During 2008, a nerdy baseball statistician by the name of Nate Silver became a sensation in the world of political analysis because of the success of his blog, www.fivethirtyeight. com. (The name was derived from the total number of electoral votes in the United States.) By the time of the 2008 election, the blog was pulling hundreds of thousands of visitors, rivaling the websites of large metropolitan newspapers in terms of traffic.
Silver was in high demand during the frenzied coverage of the election, appearing frequently on many cable news shows. His reputation was cemented when his model predicted the outcome of the election to within 0.1% point in the popular vote; plus, he called 49 of 50 states correctly.
With the election behind us, the blog has continued with its special breed of predictive modeling, now applied to the upcoming midterm elections.
But the evolution of the blog is what is really interesting.
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