Another part of this week’s assignment is to find two articles, one that represents information well and one that doesn’t do such a great job. After being primed with Huff’s book (How to Lie With Statistics), it is almost effortless to find problems with or at least questions for virtually every article on the web. Capturing some data that doesn’t seem biased or misrepresented in some way seems impossible.
Economist (deceiving) – While the data is interesting in this article, we don’t know who the actual author is, and the chart both focuses imagery and fails to specify the type of average mentioned.
Webmonkey (a little better) – This article is extremely brief, but it does give us the name of the author and some relatively close estimates of the number of APIs offered and API keys issued.
Bloomberg (not bad) – There is a lot of data here with many source details and actual numbers (versus vague percentages) provided.