<table> </table> I&#8217;ve heard from several people recently who&#8217;ve had trouble navigating to <em>The Kansas City Star&#8217;s </em>Midwest Voices blog. Refers with many Opinion section columns promote voices.kansascity.com as a place for readers to share their thoughts.</p><p>One confusion: Some users added &#8220;www.&#8221; to the beginning of the address &#8212; creating a URL that doesn&#8217;t exist.</p><p>The address usually comes at the end of a sentence, which is often punctuated with a terminal period. Another problem comes when some people type that dot as part of the address, which also creates a nonexistent Web address.</p><p>My preference is that sentences ending with any Web address should simply omit the final period. Similarly, when addresses are too long for a single line, they should break to the next without a hyphen. Avoiding confusion is more important than the rules of punctuation.</p><p><strong><span class="subhead">Researching readership</span></strong></p><p>Last week, a reader asked about the negative feedback on the new FYI Weekend/Preview that I wrote about in my last column:</p><p>&#8220;Why would <em>The Star </em>stick with something that&#8217;s so widely disliked?&#8221; he wondered.</p><p>That brings up two major points:</p><p>1. All readers&#8217; representatives/ombudsmen/public editors hear vastly more complaints than compliments. That&#8217;s just the nature of the job &#8212; and it&#8217;s implicit in the solicitation for comment.</p><p>2. Most importantly, solicited feedback like this is the polar opposite of scientifically valid research. The people who contact me are called a &#8220;self-selected cohort.&#8221; Real research demands a group of respondents chosen randomly.</p><p>In the case of the FYI/Preview combo, I&#8217;ve had some more negative feedback since that last column &#8212; but I&#8217;ve also had some readers saying that they do like it.</p><p>&#8220;I really did enjoy it,&#8221; said a caller last week. &#8220;And I didn&#8217;t have any problems finding anything in it. I don&#8217;t know why people didn&#8217;t like it.&#8221;</p><p>By the way, I hear one retort all the time when I mention that <em>The Star </em>conducts polls of its readers through MORI Research: &#8220;Well, nobody called me with a survey.&#8221; That&#8217;s certainly true for most people.</p><p><em>The Star&#8217;s </em>readership is over a million people every week, and all those people obviously aren&#8217;t all surveyed individually. Instead, a representative group is studied, and the results extrapolated.</p><p>I know there are lots of critics to this kind of research, but MORI&#8217;s results tend to be extremely consistent from year to year, even though it surveys completely different people every time.</p><p>To professional researchers, that&#8217;s considered a very good indication that the numbers are valid and give a picture of the wider public&#8217;s opinion.