Tiger Woods Index

[martindn]

I came across an interesting statistic today.. OK, its only a bit of fun, but it purports to calculate the ratio of public interet in a topic, as against media interest.

It is quite simple to calulate. You go to Google, type in the name of the topic, and note the number of hits. You then search Google for news items about the same topic, and compute the ratio. Thus, a high value of the index shows that the media coverage does not reflect the public interest, a low value that the media is over hyping something the public are not very interested in.

For a benchmark they take the ratio for Tiger Woods, which currently stands at 489.

Some others are

Barack Obama 82
David Cameraon 113
Climate Change 324
Gordon Brown 332
Climategate 9254

The lack of media interest in climategate suggest the media are trying to suppress it we are told.

For fun, I thought I would try it with a few singers:

Leona Lewis 130
Susan Boyle 950
Faryl Smith 2041
Katherine Jenkins 2884
Petula Clark 3754 (just to show the level for someone no longer recording)
Rhydian 4430
Camilla Kerslake 6500
Jonathan Ansell 10187

So what has this to do with Hayley. Well her TWI is a massive 14,088

So Leona Lewis receives approximately 100 times the media hype in relation to her popularity than Hayley. I even put my own name in, and the result was 3,190. So even I get more media hype than Rhydian. Camilla and Hayley, in fact I am four times as popular in the media than Hayley is

Well, that actually isn't the case, since I have several namesakes, many of them better known than me. But it makes you think.

Hayley is even less publicised that Climategate, which most of the media is trying to cover up!

I think we have a lot of work to do!

Martin

[Richard]

[spiderman]

richard, i'll try and translate...
google has 3 basic searches web [www.google.com], images [images.google.com] and news [news.google.com].

what martin is trying to say is that you can calculate a ratio of the number of hits to number of news stories...

a person with more web pages than news pages is more interesting to people than the media.
a person with more news stories than web pages is someone who bores the public but is active in the print media.

i dont agree that not being mentioned in the media implies you [or your event] is being " covered up". as you will see below, hayley is vastly under-represented in the media. noone is trying to coverup her existance. "climategate" likewise.

i have to caveat that with the fact that news.google.com doesnt archive pages, just reflects the number of media references in the current media;

a practical example
hayley has 636000 web hits and 39 news pages= 16308
that implies the public are more interested in her than the media or in english: sell more copies by mentioning hayley.

by comparison, global warming is 10, 900, 000/ 37145= 293.145; which implies global warming is hyped up by the media


is that clearer?

im not really sure how important it is as an index, since i'd find it hard to imagine something that has more news mentions than webpages, partly because news pages are a subset of webpages, and partly cos news pages arent archived

the spiderman

[Steve H]

Hi Spiderman,

Thanks for that explanation, I am now just a little less confused as to what benefit the result means.

Steve H

[roger]

Dec 4, 2009 18:45:13 GMT martindn said:

So what has this to do with Hayley.

Mmm, I was just wondering the same thing!

Roger

[spiderman]

roger, did you come back to us???

as for the TWI [such that it is]... it implies that hayley recieves less attention from the media than she deserves; but what attention she doesn get is more efficently converted to public affection/ attention than some other celebrites/ issues [if you prefer a simple approach, divide her twi by someone elses and claim we love her more ].

of course it could just be a bit of fun [as martin said in the first line of his post] and irrelevant to anything??!!

alternatively, someone could just move this to the "offtopic" section

the spiderman

[roger]

Dec 5, 2009 10:49:21 GMT spiderman said:

roger, did you come back to us???

As a member, yes, but I am not involved in running the show any more.

Dec 5, 2009 10:49:21 GMT spiderman said:

alternatively, someone could just move this to the "offtopic" section

As it does not directly concern Hayley's media coverage, which is the purpose of this board, that sounds like a good idea to me! But then, I'm not running the show any more!

Roger

[martindn]

Hi All,

Sorry I didn't explain this very well, I was in a bit of a hurry when I wrote it, but I think you have worked it out between you.

I put it here because it is an attempt to measure the amount of coverage Hayley gets in the media in relation to her popularity among the public, as against other artists. You can see that Hayley is vastly under represented, but I wasn't trying to imply there was a conspiracy.

Perhaps we and the people around Hayley need to work to try to change that!

Martin

[Martin]

Hi All
I am locking this thread until the Management Team find a more appropriate home for it.

Martin

[martindn]

Yes, I had the same problem making a decision on where to put it in the first place. Since the main thrust as I see it is to highlight Hayleys (lack of) media presence, something that seems not to reflect her obvious popularity whenever I see her perform or talk to people about her, I thought the media board was the right place. But it is a different slant on it I agree, I am not reporting a media appearance so much as decrying her lack of them.
It could almost go in a chart related thread I suppose. But I'll go along with whatever the mods decide.

Martin