Barrel Strength

http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2009/12/tiger-woods-index.html

The method used divided webpage lookups by media articles, or pages.  (The author is British).

“Using the TWI (Tiger Woods Index) as a comparator, the public in general are more interested in “Climategate” than Tiger Woods, by a factor of nearly 20 times.

“Applying the “ratio analysis” (doesn’t that sound grand!) to ten current issues, including the two already mentioned, an arbitrary list emerged, ranked by importance to the general public, against media interest. This is as follows:

1. Climategate: 28,400,000 – 2,930 = 9693
2. Afghanistan: 143,000,000 – 154,145 = 928
3. Obama: 202,000,000 – 252,583 = 800
4. Tiger Woods: 22,500,000 – 46,025 = 489
5. Gordon Brown: 12,300,000 – 37,021 = 332
6. Climate change: 22,200,000 – 68,419 = 324
7. Sally Bercow: 25,000 – 86 = 290
8. David Cameron: 545,000 – 4837 = 113
9. Meredith Kercher: 261,000 – 3,471 = 75
10. Chilcot Inquiry: 125,000 – 4,350 = 29

The author says that a statistician might fault him but that, unlike Micahel Mann, his methods and date are open to public insepction.

The method allows for infinite expansion. It allows for a possibly consistent measure of public interest versus newspaper (media) interest. More work needs to be done on this, because it is a simple measure of the frequent gap between popular interest in a topic and the newspaper’s interest.