Sentiment analysis of media reports about .uk

You know, Nominet have anecdotally stated there's "broad support" for .uk whereas our collective instinct suggests otherwise.

But all of this is very touchy-feely, wishy-washy... so I took a rather more "scientific" approach.

I analysed 185 articles about .uk (the ones I've collected since the first consultation began) and assigned each article a score from 1 (strongly negative) through 3 (neutral/no opinion) to 5 (strongly positive).

I then collated all this data, and found that only 11 articles had anything good to say about .uk (6%).

If you kick out all the "neutral" articles (many of which just quoted bits of the consultation documents with no editorial comment) then just 11 out of the remaining 115 articles were positive (9.5%) while the rest were negative.

I've compiled all the above into a blog post, with a couple of pie charts and a link to the original data, in case anyone wants to check my methodology or dig deeper.

http://www.webmastering.co.uk/domain-names/media-sentiment-analysis-for-the-concept-of-uk-domains/

 

I think that may prove my long held suspicion that silence is support.

 

is silence is support for .uk ?

I do not think silence is support for .uk at all, its apathy, a non-story and in some cases resignation to what some felt was inevitable as Nominet set and control the agenda.

I fear that silence is what Nominet have been angling for in V2.

At the start it looked like there was not going to be the wave of interest in .uk as many at Acorn were happy not to have V1 forced on them and to start with it looked more reasonable. But when it all sinks in, many of the real problems identified in V1 are not solved or addressed by V2.

Little feedback - to Nominet's view must mean they are correct and .uk should go ahead as they propose.

That is why it is important to put feedback into Nominet today or over the weekend before the deadline passes.

The feedback number will only be about 23.5% (my best guess) of what it was for V1, so every response will be vital.

 

You're counting multiple articles from one source (stopped counting at 3 from NominetWatch). I also see articles by bitter ex employees and huge portfolio holders like yourself with financial incentive to say no to the proposals. Then I see the Domainlore blog in there - another person who's business will be wrecked.

Then we've got 'different' domains but its actually just someones opinion that we've already counted (i.e. your post on Performancein).

Even if you hadn't done it in a deliberately misleading way, the numbers were always going to heavily favour the 'no' vote - people are far more likely to write a complaint than a happy post. Nobody is going to blog about looking forward to getting their new domains for free are they?

 

I understand what you are saying but I know Edwin would not deliberately mislead.

I'm sure if anybody told Edwin about any media or blog articles that 100% supported .uk he would include them on his list and adjust his summary.

I have monitored any news stories on "Nominet" and related terms since V1 via Google alert
and have not found any other "for" .uk media / bog or any story that put's a '.uk is good for UK namespace', that are not on Edwin's list!

I would ask if .uk is such a great product, why have the IT and other mainstream media not picked up .uk up as the next great step in the development of the UK internet and the digital economy and hailed nominet as visionaries?