Popular Delusions and the Madness of De Croud
For someone who doesn’t exist, the putative missionary Anthony De Croud is remarkably popular. I reported on the “Chinese chain letter” at the beginning of the year, after being sent a copy by my niece, who somehow felt obliged to pass it on. I later blogged about Anthony De Croud after I became curious about the origins of this highly successful chain letter.
What has fascinated me is that it is possible to measure the success of the chain letter just by monitoring the traffic to my web site in respect of those two postings. As you can see from the graph below, the traffic pattern is a regular weekly hump that drops off at the weekend.
However, recently I noticed that the spikes of traffic were getting higher for these postings. This began to happen just after the stock market collapsed.
[SinglePic not found]So what I have done is to plot the graph of web traffic (which implies chain letter volume) against the stock market, and as we can see there’s a clear inverse correlation. In case you’ve not read the chain letter, you need to know that it promises you luck if you’ll only pass it on to others. (Unfortunately for me, it promises me no luck whatsoever for merely blogging about the letter – as I have not seen fit to pass it on.)
~ Mark Twain
