Numbers Game

Academic conferences about Internet culture often have representatives from BigChampagne, the source of online metrics that are of interest to the entertainment industry and to academics alike. As Eric Garland pointed out, they have a policy of working with researchers to share resources from their tools for peer-to-peer measurement. I was certainly interested in some of the charts he showed, many of which had political connections -- such as stats on the Yes We Can video created to promote the Barack Obama's presidential bid or on the final Sopranos episode, which was parodied by Hillary Clinton's campaign on YouTube, and the ways that downloading and uploading could be quantified as the debates about digital copyright policies continues. But when he pointed out the fact that Yahoo Live had made it's debut, I'll confess that my attention was diverted while I watched DJs, cans of spam, lava lamps, shirtless men, and Asian women during much of his talk.