Why I brought back Tilting Pt1.

First to make something clear. I didn't create Tilting at Lightbulbs. I only brought it back.

You see, the first Tilting at Lightbulbs was a blog dissecting Bengo's own blog, The Floating Lightbulb, pointing out the flaws in his theories. Unfortunately, I only discovered the blog through some cached pages after it's demise.

If you're interested (and why wouldn't you be if you'd bother read my version of this blog?) here are the pages:

Page one, page two, page three, page four, page five and page six.

The Solution has some interesting things to say about our friend Bengo and his articles and I was disappointed that it wasn't still around, even more so considering the change in commenting that The Floating Lightbulb has had recently, so I decided to bring it back.

See, I find it slightly worrying that there are a number of people who don't think that the Lightbulb is effectively the rantings of a biased, jaded individual who does not do any real research.

An interesting recent example of this is his article on declining webcomic readership. In his article, using information from Google Trends, he makes a list of webcomics that have been seeming to lose readers, ones that have been going steady and ones that are in fact gaining readership.

It seems like it could be a good base for starting research, but as he says he doesn't "know where Google gets their data". Okay, it's statistics based on unknown sources, so he looked into other places to see if the statistics matched before posting his article, right?

Wrong.
It's true that he admits he doesn't know the factual accuracy of the data, but he still writes a nice long article based on it, an article that would have been much improved if he'd made some serious attempts to check these statistics against other sites, for example Project Wonderful, who relay public statistics for the sites that chose to host adverts with them. That would have been a start.

Well, no double checking of statistics, but did he check the sites in question to find out what could have caused it. Apparently not, as the first person to comment, a user called amrothery, on the article other than himself pointed out some interesting ideas. I'll repost them here:

"Of course, some strips might have explanations that are even simpler. Dr. McNinja's drop seems to coincide with the switch to full-color updates. Diesel Sweeties looks to start dropping around the time Stevens left newspapers. Achewood's numbers suggest that people who came for the heavily-hyped (and highly praised, at least among a couple forums I frequent) Great Outdoor Fight saw no need to stick around once it was over. This is pure speculation on my part, but Girl Genius's declining numbers may be a result of the update schedule effectively getting cut in half when the last of the old print pages were posted."

So, some of the comics that have shown a decline according to Bengo's Google Trends findings seem to have good reasons to. A comic halving it's output should definitely affect the amount of traffic it receives for example. Now, I'd be interested to know how long it took amrothery to find this out and why it was beyond Bengo, who has in the past referrred to himself as a journalist, to look for this sort of information.

How did Bengo respond to this information? Well, he did respond to the post, but in true Bengo fashion he managed to skillfully avoid any mention of the of the examples above.

He did however have this to say:

"I expect Google gets its data from the same sources the other big analytics companies (like the one Adobe just bought) get it: from ISPs, with help from toolbars and statistical devices. The difference is Google has the might to get more for its money, and probably buys deeper data, or even gets it in exchange for services. But even Google is stingy about buying and storing data for sites that no one will ever check."

He expects they do.
Great journalism there, just great.