If you’re following a Canadian tech entrepreneur or scientist on Twitter, you might be noticing the #stopthemeter hashtag and statements questioning something called the #CRTC. The CRTC is the regulatory body responsible for regulating radio, television, and Internet Service Providers in Canada. On paper, Canada has six or seven major teleco’s. These are divided up by region. Telus and Shaw compete in the West. Rogers and Bell compete in Ontario. Videotron and whoever competes in Quebec. There are regional variants and government monopolies in the smaller provinces. Canada is peppered with duopolies – which are, in effect what economists might call natural monopolies. A complicating factor is that Canada is a massive country with a very dispersed rural population. These[…]

If you’re a web analyst or a data scientist, developer, or otherwise deeply involved with web analytics, you should strongly consider pledging to the Code of Ethics. This Code of Ethics is a social compact. Choices were made in authoring this code. Among the biggest challenges Lovett and Peterson had in steering this through a large group of people was balancing several of them – between specificity and generalization, one set of values and another set of values, and fending off the natural tendency of analysts to enumerate 55,000 technologies and their appropriate uses. It’s something that is relatively easy to internalize and has a timeless quality. Anything that is worth pledging has to stand for something. It doesn’t bind[…]

The space is tremendously fragmented because social itself if fragmented, unstructured, and ill behaved. Broadly, there’s ‘listening’, which has its origins in the PR space, and then there’s marketing performance, which has its origins in the analytics space. Although there are nearly 250 (+) ‘listening’ companies out there, none of them will have a solution that fits your unique set of circumstances, biases, and needs. You are simply not a PR person. Web analysts entering into social should be prepared to confront fragmentation and complexity on a level that they have yet to experience. If you work in an enterprise with more than 150 people, you will rapidly reach a stage where you will not be able to keep pace[…]

ETL stands for Extract, Transform and Load. They’re the three vital steps most analysts do before Analyze, Investigate and Storytell. Most of the time, the ET’ing is done for us. You log into a tool and hit export. The Loading part, getting the data into a format where it can be statistically analyzed or presented in a culturally acceptable way, is longer. And it’s where we spend too much time. But not today. I’m unpacking a tricky T problem. In an attempt to fully automate an algorithm further and unlock an area of possibility, involves a tricky operation of flattening lists of lists of lists, which, sadly for me, are also composed of lists. It’s tricky. There are functions that[…]

An insight is: New information Executable Causes action Profit results With that piece of jargon unpacked, the next one is ‘convenient reasoning’. Convenient reasoning is: An existing heuristic, hunch, feeling, belief, or instinct The seeking of validation or evidence Evidence to the contrary or modifying the position will be rejected Convenient reasoning differs from a hypothesis. A hypothesis is rejected if it’s proven wrong. No amount of evidence to the contrary will ever deter a convenient reasoner. Building cases in support of a project, plan, or prospect is an incredibly important skill. Rallying persuasive evidence is a key part of that. A whole industry was built around the provision of convenient facts. It’s an essential skill. Perhaps there would be[…]