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Why bloggers can be wrong, wrong, wrong
With all the fuss about Firefox and Browser War 2, Jeremy Zawodny, a blogger who works for Yahoo, puts on the hat of the data analyst and draws some bold conclusions.
In analysing the data about the browsers his visitors use, he breaks about every rule that data analysts hold so dearly.
If anything, the visitor data proves that weblogs readers use Firefox a lot more than the average internet user. That's not a big surprise, given the fact that Firefox users and weblog readers are considered advanced computer users. Who else would bother reading a weblog about search engines?
Although it's tempting, bloggers shouldn't prentend they are something that they really aren't: analysts. They were dead wrong in the recent US presidential elections, claiming certain candidates won states before such claims could be made, nor do they have any credibility in analysing visitor statistics. They shouln't make the same mistake with Firefox.
At the end of his post, Zawodny rhetorically asks: " The real question is this: are the weblog numbers useful as leading indicators for the rest of the popoulation?"
Given the proof he provides, the only anwer to that question is: I don't know.
December 20, 2004 at 08:09 PM | Permalink
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