News You Can Bruise for 2004 May 25 (entry 2)

(2) Tue May 25 2004 18:09 PST Give Me A Graph With Hair: I redid my graph to do a side-by-side comparison of Yahoo's and Google's allegations as to the relative popularity of Creative Commons licenses (and to get rid of a license which I somehow had in there twice).

The two engines give pretty similar pictures, except that Yahoo says public domain usage and the "Attribution" license are much less popular. Note the following:

• Every Attribution license is more popular than every non-Attribution license.
• The non-Attribution licenses are popular in approximately the same order as the Attribution licenses. The exception is the ingeniously perverse "Sharealike" license, which is sort of like a viral public domain.
• Yahoo and Google agree that the the top 4 licenses have about 84% market share, and that the top 5 have over 90% market share.

Comments:

Posted by Jarno Virtanen at Wed May 26 2004 00:20

If Edward Tufte were dead, he would turn in his grave because of your pie charts! Really, although pie charts look nice, they don't quite fit for their purpose.

I have absolutely nothing to say about licenses, though!

Posted by Leonard at Wed May 26 2004 00:47

I actually think pie charts are useful for my problem, because they let me visualize the problem as "how many of the wedges of the chart do I have to accept as radio button options before I've taken care of the vast majority of cases?"

Anyhow, I think this is all the pie charts I will do for a while. :)