So far, however, they are *not* allowing my comment, reproduced below:

What’s not addressed here is that this campaign merely follows in the footsteps of local media who, over the last few summers, have trumped up “Cars vs. Bikes: It’s war!” stories that inflamed road passions and ushered in the season’s spate of injuries from car vs. bike road-rage incidents.

This summer, local media were quiet---but WebTrends ably filled the vacuum, as seen in all the rager comments on KATU and oregonlive.

Thanks, WebTrends, for keeping our summer commutes lively. This summer’s blood is on *your* hands.

What price publicity?

Judging from the above, the half-life of this discussion appears to be well less than a week. (Irrelevant side point: it's taken at least the discussion's half life before the emotion cooled a little and rational responses became predominant.) The quickest possible turn-around for advertising on MAX can't be less than a month, so any sort of follow-up through that venue will be untimely, something WebTrends should have realized at the outset.

The question obviously wasn't market-tested. Probably a small bunch of people got together and just came up with something in a brainstorm. There's no visible control question. (Not that you would expect it to be visible ordinarily, but WebTrends has openly discussed other aspects of this experiment.)

The choice of advertising location (only one, apparently?!) and limited means of response assure the responding population will be biased. The choice of response mechanisms provides no mitigation for the responding population bias, nor even any way to know what or how bad such bias is.

The response itself is free-form text. The only way to measure free-form English text is for trained native speakers to carefully read and rate every single response on relevant scales. WebTrends doesn’t appear to be doing this.

The response page was changed mid-way through the experiment.

There have been blog updates, revelation of data sources and preliminary results, and interference from the company itself in those same data sources.

The types of data analysis and method of summarization (a tag cloud... seriously?) are questionable and inconsistent with the sources of that data. For example, WebTrends doesn't have access to know how many unique commenters responded to this website. Even for someone who had access to the logs (i.e. Jonathan Maus), determining uniqueness is difficult. Even an elementary understanding of statistics and scientific method appears to be lacking. I'd say the understanding of marketing and advertising appears pretty weak, too, but those are not my areas of expertise. I could go on...

Obviously, I don’t think any measurements or “metrics” WebTrends gets out of this (or anything else, for that matter) are even worth seeing.

It looks to me like the only story here is a stunning public revelation of incompetence. Given such incompetence, it’s hard for me to imagine any sort of malicious motive, though the charged emotional environment they created is undeniable.

Thanks for the support and the emails.

J

I think what we've attacked is the question itself - its arbitrary, meaningless nature. Since "road taxes" do not exist, asking if a specific group should pay them is like asking if people born in July should pay more for health care.

The even bigger problem is that WbTrnds has asked the question in a way that 1) implies that there is not already a factually established explanation for how roads are funded (which is not the case), and 2) does not actually give anyone a voice or venue for correcting the aforementioned misconception that cyclists are not already paying for roads. For instance, if the Oregonian had gotten some people together to do point-counterpoint in the paper on this issue - an actual "debate" - then even if some people would have hooed and hawed about the question not being valid, at least we would have been able to directly refute it. Instead, WbTrnds simply "stirred the pot" so that everyone would get upset about it, and then sat back and collected their web data so they can give a good report to their investors.

In other words, what we dislike is being exploited.