Microsoft was going to ship Internet Explorer 10 with Do Not Track turned on by default. The industry reacted negatively. As a result, IE 10 will not ship with Do Not Track turned on by default. The key principle is: “An ordinary user agent MUST NOT send a Tracking Preference signal without a user’s explicit consent.” Argument If a browser is sending out a do not track signal by default, it is argued, then the signal becomes meaningless and will be disregarded, as the user didn’t actually opt out of tracking. They didn’t make that choice. Why isn’t Do Not Track turned on by default? The HTTP cookie has been turned on by default since 1994, when Lou, an engineer[…]

The Data Journalism handbook from O’Reilly is good stuff. The rise of data journalism is really great news. I’m seeing great things in Toronto. Like this piece. And this piece. And this piece. Granted, some of it is good old fashioned access to information investigative journalism. The sophistication of the analysis has increased. So has the sophistication of their mediums. There’s a lot that digital analytics practitioners can learn from journalism. Journalists have several hundred years on all of us in terms of communicating with the public. They have to write popular things to stay in business. They’re master framers of public opinion. There’s a lot to be learned there. Journalists don’t communicate in excel or powerpoint. Their mediums are[…]

Fisher and Pry put forth “A Simple Substitution Model of Technological Change” in 1971 (Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 3, 75-88). (The paper is not publicly available, for free, at the time I wrote this post.) It could be useful in explaining the gap left behind by Bass, and the downsides of all the charts I showed Monday. I like this paper. Here’s the first paragraph: “For people who attempt to forecast the future, there is a continuing need for simple models that describe the course of unfolding events. Each such model should be based upon easily understood assumptions that are not available for unconscious or invisible tampering by the forecaster in his efforts to make the future what he[…]

Henry Blodget wrote a pretty good piece about the TV business, comparing it to the collapse of newspapers. It’s well worth the read. TL;DR: Newspaper executives were skeptical about the threat that The Internet posed to their business model Revenue collapsed far faster than they expected Network TV is increasingly irrelevant in a DVR-shifting and omni-channel streaming world “The vast majority of money TV advertisers spend to reach our household (~$750 a year, ~$60/month) is wasted, because we rarely watch TV content with ads, and, when we do, we rarely watch the ads.” Human behavior is changing fast What surprised me? Just how precipitous the collapse in newspaper advertising was. The importance of newspapers in facilitating local commerce – in[…]

The Bass Diffusion Model not only works for what happens inside a social network, but also applies for the adoption of the network itself. Two weeks ago you read about the rise of Pinterest, and, followed up with a piece on the primacy of Facebook in America.  In short, Pinterest is scaling successfully, and in my judgement, much better than Twitter did comparatively in 2008. Facebook, to most Americans, is synonymous with social networking, and, their experience is largely positive. Last week you read about the Bass Diffusion model. Innovators adopt. If they’re impressed, word of mouth takes hold and the imitators follow suit. The effect can be modeled, understood, and predicted.The diffusion of social network platforms (software as a[…]

With few exceptions, everybody has a personal knowledge system. I use the term as Roger Martin meant it in “The Opposable Mind” (pp. 103). It’s all summed up in one nice little diagram. Behold: The text summary is: Your stance, “Who am I in the word and what am I trying to accomplish”, guides what tools you use. That is, “With what tools and models do I organize my thinking and understand the world?”, often guides experiences: “With what experiences can I build my repertoire of sensitivities and skills?”. Likewise, your experiences inform your tools which inform your stance. Tools I’ve railed against definition by tools. Again. Again. And Again. You are more than the sum of the tools and[…]

We’re doing a little experiment on Twitter around the #msure hashtag. To understand the reason for #msure, you need to understand our problems with #measure. Concretely: Bi-hourly ‘reminders’ of an event that’s going to happen two weeks from now Bi-daily ‘I’m recruiting an analytics ninja with twelve years of Google Analytics’ messages Live tweeting throwaway lines like “Leverage data to optimize your business” Traffic generation spam top 10 tricks, top 7 ways to increase clickthrough rate, top 8 derp for maximum herp lists Random people using strange hashtags that are related to analytics I don’t expect #measure to change. I’m not expecting #measure to change. I’m no position to ask #measure to change. I think a lot of people like[…]

Yesterday, Ashlie asked “what kinds of laws social media analytics is borrowing?” One of the great tree trunks in Marketing Science is called the Bass Diffusion Model. It was published in 1969 by Frank Bass, in a paper entitled: “A new product growth model for consumer durables“. (Management Science 15 (5): p215–227)Briefly: There are innovators and there are imitators. Each segment, innovators and imitators, adopt a new product at differing rates over time. The impact of Word Of Mouth can be modeled by the coefficient q The impact of Advertising can be modeled by the coefficient p The coefficients cause different product adoption curves The model can be used to predict the impact of word of mouth on product diffusion[…]

Have you seen Beluga Analytics, the open insights platform made available by Grooveshark? It’s pretty sweet. Enter in the name of a band and gain a whole range of data about that band’s audience. This just isn’t interesting. It’s absolutely fascinating. (Statistics ahead! A Z-Score means “how far from the average is a given group”. The higher (or lower) the Z-score, the more unusual a group is.). Let’s compare two very different bands: europop sensation Aqua against Hipster favourite The Flaming Lips. Aqua listeners are female, and disproportionately young. They’re more likely to listen to music while doing chores, hanging out, and surfing. And, hay, that’s something you didn’t know before. Next, check out the Hipsters. Males, 25 to 34[…]

There’s a campaign going on for MiO in Toronto. I didn’t know much about it until Friday, when I saw this commercial: I went to the Loblaws today, and, right at eye level, I saw the MiO. I recognized it. I picked it up. So, the commercial ‘worked’, in that I paused in the powdered chemical section. Big moment of truth. I looked for the nutritional information. After all, the MiO is in a bad neighborhood. Started reading the french side first – nope, not going to read that. Such tiny lettering. English side, great. Water…Citric Acid…propelyne…. Suspicion confirmed. I put it back. I headed off to the gym, and, I wondered what had gone wrong. Here we had a[…]