Tonight’s edition of Web Analytics Wednesday Toronto is taking place at The Counter. A new venue that we’re going to try out. I’ve invited web analysts to get together with IA’s, Data Miners, Dev’s, and, for the first time in a long while, Creatives. Only good can come out of that sort of interaction. The openly visible agenda is all about forming weak ties. People getting together over beer and wine, talking to other people with a totally different perspective, in small groups, in an honest exchange, is valuable. It doesn’t happen very often because of the tendency to keep to ones own. I look forward to meeting everybody.
Category: Uncategorized
There’s a new type of HTTP cookie that exploits an HTML5 hack. The long and short of it is that the cookie becomes immortal. The cookie is capable of leaping across browsers on your computer. It re-instates itself after a user has deleted it. It’s not right. And analysts should reject it. I’ve long been dissatisfied with the concept of ‘unique visitor’, by and large because it’s a highly unstable proxy measure for a person. People go into private browsing during key points in their day, anti-virus programs tend to root out these ‘tracking cookies’ as malware. and owing to an unfortunate three fiddy event in 2000 – people of a certain demography routinely clear their cookies. A commenter on[…]
IBM has announced its acquisition of Netezza, a datawarehousing and BI company, for $1.7 billion. There’s much more to come. A majority of the human beings are generating machine readable data about themselves. Just check out the mobile penetration numbers and see for yourself. Even in developing countries they’re generating huge trails of data. And while there wont’ be 50 billion phones on the planet, every human being will have access to a mobile phone very soon. More advanced devices and experiences will generate ever more data. A majority of human beings in the developed world are generating more machine readable data than ever before. Whereas the Internet has always been social, the relative transaction cost has now come down[…]
“If you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer. You’re the product being sold.” -Andrew Lewis, August 26, 2010. Andrew’s statement is accurate. It’s well worth considering.
Hamel’s counterpoint to my previous post on the Facebook LIKE button is up. Check out both posts for detail. If you want the Cole Notes: Chris: “It’s not all spam. But it can be spam. And some marketers will spam. Some marketers will provide utility. There will be a net positive over time – like email.” Dave: “It’s all spam. You clicking the Like button generates NewsFeed spam. Screw your interests, Chris. Because I don’t care if you Like something.” Fair enough Dave. I see your point and I understand it. In general, like people clump alike. I tweet stuff all the time aimed at a very specific focus area. All of it is solid gold and incredibly valuable to[…]
It’s not generally well known that when you click the Facebook ‘Like’ button on a website, you’re giving the author of that Button permission to message you in a newsfeed. So, if you LIKED a bingo card while shopping, then the owner of that site has the opportunity to message you when it goes on sale by way of your newsfeed. It’s a point brought up by Patio11 (Patrick McKenzie) over at Bing Card Creator. He’s a great entrepreneur, and I dare say, analytical thinker. His concern is that this functionality will enable marketers to spam people. It’s a valid concern. The world is filled with absolutely stupid and inconsiderate people. Just look at what they’ve done to email: It’s[…]
I’m not certain that many people really understand what private browsing it – at least based on my interpretation data published by Mozilla Labs. The study is awesome and you should check it out. I’ve been over what private browsing really is. It isn’t what I think what the general population thinks it is. (I don’t know what people are really thinking – but I can attempt to infer it by observing aggregate behavior.) Come with me and dive in. The Mozilla Labs data indicates that private browsing activations spike at noon, with subsequent spikes around 5pm, 9pm, and shortly after midnight. The median duration of staying in private browsing is 10 minutes, with 50% of the cases falling between[…]
Anybody who has seen their torrents throttled over the years knows that net neutrality really doesn’t exist, regardless if it is the law of the land. The argument against net neutrality – the notion of equality in experience – has been long trotted out. The argument goes that you have 1 person in 100 that is responsible for gobbling up 80% of the bandwidth – and they’re degrading the experience for the other 99. So, to preserve the experience for everybody minus 1, the ISP simply must place curbs on that one person. Such framing is designed to exclude the notion that the pie isn’t strictly fixed and metering isn’t essential. ISP’s are incented to maximize revenue by generating scarcity[…]
How should analysts communicate? I’ve written a lot about communication mediums. I’ve been dreaming of a post-excel world for quite some time now – getting us out of that slumber and into a world of active communication with people. And perhaps, in a more normative moment, people who matter. It’s been particularly hard to change long standing patterns of behavior. We’re getting there, gradually. Whenever something is hard, I take 90 steps back and go extreme case hunting. Come with me and let’s have some fun. At the one extreme, what if an analyst could only communicate through video? What if they were particularly effective at it, especially with the editing? What if it was edited in a compelling way[…]
Consider the problem of problem ambiguity and the solution that analytics brings to the Lean Startup – “letting thousands decide what millions do”. Time to unpack that. The problem of problem ambiguity refers to the creation of a business models or products which are intended to solve fuzzy, low-defined, problems. Yes! It really does happen! One of the mentalities within the Y-Combinator hive mind is to simply produce a product and get it out there. Iterate. Dominate. Be capital efficient. Be lean. Ponies. Stickers. Double Rainbows. And so, there are any number of firms out there that are generating solutions to problems that they don’t fully understand and loads of potential customers that are aware of ambiguous problems. The behavior[…]