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.
Without assumptions, analysts wouldn’t be able to say very much about the world. Even facts have assumptions. Consider the following statement: “There were 19,000 pageviews in October, 2010.” Okay. I’m willing to accept that fact as true. Assuming that all the tags were in place, on every page. Assuming that server errors identified and not counted as pageviews. Assuming that all the tags fired without fault. Assuming the web analytics software is calibrated to the WAA definition of the term ‘pageview’. People form associations and communities, in part, to standardize assumptions so that progress can be made. Whoever is behind the Metric System. The IEEE. The WAA. Consider the following statement: “Traffic to the website causes conversions.” Oh boy. So[…]
The title is funny and accurate. Web Analytics Wednesday Toronto is on a Thursday in March and April. I hear that people like technical presentations and business presentations. So, the March 31 edition at the Charlotte room and will feature presentations by Simon Colyer and Robin Ward. I will be presenting a recent study on Increasing Campaign Effectiveness from the business side. The eMetrics Toronto edition happens on April 28th and will have Jim Sterne, Jim Novo and Eric T. Peterson. Why should I come out? The Toronto analytics community is exciting and growing. According to Indeed, there are six published open recs for web analysts in Toronto. There are 806 open recs for analytics in Toronto. Publicly posted recs[…]
9. They know that any mention of a list is total baiting. People love lists. You’re here now, aren’t you? 8. They deliberately use an odd sounding number for the length of a list. Round numbers like 10 sound engineered. 7. They know that there’s a high reading completion rate on such a list. That is to say, the probability of a person clicking through to another page, right below the list, is high, thereby increasing overall ad impressions on a single visit. 6. They know that some of the most effective list titles contain a promise of insider information. 5. They know that a small percentage of the population creates lists, but a large percentage of the population cares[…]
Creativity is measurable. A long time ago, two scientists, Yang and Smith, demonstrated how creativity can be quantified and linked through to marketing performance. How can you tell if a message or ad is creative? On the dependent variable side, they enumerate attention to the ad, motivation to process the information, depth of the processing, ad attitude, brand attitude, and purchase intention. What causes something to be creative? They identified divergence, relevance, and production quality. This gets broken down again – into originality, flexibility, synthesis, elaboration, artistic value, relevance of the ad to consumer, and relevance of the brand to consumer. And then, if you break it down further, you have very specific criterion, accumulated from multiple false starts on[…]
I cut the cable on March 17. Cutting the cable means ‘to unsubscribe from cable and/or satellite TV”. First, a few words on the substitution. I face the CN Tower, with a clear line of sight. As a result, over-the-air for the live weather and idiotic fluff works nicely. It provides zombie noise for those 10 minutes between checking the pad for the hard news (because there is no hard news on in the morning…anywhere) and running out. Check. Netflix provides a lot of zombie noise. I prefer to work to reruns of ‘yes minister’ and ‘arrested development’. Yes Minister is nothing more than a university textbook on public policy dynamics and arrested development is benign background noise. Zombie viewing.[…]
A good twitter exchange with Evan Lapointe follows below. I’ve tried to put them into sequence, but admittedly, we were actively tweeting at one another in a cluster of ideas. I started tweeting Evan out of the blue, in part because of a podcast he was in, I initiated: CB: @evanlapointe You make good points. I’m skeptical that the person holding the ruler should also be responsible for generating the strategy EP: @cjpberry I wouldn’t say generating the strategy, necessarily, but conducting the orchestra once the music is written CB: @evanlapointe Yes. I agree. I make the distinction between measurement, convenient reasonsing, strategic analytics and marketing science. EP: @cjpberry we’re lucky if it’s only 4! CB: @EvanLapointe Measurement is straight[…]