Two Online Social Experiments

1) Garfield minus Garfield. Remove the obnoxious orange cat from the comic strips, and what do you end up with? The tagline says it all, "It is a journey deep into the mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness and depression in a quiet American suburb."

2) You Can't Please Everyone. This website is an aggregation of 1 star-rated comments on albums, books, and movies that are widely considered to be classics. You can see first hand the variance in rating systems. This isn't surprising, because everybody will watch/read/listen in different conditions, and that will have profound impacts on their opinions. The moral is to be wary of small sample sized criticism, because it may not be indicative of larger trends.

(Hat tips to Charlie Hoehn and Ben Casnocha)