I just helped William Meyers put up: http://www.spring.com/~wmmeyers/ It's got Monday Night Class, Huichol indians, and the Dalai Lama and is linked to the cultures conference on the Spring: http://www.spring.com/yapp-bin/public/browse/cultures/all Some topics: 2 18 Introductions (william) 4 8 saving the world (william) 5 1 Buddhism (william) 6 3 Going South http://www.spring.com/~ssabrina (ssabrina) 7 2 Psychedelic Era (william)

In the business, PC Meter's main notoriety is that it delivers estimates of sites' reach and frequency--two familiar and useful concepts to the ad industry. For example, it is very useful for Yahoo to know that, in PC Meter's latest measurement quarter, 38.5% of the Web audience (as reflected in PC Meter's sampling approach) visited a Yahoo site. That's a huge selling point for Yahoo's ad-sales force, which can claim the most reach of any of the directory/search services. And it's something that Yahoo couldn't otherwise measure itself. The other thing that PC Meter delivers is user demographics for sites. Although most large sites already have info on their users' demographics, PC Meter's data should be more accurate. That's because most sites get their user demos by running optional online surveys, which they rarely validate for representativeness or comparability to other sites' demos. In contrast, PC Meter's business starts with a panel of users that it validates as representative in the first place; it then tracks them across all sites with the same measures. (Or at least that's what they're trying to do. Anytime someone attempts this, questions arise similar to those accompanying Nielsen's TV-ratings measurements.) Independent of whether PC Meter's methodology is better than any given site's internal user measurements, the other angle with PC Meter is that it's a neutral third party. Perception-wise, this factor tends to elevate PC Meter data over that of a site self-reporting its user demographics. As to why PC Meter gets so much ink, it's because they've got a unique, continuing, and more-or-less neutral way to fuel "who's up / who's down" stories.