The Economist Style Guide is a good reference for communicating insights. It’s the easiest style guide for our industry. A few favourite highlights: “Short words Use them. They are often Anglo-Saxon rather than Latin in origin. They are easy to spell and easy to understand. Thus prefer about to approximately, after to following, let to permit, but to however, use to utilise, make to manufacture, plant to facility, take part to participate, set up to establish, enough to sufficient, show to demonstrate and so on. Underdeveloped countries are often better described as poor. Substantive often means real or big. “Short words are best and the old words when short are best of all.” (Winston Churchill)“ “Active, not passive Be direct.[…]
Author: Christopher Berry
There’s been a some talk about education bubbles as of late. Some of the evidence is compelling. A Frontline documentary on the quality and liability of for-profit post secondary education for instance. A general lamentation of the volume and cost of MBA’s being produced. And, many gripes about the affordability / accessibility of post secondary education in the US and Canada. When demand exceeds supply, the price for that supply rises. There’s a period of lag between demand shocks and supply responses. Frequently, suppliers either overestimate demand shocks, or, more likely, increases in supply follow a step function, which in turn eventually causes a price collapse. It’s this dance between supply and demand that generates the pseudo-random price of a[…]
For thirty minutes Monday night, when a federal statute prevented me from accessing information I wanted, I raged. Then I had empathy. There was an election in Canada. The federal statute is an Elections Canada law that prohibits anybody from transmitting results to regions of the country where the polls are still open. That includes all broadcasters and applies to online. For 30 minutes, between 9:30pm EST, when the polls closed in Ontario, and 10:00pm EST, when the polls finally closed in BC, I relied solely on twitter and a dashboard on CBC TV. It was horrible. That screencap shows a dashboard, populated with data from later on in the evening. You could see the seat totals for parliament, and[…]
eMetrics Toronto 2011 was excellent. A huge thank you and congratulations to Andrea Hadley, Jim Sterne, my colleagues on the advisory committee, Syncapse for putting on a great Web Analytics Wednesday, and the Rising Media team for putting it on and pulling it off. Many points of view were generated and shared. The top five that generate the very most interesting questions (for me) are: 5. Laura Callow delivered a convincing arguement in favor of testing regardless of much traffic a given site or page is doing. Traffic will eventually accumulate for significance. She also presented the relationship (dare I say correlation?) between page load time and conversion on site, and, in a delightful twist, linked it page tagging and[…]
eMetrics is this week in Toronto and I’m pretty excited! 8. Come out on Wednesday night to catch a panel with Jim Sterne and Mark Dykeman on Convergence and the State of Audience Measurement. Mark deals with radio, tv, social, and web analytics in his role at the CBC, and you’ll learn a few of his secrets for dealing with media. 7. Corner Stephane Hamel at the eMetrics meet and greet that Wednesday night. Ask him about W.A.S.P., and then turn around and ask me how I use the product! 6. On Thursday, during the first break, visit Jim Novo at the WAA desk, and ask him three questions about analytics, certification, and professionalization. 5. Attend Stephane Hamel’s Web Analytics[…]
I learned a lot from the discussions with many of you. Here are my proposed answers. 1. What is a valid model for monetizing a web page, regardless of whether monetary transactions are possible? Yes. There are two conservative paradigms and multiple progressive ones. The most conservative one is to assign a monetary value to the conversion event, and then attribute the monetary value back through the tree using a decay curve. This method would automatically consider abandonment rates and discount those pages accordingly. The other conservative way is to assign a monetary value to each page based on paid media received or valued. A progressive way is to examine how much content upon each page is copied and shared.[…]
19. iReddit: Good usability with in-browser support. Sit back on the couch and watch the world burn. 18. BBC News App: Excellent usability and good content refresh rate. No paywalls and full access. An excellent experience all around. 17. Exoplanet: Continuously updated with the latest exoplanet discoveries. Excellent data visualization and navigability. 16. Twitter: The official app is usable and more convenient than the web. 15. Wikipanion: Of all the Wikipedia apps, the most basic one is the most usable and detailed. I used to use Discover for the longest time, but ultimately stopped because of a lack in detail. 14. Kindle: All my amazon books in one place. Convenient and a huge depth. I tried Kobo, but couldn’t get[…]
Al Franken has asked nine very important questions to Apple, in light of the recent discovery that Apple iphones and iPads record your location and store the information in an unencrypted format. “These developments raise several questions: Why does Apple collect and compile this location data? Why did Apple choose to initiate tracking this data in its iOS 4 operating system? Does Apple collect and compile this location data for laptops? How is this data generated? (GPS, cell tower triangulation, WiFi triangulation, etc.) How frequently is a user’s location recorded? What triggers the creation of a record of someone’s location? How precise is this location data? Can it track a user’s location to 50 meters, 100 meter, etc.? Why is[…]
Seven questions. 1. What is a valid model for monetizing a web page, regardless of whether monetary transactions are possible?2. What is a valid model for costing a web page?3. What is the relationship between the complexity of a page and the monetary value of a page?4. What is the relationship between (hierarchical navigation) buried depth and the monetary value of a page?5. What is the relationship between indegree connectivity and the monetary value of a page?6. What is the relationship between an audience segmentation and the monetary value of a page?7. What is the relationship between customer affinity and the monetary value of a page? This is quite dangerous, isn’t? But how fun this will be! If your answer[…]
Communities create their own jargon because they need brevity in their conversation. The price of that brevity is abstraction. Jargon unites people in as much as it alienates them from each other. I’ve experienced this first hand – visiting data miners, market researchers, marketing scientists, entrepreneurial developers, and brand managers. It becomes very easy for people to dismiss entire modes of thought purely because the jargon doesn’t resonate. Deep within abstraction are generally understood understandings. For instance, the term ‘qualified traffic’ means something very fundamental to a search marketer. The same term, ‘traffic’, is perceived a fair bit differently among web analysts. And in terms of CRM people – well – they don’t view ‘response’ as a form of traffic.