“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.”

What is sad is that fundamentally flawed statistics and graphs like this one are constantly used in politics / policymaking.

There seems to be this idea that everything is a zero-sum game, something must always win, something must always be killed.

It’s simply poor journalism trolling for pageviews.

The iPhone doesn’t need to be killed, Google doesn’t need to be killed, Facebook doesn’t need to be killed. What is needed is open, fair competition with lots of competitive choices, which isn’t the kind of story lazy journalists like to write.

But I’ll give you my case as an example. Not an avid reader of Wired, but once in a long while I check you up. Had a neutral view of your brand and product. I remember reading some interesting things in here. If I had to push my somewhat faint impression of Wired, I’d say that your articles typically don’t strain my intelligence, but sometimes, they are mildly interesting.

I came here through Daring Fireball today. Read a couple of articles panning this article, and another putting it into a context of past disgraces similar to this one (which I wasn’t aware).

So, great. You got me to come to this page three times today. But, in my case at least, your brand is shot. Hard to recover from that. Really hard. Chances I’ll visit Wired in the future instantly halved at least.

That’s a really bad deal for you.

PS: By the way, the same self-destructive mechanism of short-term gain build upon pooping on your own brand is really prevalent in most media. Sad.

you are so mean. poor wired. their artwork was nice, too. and it had less whitespace!

.~.

The web didn’t bring images. The web brought a simpler interface, so less technically skilled people could get online. Sadly the interface is SO simple that the stupid people got online too… I kid, I kid! We’re all stupid.

My captcha is “Colleen’s theStank”. Wtf?

Breaking out video as somehow seperate from the WWW is just stupid. youtube has a www at the beginning. where is this land of online video that I don’t access through a www. Netflix on my xbox?

we were never accessing the www on our TV’s or while sitting on the toilet, so the fact that direct to TV services and mobile now have a market isn’t a loss for the interwebs, its a loss for broadcast TV and magazines.

I would love to see any type of data you have to back up your claims.

So – what about making the vertical scale a “per web user”? Even while bandwidth has been exploding, it isn’t just driven by the change in usage, but the change in the number of users.

Looking at the shift in both volume and use on a per-user basis would be interesting. I think we might see that email creeps *up* slowly, while video expands.

I’m also curious how we measure “email”, when a huge chunk of Hotmail/Yahoo/Gmail is “web”.

Furthermore, if you had to rank or value every single bit (say, if you were still on dialup), do you think videos, per byte, would end up anywhere close to the top of the rankings? Sure, some would, but I’d like to think I’m correct in assuming that the vast majority of video on the internet is crap – although that doesn’t mean that a similar proportion of the video *consumed* from the internet is also crap (Though I’m sure 4chan has skewed that statistic forever for numerous cases – then again, someone’s getting a kick out of rickrolling people – there’s value in that too, I think..).

This should account for more than 70% of internet-traffic at any time.

I have a request though. Maybe I am lazy or just ignorant, but after browsing for some minutes I couldn’t find the numbers. Could you provide a direct link to the source data from which you (and Wired) draw the graphs? I like to check (and play with) the numbers behind graphs on my own. Many thanks.