[WEB4LIB] Nielsen Netratings in the library

[Walt_Crawford at notes.rlg.org]

Offhandedly, I'm going to say that neither the threat nor the promise
amount to much...for the same reason.

Are you aware of the people who provide the source material for Nielsen TV
ratings? Of course not: if you (and TV networks) were, their credibility
would be ruined. Ditto the Net ratings. These ratings only work if (a) the
sample being monitored is statistically representative, (b) the sample
being monitored is _anonymous to those being rated_ so as to be free of
influence.

It would wreck Nielsen's credibility to make any identification of
individual monitored machines available to anybody. That means that privacy
should not be much of an issue--but it also means that there's no plausible
way that your institution can get "credit" for "research."

Only my opinion, but based on some background as to how ratings services
_must_ work in order to maintain credibility.

-walt crawford-
[Portion of original message]
>Nielsen Netratings (same as the TV ratings people, now they've gone over
to
>rating web sites) has talked to one of the faculty here about putting
their
>monitoring software on the library's public use computers. This software
would
>(ostensibly) would send information back to Nielsen for their use in
determining
>what websites are the most popular.

>The faculty member is mostly interested because our students, faculty and
>staff do "research" (online searches using Ovid, PubMed or MDConsult) at
our
>computers, and that our institution might indirectly get some sort of
public
>recognition (e.g it might be easier to get grant funding)  if Nielsen
finds out how
>much "research" goes on at our machines.