Re: [wg-c] .com vs. ccTLDs in Europe

[Dave Crocker <dcrocker@brandenburg.com>]

At 02:04 PM 10/20/1999 , A.M. Rutkowski wrote:
>At 02:27 PM 10/20/99 , Dave Crocker wrote:
>>Asia.  Now, billboard advertisements that cite a .com address are common 
>>in Bangkok, Borneo, Hong Kong, Brussels, London, Milan, ...
>
>Billboard advertisement recollections summed up in the
>word "common," from the travels of a single person to a
>few major cities are generally not regarded as
>authoritative determinations.

1.  Does this mean that other people looking at those billboards would have 
seen something else?

2.  The examples were just that, examples, with Borneo specifically tossed 
in to make clear that the appearance of .com was not isolated to "major" 
population centers.  A briefer and broader summary of my perceptions is 
that I regularly saw and see .com (and .org) references all over Southeast 
Asia and all over Western Europe.  Other than one trip to Israel -- where 
my recollection is that I also saw them -- those have been the areas of my 
travel.  We could, I suppose, spiral down to a debate about the established 
role of billboards in the array of advertising techniques available to 
organizations, and maybe even to the validity of that role in diverse 
cultural environments.  Care to test your knowledge and debating skills in 
the realm of marketing and promotions, Tony?

3.  It is interesting to see such flexible skills in critical analysis of 
statistical techniques.  Fundamentally flawed models are put forward as 
meaningful, whereas an explicitly personal sampling is claimed to have no 
relevance.  A shame that such critical energy is not, instead, applied to 
doing valid analysis in the first place.

>Even if there were some arbitrarily larger number of
>such advertisements, it would most likely reflect the
>advertising campaigns of a few large transnational
>corporations rather than the actual local Internet
>usage.

Nope.  As I have said many times before, these ads are for a very wide 
variety of companies, including small, local one.

That's the trouble with trying to attack information due to essential 
contrariness rather than from a seriously factual basis.

>If you want actual local usage indicators, the domain
>host counts of Mark Lottor and RIPE have long been regarded
>as authoritative.  That tells you the number of machines

Ahh.  Now we are back to accurate, but irrelevant, data.

Too bad that the call for valid methodology is being ignored.

d/

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