News Numbers

Search

2011-09-28T02:52:36Z

Google’s new mobile, social media and cloud storage products have made it more omnipresent than usual. That’s why I was surprised to hear Brian Schmidt, Google’s Americas sales director, say that Google still considered itself a search company. This seemed a little disingenuous at first, just something Schmidt would say to sooth me and the [...]

The humanity of web analytics

2011-05-27T05:16:07Z

This snippet from the Economist’s review of Brian Christian’s book about artificial intelligence – The Most Human Human: What Talking With Computers Teaches Us About What It Means To Be Alive – reminds me that web analytics is about people, not data: “People produce timely answers, correctly if possible, whereas computers produce correct answers, quickly [...]

E-books vs. e-readers

2011-01-05T06:14:05Z

I was happy to see Barnes & Noble reporting digital books outselling physical ones on BN.com and Amazon announcing that the Kindle was its best-selling product ever because I hope this means much more e-reader content will become available. I’m always surprised and disappointed when a book I want to buy isn’t Kindle-ized. Then [...]

The content’s there but the data often isn’t

2010-12-29T09:33:34Z

Neil Heyside’s Oct. 18 story on PBS MediaShift about how newspapers should analyze their content by source type – staff-produced, wire/syndicated or free from citizen journalists – got me thinking about other ways content should be analyzed to craft audience-driven hyper-local and paid-content strategies. Most news sites have navigation that mimics traditional media products [...]

Two million users? Not enough…

2010-12-29T09:40:50Z

Xmarks had lots of users but little engagement. Apparently it forgot to figure out what the users needed or wanted. From WebNewser: “For the popular bookmark syncing service Xmarks, 2 million users was apparently not popular enough. Co-founder and CTO Todd Agulnick announced on the company blog Tuesday that, despite growing by 3,000 users each [...]