2009-06-28
post/131806751
Richard Rutter, commenting on the Best Daily Mail poll ever, one of Simon Willison’s images on Flickr, and the fact the Mail withdrew a gamed online poll.
Well, it now looks like there is an analogue at the Guardian; their page asking “is it time to return the Parthenon Marbles” is currently running 95% in favour. I also note it’s “most read” on the site, and a quick use of bit.ly finds posts like this on Twitter.
I doubt the Guardian will take this down, but I would love to know if the data is recorded with a guess as the location of a voter, whether there’s evidence of a surge of Greek (and other) voters visiting the poll and leaving the site, and the answer to similar questions. (I realise that there are good reasons we can’t have such data, but it can’t hurt to wonder.)
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Economist’s leader is also one of its most commented-on articles at the moment. (I liked their coverage of the museum, by the way.)
Two last points: firstly, the URL has the phrase “Elgin marbles” while the page’s title uses “Parthenon Marbles”. As names matter, this is an interesting disparity. Secondly, when I tried to post this as a comment on Flickr, it labelled one of the URLs I’ve referred to as “used for abuse”. Hmmm.
