This morning on CNBC we were arguing about the blame to be accorded web traffic service Comscore in investors collectively leaning the wrong way on Google's earnings last night. After all, Comscore had tipped paid-click growth declining to 2%, which would have smoked Google's results on the quarter, but didn't happen. Instead, U.S. paid clicks fell to something like 9%.

I scoffed at that performance, suggesting that Comscore plain whiffed here. An analyst against whom I was put on-air said that we should go easier on Comscore, after all it was "directionally correct".

Directionally correct? Directionally correct? An undergraduate economist emerging from decade-long stasis an hour before the Google earnings call could have told you that a slowing U.S. economy would cause some slowing in paid clicks. Letting Comscore off the hook for being way, way off about U.S. paid clicks but being "directionally correct" is a joke, like getting busted for speeding in a school zone, and saying you might be over the limit, but at you had slowed down and were "directionally correct".

Anyone think of other great moments in the history of being "directionally correct"? I'm thinking of explorer La Salle landing in Texas instead of the Mississippi delta, or maybe when he sailed from there aiming for Canada, got lost, ended up back in Gulf of Mexico, and his crew murdered him. That sort of thing.

Emptying my burgeoning browser tabs:

• Did banks manipulate banking Libor index? (Marketplace)
• How cellphones are changing the third world (New York Times)
• U.S. patent chief says applications are way up, but quality is way down (EETimes)
• 10 Cleantech Deals from Quiet Quercus (Earth2Tech)

Couple more things worth reading:

• Frontiers of real-time data analysis (FRB of Philadelphia)
• Resolving the U.S. trade balance via the U.S. dollar (NBER/Feldstein)

Fascinating data out from iSuppli on iPhone usage compared to the average phone for typical tasks. Some eye-opening differences:

The big differences? Internet use -- no surprise -- and music use, where iPhone is used much more often than other devices. On the other side, hard not to wonder if people aren't noticing that the iPhone, is you know, a phone. (I'm kidding, of course -- these are percentages, not actual time allocations, but the differences are striking.)

I normally disregard these "Are you better off now than you were X years/months/minutes/seconds ago"? surveys. They are usually selective, small sample, tough to generalize, etc.

But that said, this Pew summary of 40 years of such surveys among the middle-class in America is remarkable:

We are at a 40-year low, with most of the emotional carnage having happened in the last six months. That is the sharpest decline in the poll's history.

So, are you better off than five years ago? Worse? Other? Indifferent? Bemused? Do tell.