Give the free-credit-score reporting Web site Credit Karma some credit for nifty public relations. The San Francisco-based site -- which really is free, if you have the courage to type your Social Security number into an online form -- crunched its own database of 20,000 credit reports, cross-referenced them with e-mail domains, and popped out a neat chart that tells us, among other things, that yahoo.com e-mail addresses are associated with the worst credit scores, especially in comparison with gmail.com addresses.
Mashable picks up the Credit Karma link and Gizmodo picks up the Mashable link and before you know it, Salon bloggers are checking out their own credit scores via Credit Karma while wondering why AOL users have better credit than Yahoo users.
Is it because AOL users are your grandmother and grandfather who signed up 10 years ago and never even looked at another e-mail provider? Or because Yahoo is the fly-by-night free e-mail provider of choice? Does this prove that Gmail users are the elite when it comes to free e-mail? And why does Bell South reign supreme?
All Credit Karma will divulge is that the answers have to do with differences in regional and age demographics associated with the various e-mail addresses. But my guess is that not too long from now, they'll have a much bigger database to crunch.
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