Finding Fault

A famous blogger argues¹ that allegedly bad PR doesn’t pay as well as allegedly good PR.

The proof takes the form of a chart²

showing that a web-based service called Wordnik,³ which supposedly does allegedly bad PR, is getting only limited web traffic, while a different web-based service called Topsy,⁴ which supposedly does allegedly good PR, is getting a high amount of traffic.

Hidden in this argument is an assumption that the Writer never analyzes: That all other factors are essentially similar enough between the two web sites (Wordnik and Topsy) that we can safely conclude that the PR from his blog’s blessing was the major, if not the only, reason why Topsy is getting so much more attention from users.

In other words, he is asserting, in effect, that Wordnik and Topsy are essentially equivalent services differing only in how they do their PR. And from his argument we can conclude that, had Wordnik been the one doing allegedly good PR and Topsy the one doing allegedly bad PR, the results we see would have been essentially reversed.

But has he provided any facts to support his assertion?

None that we can find.

Is he arguing that Wordnik and Topsy perform the same searches?

Not that we can find.

Is he arguing that Wordnik and Topsy perform their respective searches equally well?

Not that we can find.

Is he arguing that Wordnik and Topsy have essentially equivalent funding, so they could invest essentially equivalent resources into their respective services?

Not that we can find.

To us, Topsy looks like a search engine focusing on Twitter, while Wordnik looks more like a dictionary with bonus features. It’s hard to mistake one for the other, if you try a few searches. And neither would replace the other, if you wanted the functionality that each offers.

In our tests, we found that Topsy, which searches Twitter tweets and the web pages they point to, gave us a large number of hits for most searches of words and phrases. But we found that Wordnik gave us useful results for single words but gave us only a few search results from Twitter, and almost nothing else, for phrases. Even though one normally looks up single words, not phrases, in a conventional dictionary, we think Wordnik’s inability to cope with phrases is a bad thing. We also think, but are not sure, that Topsy searches both tweets but the pages they point to, while Wordnik searches only the tweets.

If Wordnik is broken for phrases as we think it is, and limits its Twitter searches to only the tweets themselves, then perhaps this explains why Topsy might be making its users more happier.⁵ Of course, we haven’t done detailed enough research to be sure of the above. But at least we took a look at both services that noticed that they do different things and one of them does certain things quite poorly. Something that the blogger in question didn’t even mention in his comparison.

Not every correlation implies a causation.

In the world of science, when you look for causation, you try to vary only one thing and keep everything else constant.

In the world of blogging, apparently, you just pick the result you want and add some pretty, if blurry, pictures.

We would like to see bloggers come up with better research and better reasoning.

And oh, so long as we are finding fault, we would like to see better naming too. If you tell somebody about Wordnik on the telephone, the other person will more likely type Wordnic (analogous to Internic) or Wordnick.⁶ On the Internet, if they can’t spell your name, you don’t exist.

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