Statistical Abberation
I’ve been on a hiatus from blogging. Hopefully, loyal readers of Scribkin didn’t miss me too much! The first week after my last post, I tried to stay away from all the tools I have been using to keep up with social media stuff. Basically, what I ended up doing is checking my email a lot and going to web sites that update frequently, like news.com, CNN and Engadget.
The second week, I let myself settle back in to my FriendFeed addiction and ease back in to Greader. I will admit that my new iPhone has been a constant source of distraction during this time as well. First I went crazy downloading free applications from the iTunes store, and then I stumbled across some really excellent games!
Anyway, I did manage to work on something that had been nagging at me for a while. One day a month or so ago, I asked FriendFeed to re-arrange a list of design styles (used in architecture and interior design) from most favorite to least, based on the words themselves. This is what I asked:
As you can see from the link, I got a number of replies, including some mystified folks who wanted to know what I was going to do with the data. In fact, I didn’t really have a plan. But it nagged me that there was some potential to the raw results that could be made into table form. So being bored earlier this week, I copied the comments into a text file, imported that into OpenOffice Calc as a comma-delimited list, and cleaned up the results. Then, I messed around with what sort of graph would give me the trending I was looking for.
I’m no Statbot, so it took me a while to find the right one. And when I did, of course I had to play with the 3D options and fonts until it looked good. Here is the result:
There you go. As you can tell, there is a nice progression for certain styles, Most people loving either modern or ancient styles most, and trending to liking quaint and to a lesser extent gothic and rusting least. Retro and industrial make a solid appearance in the middle. I thought it was interesting that futuristic was so spread out, it seems to affect everyone a little differently.
You might also notice that some terms don’t appear in the 8th or 9th column. That is because not everyone chose all 9 terms. I also left out chocolate since it was only voted for once, and wasn’t actually one of the terms on the list and/or could be considered statistical error. Sorry Bwana.
Update: You can now download the OpenOffice document yourself and generate new charts!