It looks obvious

“Things should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” — Albert Einstein

Interesting numbers, so?

Comments

The Club of Growth links to site that provides an index of the Internet activity of each of the Presidential candidate:

The Spartan Internet Political Performance (SIPP) Index is the first quantitative metric to measure the Internet-wide performance of each Presidential candidate for the 2008 election. The Index is comprised of over 650 quantitative factors measuring the level of support and how well each candidate is connecting with individuals across the Internet.
The score for each candidate represents their overall Internet market share.

The site provides plenty of graphs and different views based on, I assume, sophisticated algorithm that shows online activity, trends and other factor. Visitor of this site can dissect the data in many ways and have plenty of different views. However the index is lacking one simple factor - how these numbers correlate to the general population. Because, if the intention is to build a useful tool, the only use of such index should be its ability to help predicting the elections results. Simply put, if the index cannot demonstrate some correlation to the election and provides some predicting usefulness for the actual results - it is a meaningless index.

 

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Written by Rogel

August 28th, 2007 at 12:49 pm

Posted in 2008 campaign

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    I believe that this study can be used not as a predictive tool, but rather as a benchmarking tool. If you look at traditional polls, especially those online, you have to take into account the fact that people think and vote differently when they are sitting in the comfort of their own homes. It is still unknown how much an aggressive online campaign can actually affect the turnout of an election for a particular candidate.

    The company also acknowledges this fact, they don't try to claim that these scores will tell us the outcome of the election. Rather, it "counts the number of digital bumper stickers and yard signs." I find it very intriguing, but that is only my opinion.
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    I'm might be wrong here but the numbers should represent something. If the only intention, the entire goal of this exercise, is to count bumper stickers for the sake of counting bumper stickers than it is rather useless - isn't it? And if it is a benchmark, than what is it measuring?<div>For me numbers are intriguing if they tell me some story, but this is only me :)</div>

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