the analog mediasphere:

“Link counts alone are an analog media model, but online media is dynamic, and what is digital often has the possibility of getting much closer to finding smaller, more granular, and more interesting ways of perceiving things, that are much more interesting, and orthogonal to legacy media models counting eyeballs.”

Google’s pagerank algorithm, after all, while not secret is opaque because the ordering of the search results is secret, supposedly as a defense against spam and gaming the search engine. But a transparent metric would allow the micropublishers to help police the system. “Transparency as it exists in open source software, and as it should exist here, is the opposite of security by obscurity.”

Breaches of personal information on the massive scale seen in the US never happen in Europe because “every other Western country has a comprehensive set of national privacy laws and an office of data protection, led by a privacy commissioner.” So writes Eric Dash for this morning’s New York Times. Quite simply, it’s illegal in the EU for personal information to be used for any purpose other than that for which it was originally collected.

Dash notes a fundamental cultural divide over the concept of privacy itself:

“In broad terms, the United States looks at privacy largely as a consumer and an economic issue; in the rest of the developed world, it is regarded as a fundamental right.”

And therein lies our problem here in the US. Here, the only time personal information is protected is when it’s either beneficial or expedient for commercial enterprises to do so. Dash uses the example of the US telecommunications industry. In the mid-1990s, the national telephone companies sided with privacy advocates because it was in the telco’s best interest to keep phone and billing information from their regional carrier competitors. A decade earlier, France kept phone records private not out of commercial concerns but out of a basic respect for individual privacy rights.