It’s almost funny, how Bain Capital shows up in this (from
this morning’s New York Times):
The announcement on Monday that the
Weather Channel Companies, owners of television’s Weather Channel and
weather.com, would buy one of its rivals, Weather Underground, set off howls of
displeasure on social media platforms and around water coolers across the
nation. The purchase price was not disclosed.
In the eyes of Weather
Underground’s ardent fans, the Weather Channel appears to represent the wrong
kind of weather information: personality-driven sunniness and hype, they say,
rather than the pure science of data. As Mike Tucker, a computer professional
in New Hampshire, put it on Facebook, reacting to news of the deal:
“Nooooooooooooooooo! Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!”
The controversy illustrates the
deep national divide between those people who just want to know if it’s going
to rain, and people who really, really, care about the data underlying the
weather. Christopher Maxwell, a manager at a solar energy company in Richmond,
Va., is in the really-really-cares-about-the-weather camp. He said he saw the
Weather Channel deal as a sad sellout for Weather Underground.
“It seems to happen all the time,” he said. “Something great gets
invented and sold in the United States, and it gets bought up and destroyed.”
Weather Underground was founded in
1995 in Ann Arbor, where it grew out of the University of Michigan’s online
weather database. The name was a winking reference to the radical group that
also had its roots in Ann Arbor. Mr. Maxwell said he appreciated Weather
Underground’s fanatical devotion to data, and how it drew information from so
many thousands of weather stations run by users that he is able to determine
“microclimates” of variation that can prove important in getting the most out
of a new solar installation.
In other words, as he put it on
Facebook, “I liked that Wunderground was indy and for weather geeks and not so
much ‘normies.’ ”
For Mr. Tucker, the
“Nooooooooooooooooo!” response was a reaction to what he sees as the Weather
Channel’s penchant for the commercialization of weather. In a telephone
interview, he said: “I’m looking at the site right now, and it’s laden with
ads, and promotional things for their shows. I don’t really care about all that
stuff. I only care what the weather is.”
Mr. Tucker called the Weather
Underground site “simple and somewhat elegant” by comparison.
Paul Baginski, a visiting assistant
professor of mathematics at Smith College, said that when he assigned his
students to run their hometown temperature data through a series of calculus
functions, he pointed them toward Weather Underground instead of Weather.com
because it was so much easier to track down historical data on the independent
site. “It seemed with every update to their Web site, weather.com added another
obstacle” with advertisements and extra tabs and clicks, he said.
Weather Underground’s devotion to
weather data has brought the site about 10 million unique visitors a month,
according to the measurement firm ComScore, and has helped it to remain an
independent company for the better part of two decades. A similar site,
WeatherBug, draws 21 million visitors a month. (WeatherBug is owned by Earth
Networks.)
Both sites, however, are dwarfed by
Weather.com and the other properties owned by the Weather Channel, which is
owned by a consortium that includes Comcast, Bain Capital and the Blackstone Group.
[Update 13 July 2012] Romney's shell-game:
http://articles.boston.com/2012-07-12/politics/32633322_1_bain-capital-mitt-romney-financial-disclosure
Mitt Romney, Pirate of the Caribbean:
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/2012/08/investigating-mitt-romney-offshore-accounts
[Sunday, 28 October 2012] FLASH UPDATE!!!
Tired of wimpy
limp-wristed weather coverage?
Switch to Dr J’s
Frankenstorm Central ©
for all the
weather-terror U can handle !!
No comments:
Post a Comment