MasterCard's Centers of Commerce Index has been getting a lot of press today (it's London 1, New York 2, just like last year). So I wanted to check it out, and to see just what MasterCard's Michael Goldberg meant, in quantitative terms, when he said that "London towers over other cities not only in narrow financial terms but in a broader sense as well". So I went to the website. Which (a) plays annoying music which can't be turned off, and (b) is a full year out of date.

I don't mean to pick on MasterCard here, necessarily. But pretty much every day I get press releases about some new report or index, and very occasionally the release itself actually contains interesting information which is worth linking to. In my experience about 60% of the time the press release isn't online, and about 90% of the time the referenced report or index isn't online.