Sun's Page

From: Henry Blodget | Jan. 22, 2010, 7:09 AM

Comscore has finally caved to a decade of complaints from web publishers that its traffic estimates woefully undercount site traffic, thus producing a vast disparity between Comscore numbers and the numbers the sites have in their logs.

Now, Comscore is finally going to change the way it counts traffic, thus, hopefully, bringing the numbers more in line with reality.

(Comscore extrapolates overall usage from a relatively small panel of web users, w… Continue

When you factor in the costs (employee salaries, consultants, software, etc.) can Analytics truly provide a lift? Or can business successfully operate and compete without analytics, using decisions based on gut feelings, expert opinions and guesses? Should students be discouraged to pursue analytic studies? Is return on analytics higher for large companies than for startups, or does it depend on the choice of solution (SAS EM for large companies, R for small companies)?

There's at least one are… Continue

By Augustine Fou, ClickZ, Dec 17, 2009. Sponsored by Responsys.

Coincidentally, or not, this week an investor, an entrepreneur, a vendor, and a writer each enthused about behavioral targeting. They seemed to all believe this was the future of advertising. But while I do believe in the demonstrated benefits of behavioral targeting, I couldn't help but wonder whether believing in it was like believing in Santa -- something you do when you're a kid, but grow out of, hopefully, at some point.

Past… Continue

What is it?

Software accessible online, via your web browser, instead of available as a package installed on your desktop or on your company's network. Also, software accessible online that can run automatically in the background via API calls. This is SaaS for analytics.

For instance, one could install a copy of SAS on her web server, and everybody with an Internet connection could access it in batch mode (API) or via a user interface if a GUI is created. SAS code could be executed fro… Continue

by Michael E. Driscoll | January 9, 2009

(5/18/09 update - included an overdue reference to linked data!)

Stuart Kauffman, in one of his books about complexity, discusses tipping points in networks — what he calls a phase transitions — by way of buttons. Suppose you’re sitting on a floor strewn with 400 buttons, and you begin tying them together with pieces of string at random. At first, you have just pairs of buttons. Then, you have clusters of threes, which in turn get tied into ever larger… Continue