Posted in analysis of behavior, tagged mentalism, social change, superstition on February 28, 2008 | 1 Comment »
Here’s a set of insights from John Bryant. They are particularly potent considering the upheaval in media, news, politics and pop culture. We often appeal to mentalistic terminology to understand and explain the complexity of behavior at play on our sites, in our classes, in our cities and at the polls.
Here’s what John has to [...]
Posted in analysis of behavior, software, tagged blackberry, email, typing on February 27, 2008 | No Comments »
Somewhere along the way I lost capital letters and periods in my emails, IMs and other documents.
People started to notice.
Where did they go?
Blackberry, Office 2007, and other software took them from me! That’s right! Authoring software for mobile emails and office documents now does so much for me that it even caused me [...]
Posted in economics, hollywood, tagged academy awards, tv audience, viewership on February 26, 2008 | No Comments »
John Bryant observes:
A combination of factors affecting this year’s Academy Awards viewership show on Sunday:
Gruesome /dark nature of many of the top films up for awards
Number of non-traditional film subjects
Writer’s strike got us away from TV too long and we didn’t come back that Sunday
Host was a wing-affiliated effete snob cable guy that was not [...]
Posted in analysis of behavior, hollywood, tagged academy awards, best actress, oscars, supporting actress on February 26, 2008 | 1 Comment »
John Bryant writes:
At the 80th Academy Awards Sunday Feb. 24th, 2008, an actress stood up and said that her award is an “accident” because she didn’t know how she got up there to receive her Oscar. No one can attend to the how this particular Oscar award came to be. Besides “accident” being monocausalitis (see [...]
Posted in analysis of behavior, business strategy, data mining, economics, science prizes, social networks, tagged 1 million dollars, att research, collaboritive filtering, kNN, netflix, netflix prize, prize on February 24, 2008 | 1 Comment »
In October of 2006, Netflix released a $1,000,000 contest to improve their rating prediction/movie recommendation algorithms. No one has won the prize yet (surprisingly).
I read the latest wired mag (i know, i know) which featured a contestant. I’m easily inspired to work on difficult challenges. I figure this will be good learning AND good research [...]
Posted in business strategy, data mining, economics, politics, tagged politics, internet traffic, policymap, quantcast, alexa, barack obama, hillary clinton on February 23, 2008 | 2 Comments »
Consider the Democratic Primaries. Do we see any predictive power in internet traffic?
Quantcast Demographic Info:
Hillary
Barack
Compete.com: Hillary vs. Barack
Alexa:
Check here.
Quantcast:
Conclusion:
It’s tricky! however, I think we need to normalize the traffic by demographic as raw volume is not a good predictor at all (very low correlation between results+exit polls and internet traffic). See [...]
Posted in business strategy, economics, hollywood, traffic, tagged search ads, video, video ads, youtube on February 23, 2008 | No Comments »
Yeah, it’s all the rage in agency/vc/online publisher land but Online Video and Online Video ads is not going to get very many people rich really quickly, not like search ads and domain squatting.
Yes, youtube and other video outlets are growing like weeds still but their revenue is not even close to their costs. Their [...]
Posted in business strategy, economics, tagged profit, revenue per user, metrics, media business on February 19, 2008 | 1 Comment »
In my last post, I pointed out the inevitability of entropy and energy consumption in media businesses.
Well, you can’t avoid, but you might want to know how I spot it when the entropy is costing money?
Change the measurement.
Measure Profit/Employee and Profit/User and Profit/Pageview. Those 2 metrics tell you everything you need to know. You’ll spot [...]
Posted in analysis of behavior, business strategy, tagged second law, entropy on February 16, 2008 | 1 Comment »
“Why did you {them, this company, those guys, that company, this group} do this?”
Yup, that’s the first - maybe second - question any consultant or new hire in a media company asks. The hope is to find some easily understandable, presumably correctable, explanation for how the hell on earth a product, service, experience, division, or [...]
Posted in analysis of behavior, data mining, information theory, social networks, tagged collaboration, social network, lattice network, small world, problems on February 5, 2008 | 2 Comments »
Here’s a terse little paper and experiment showing some clean (easy to understand and rework) results.
DISCUSSION
Past research on the benefits of network structure on the flow of information has often focused on the positive properties of small-world networks [2, 3]. The results of our research cast this view in the wider perspective of fit between [...]
