Fooled by Randomness, authored by Taleb, is one of my favourite books. At the center of his thesis – Pareidolia – the tendency of humans to see patterns in random sequences. We’re programmed, all humans (with possible debilitating exceptions), with the ability to make sense out of randomness. How else would you be able to recognize faces or learn language from birth? One of my favourite passtimes is to sit at the roulette and craps tables and listen to the fantastic theories of how the wheel and dice behave. Paired with that, or almost implicit in that, is the tendency to under-estimate risk. In fact, so many of us are programmed with a case-study mentality that it becomes even harder[…]
It’s difficult to express the value of SEM Optimization because the mathematics / economics behind it is hard to express in a simple Y = mx + b format. The valuation of SEM Labor Input Optimization does not lend itself to that. The least controversial ‘law’ is that the cost of human administration increases as the SEM budget increases. For instance, a small budget of 10000 dollars a year wouldn’t require all that much human administration – by and large setting up a single platform. However, as SEM budgets expand, out to 30 grand up through 1 million and beyond, you need more platforms, and ultimately out into affiliate programs – programs that require a lot more human administration. Human[…]
Apologies for the gap in publishing in this space, I’ve been away on business for quite a few days. The Dow plunged 777 today. Not good. Creative Destruction is the process by which companies and industries collapse and fail in the face of new technologies. The phonographic industry was destroyed by the cassette. The cassette industry was destroyed by the CD. The CD is currently being destroyed by the MP3. During periods of recession and extreme distress – you should get an accelerated rate of creative destruction. Industries that were once tottering get pushed right over that edge. They would have gone out anyway. They were just pushed a little bit too soon. The current recession is a manufactured one.[…]
How many times have you heard this? “We did a focus group with 12 people, and they said they liked this product, so, even though it’s not statistically significant, it’s still directional” or “How many more people would we need to get into a focus group before we’d get something statistically significant?” Where does one even begin? There’s a huge difference between qualitative research and quantitative research. Qualitative research focuses on very small groups of people, and the interviewer goes very, very deep into what they’re thinking, attitudes, preferences, what if scenarios, and why. It’s about deriving a very deep level of insight. Recall during the 1993 election, Alan Greg showed a focus group a commercial that he felt accurately[…]
Dave Hamel wrote a pretty thoughtful reply, entitled, aptly: The ship has already sunk, learn to swim “While the BI/WA barrier may be getting thinner I think it comes down to due diligence and an expectation of privacy. You may think “I only posted it on my Facebook”. Ya okay, but your friend liked that photo of you passed out with marker on your face so much they re-posted it. Now it is in the open. If you post things on the internet, you have no expectation of privacy. Chris is talking more about personal data collected by WA’s and used by Business Intelligence. But I think this falls into the same category. If you don’t want Amazon to know[…]
Jim Novo, Shaina Boone, and I – engaged on a rather interesting email thread today. It centers on a certain company claiming that it has set up the first online advertising ‘hedge fund’. I don’t want to give that company any publicity, because, in part, I have reason to suspect the veracity of their statement. Middlemen are common. They buy inventory from a number of smaller website, bundle it together, mark it up, and sell it off to partners – be it clients or agencies – at a premium. Google is a really huge middleman. Google uses complex algorithms to match buyers with sellers, perhaps, in a manner that is efficient than a human dealer would be able to do[…]
Similar origin skillsets can be derived from strange sources. Take night auditors and web analysts, for instance. Let’s start with definitions. A night auditor is somebody who works in a hotel, on the night shift, usually from 11pm until 7am, balancing the days receipts. Early in my working life, before university, I was a senior night auditor at a very large hotel. It had a night club, a gaming lounge, two restaurants, a pub, and two front desks. It also featured an overburdened accounting staff which was responsible for 4 other hotels, and as a result, much of the accounting functions were downsourced to the night audit team. Not complaining, just saying. I wasn’t a statistician then, and it wasn’t[…]
Word on the street is that Unisys is starting to bust down the Business Intelligence / Web Analytics barrier (BI/WA barrier) As Shaina Boone has said before, web analytics software was always just a stopgap between the eventual evolutions of BI integrating with the web channel. It all made sense to her while she was taking her course on BI and data warehousing…and that makes sense to me too. While in Vancouver, I warned, twice, that our entire industry would be just one disaster away from feeling very severe consequences. I’ve noted on this blog that we’re in need of some very conscious legislation that really cracks down on the abusers of data – for all of our sakes. Why[…]
I’ve been following Garth Turner on the entire Digital Democracy initiative from the beginning. He’s the only MP that has a real blog, and, he was the first MP in Canada, to my knowledge, to have been booted out of a political party for maintaining a blog. (Talk about fighting the last war.) The state of Political Web Analytics is extremely young. It largely began with the emergence of forums and usegroups, and basic volumetric figures, and has since exploded with the blogosphere. I frequently find Google Analytics tags on several blogs – so I can only assume that somebody out there is using those analytics. Whether or not there’s much optimization going on is another story. What’s possibly the[…]
A huge shoutout and thank you to Patrick Glinski of Critical Mass for organizing Web Analytics Wednesday at Bar Wellington last night. I had a particularly good time meeting a few people, talking to regular favourites, and being trolled by Mike Sukmanowski and co. (as always). We had attendance of roughly 35 to 40 people, representing a really good cross section of Toronto’s anlaytics and eMarketing talent. One of the more major discussions was around ‘talent’ and the labor market. What was interesting was that at least 5 people I spoke with were looking for new jobs. Good news for companies looking to get an eMedia or Web Analytics prescense. Bad news for the companies that are hemoraging talent. Another[…]