The following chart, kindly supplied by Bill Tancer from www.hitwise.com, documents Freakonomics' share of the web traffic from the millions of internet users that Hitwise tracks (and for fun, Bill Bennett's too):
Last week was the highest activity we have seen to date. Many things happened last week: GMA, Bennett, World News Tonight, and a big ad that ran in USA Today. It is not completely obvious which factor was most important. Probably Good Morning America and Bennett.
That first spike in late April is from the Daily Show. The spike in mid-to-late May is from the Today show.|||112884362986696427|||What makes people search for Freakonomics on the web?
As far as I can tell he is still making the same arguments I dispatched in 1999 on Slate, and again in this blog in May. If you are interested in what I had to say then, here is a link to my earlier post. (I can't tell whether every single comment about Sailer is actually posted by him, or maybe there are one or two other people who might have some interest in the subject).
Dubner and I value the free and open discussion that comes with anonymous comments, but at times it has a cost. Once before we had thought seriously about banning anonymous posts, but then our dear Deb Frisch grew kinder and the change didn't seem necessary. We are open to what people have to say about moving towards a system in which one must be registered to make comments.|||112884223211516955|||The downside of blogs
I particularly like this quote (especially the last sentence):
The Ivy League schools justified their emphasis on character and personality, however, by arguing that they were searching for the students who would have the greatest success after college. They were looking for leaders, and leadership, the officials of the Ivy League believed, was not a simple matter of academic brilliance. “Should our goal be to select a student body with the highest possible proportions of high-ranking students, or should it be to select, within a reasonably high range of academic ability, a student body with a certain variety of talents, qualities, attitudes, and backgrounds?” Wilbur Bender asked. To him, the answer was obvious. If you let in only the brilliant, then you produced bookworms and bench scientists: you ended up as socially irrelevant as the University of Chicago (an institution Harvard officials looked upon and shuddered).|||112866031951983121|||Gladwell on the Ivy League