Following a recent announcement from WebSideStory, a company that does web analytics, which expressed that Firefox's adoption rate has slowed somewhat, there have been a rash of news articles on the topic. Basically, this company released stats that suggested that after the initial excitement behind the one-point-oh launch a few months ago people are still downloading the browser, but at a slower rate. That's hardly surprising as you wouldn't expect the huge hype to continue unabated for too long.

However, the interpretation of these findings in the press titles has been remarkable. If you look at the Google News results on the story you get everything from "Explorer douses Firefox flames" to "Mozilla gains on Microsoft" to "Firefox Flame Burning Low" to the sane "Firefox Usage Up, But Slowing". It's indeed incredible how fairly simple data can be manipulated to make a dramatic or entirely misleading statement. This might sound a little bit naive, but when something like this happens in a subject area you're relatively familiar with it just makes you wonder what's being manipulated in areas with which you're less familiar. Another sign of the Dark Age Ahead?