“Meme-tracking and the Dynamics of the News Cycle” is an excellent paper put out by Leskovec, Backstrom and Kleinberg. In it, they track meme’s against the news cycle. The empirical findings of their study, which focuses on Palin, is really cool. How they chose to vizualize what was going on that’s quite new. Traditionally, we tend to graph social networks using graph theory: each person is a node, and you draw links. Sometimes we color in the nodes and represent the strength between nodes by thickness of the lines. This kind of social network vizualization is something very cool, but the type of math that’s required to derive a real business strategy out of it is not. People have a[…]
Author: Christopher Berry
I hope to embark on some Internet Serious Business work that links community with government with some industry. There’s a large social analytics piece in all of this that I’m looking forward to. The triple bottom line can be summed up as “profit, people, planet”. Basically, accounting for social and environmental impacts as well as the profit motive. There’s a story about a young graduate student and an old econ prof walking down the street together. The young graduate student, clearly cash starved, spots a dollar on the street and says, “look, a dollar” and goes to reach for it. The prof holds him back, and replies “nonsense, if there really was a dollar there, somebody would have already picked[…]
Paco Underhill had an interesting interview on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer that was re-aired this week. It struck a cord. I’m still thinking about it 72 hours after the fact. You can read the transcript here. While there is a lot of good content in there, it was this part that really caught me [my emphasis]: Marketing to a younger generation PAUL SOLMAN: Well, let’s say there are some people in our audience who would like to re-inflate the bubble. How do you get consumers to start buying again at this point? PACO UNDERHILL: Nobody’s going to go back to the old ways. And what we’re seeing here is a time in which our retail world is probably going[…]
As with any early industry, there are quite a few ‘free’ measurement applications out there. Social Media is no exception. Many of them are quite good at doing one or two things very well. For instance, Twitalyzer is very good at measuring influence, and in particular, the first derivative of influence. The advanced search functions on Google are very good at tracking, at least at a monthly cadence, the number of mentions and backlinks. Very useful. And they’re FREE*! There’s a large component of social media analytics that can be done with Google Analytics for ‘free’ too. Of course, ‘free’ has a hidden cost. In some instances, unless you’re opting out and getting mutual NDA’s, you’re giving up some privacy.[…]
I think that sometimes, it’s human nature to try to add complexity to seek a competitive advantage. Sometimes there’s competitive advantage in Ease. In easyness. In simplicity. A good example is the difference between Windows and the original command line DOS. Another is between Mac OX and Windows. Simplicity isn’t easy though. It’s far easier to pound out a five page brief than it is to write two paragraphs communicating the same thing. It’s hard to get right. But most of the time, you only have two paragraphs. So you see, simplicity can be incredibly complex. I’m kind of intoxicated by this relationship between simplicity and complexity.
One of the more neat aspects of the Internet is its impact on prices. Before the Internet, researching the best price for something was relatively hard. Or, I imagine it to have been hard. The price you got for a consumable, like a car, a house, an airline ticket or hotel room largely depended on who you knew or how many people you called and asked. One of the impacts of the Internet has been relative deflation in prices as a result of the ability of customers to compare prices easily. This decrease in the cost of becoming un-ignorant has eaten directly into the margin. I don’t think I can argue that the barriers of entry have been significantly lowered[…]
Whether it’s Elitist or not to point out the disparity, the fact remains that these kinds of media flares have become standard. Lynn Rosenvall taught me that the world is divided up into large media zones. There’s no conspiracy about them – regions of the world just have different points of view and are dominated by different stories on different days. Our little neck of the woods up here is dominated by the Michael Jackson story. I don’t know if we’re all the more richer or poorer for it. Would the news be greeted by yawns or passion? After all, there’s no oil buried underneath Honduras…
Web analysts I speak with are expecting a crash in observed traffic with the launch of Firefox 3.5 and the newer features within IE. I question if it’s really all that private at all. Some commentators, like Preston Gralla, call private browsing the “porn mode”. Gralla goes onto write: When you browse the Web using it, nothing about the session is stored — no history, no cookies, no temp files, no forms information, no search information, nothing that can show where you’ve browsed or what you’ve done. To turn the Las Vegas tag line on its ear: What happens in Firefox doesn’t stay in Firefox. Well, alright, nothing in-the-browser is really stored. Of course, some memory of the porn run[…]
The good folks at Bing Canada were kind enough to invite me to their Bing.ca launch last week. They’re good people over there. Very friendly and genuinely warm. It’s taken me a week to really formulate coherent thoughts that I could write here. From a search perspective, Bing has very good percentage margins. Of course, I don’t bank percentages, I bank dollars – and therein lies the problem for Bing: getting the volumes while maintaining the clickthrough and conversion rates. In the end, of course, search engines dominate through relevancy, and it’s through relevancy that Bing will win volume. It was observed at our table of quantitative search folks that Bing was more consumer oriented. It wasn’t necessarily designed for[…]
You read that right. The intersection of text analytics, social analytics, and neuroanalytics is incredibly interesting and useful. It’s an old meme, and you read about it’s origin here. “Has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to look more like?” is a 4Chan-ism. I suspect that it was written by a linguist. Awesome troll is awesome. It can be roughly translated to: “Has anyone really decided as to even go that far in wanting to do to look more like so?” Subject – Anyone Verb – decided (modified by “really” adverb) Direct object to “decided” – “that” (pronoun modified by “far”) Noun clause that clarifies “that” – “wanting to do” (gerund phrase) Do what?[…]