Comscore feeling the heat

One of the great things about the Internet and the blogosphere is the increased pressure on businesses to start showing more transparency in what they do.

Part of the theme of having a conversation with your customers rather than the old "shut up, we know what's best for you" model that has been standard everywhere.

Thanks to the internet, cheap communication, and cheap publishing, people can challenge, do their own research, ask questions, and communicate with others.

No longer do people just sit there passively and accept what's written in a newspaper just because they're a newspaper, or what a doctor tells them just because (s)he's a doctor.

And now, Comscore is starting to feel the heat for a study they made of the top blogs by traffic. Turns out the results look very odd; they exclude lots of important blogs; some blogs are blatantly misranked; other blogs are grouped together in strange ways; and surprise!, it turns out the guy who paid for the study has come out with fantastic rankings. Hmm...

Jason Calacinas, the publisher of Weblogs, Inc is very publicly poking holes in this story, and it's a great thing. Now Comscore, do the right thing, and open up completely to discuss what really happened here.

Anything less means your company's credibility vanishes faster than you can say Arthur Andersen.

Link: Comscore: Show us the data or get out of Dodge.

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