Thursday, January 12, 2006
Completely Nonscientific Statistics
I decided I would perform a thought experiments and share the results with you.
The idea was that I would try to rank the popularity of various stories posted at the PPMB.
What I would do is very simple: divide the number of viewings of a topic by the number of replies. For example, suppose a story had 10 replies and 250 total viewings. One would rank the story as 250/10 = 25.
There were a few caveats:
1) I would only do the first page of the stories in Creative Writing on PPMB.
2) A story had to get at least one reply (to avoid a division by zero error).
3) There had to be at least 100 viewings of a story (to avoid non-representative stories).
4) Iron Chefs were not counted.
Here were the results. Whether they are an accurate judge of the popularity of
certain stories is hard to say. There is definitely some sort of selection bias, but what it is I leave to smarter minds.
Saving the Spotted Owl: 42.28
Sarcasm at 1600: 37.08
Another Damn New Kid Series: 35.75
Dariarama: 33.3
Daria's Star Wars: The Lawndale Menace: 32.7
Sever: 29.46
Diary Entries: 29.29
Shadow of a Cynic: 27.57
Daria 3059: 25.04
First Summer 7: 24.75
Outcasts from Beyond: 24.64
Daria's Popular: 24.57
Sheep Go To Heaven, Goats Go To Hell: 24.25
Driven Wild 22: 23.08
Falling Into College 42: 22.07
Celebrity Jeopardy: Daria Edition: 16.5
John Lane 14: 12.36
Legion of Lawndale Heroes Reposting: 9.67
It might be interesting to do a recalculation that weights not only the views-to-posts quotient but total posts as well (say total posts squared/views).
And now you know what I did today instead of cleaning the floors.
# posted by James @ 2:44 PM 
