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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

Hal Varian, Google’s Chief Economist, was interviewed a few months ago, and said the following in the McKinsey Quarterly:
“The sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians… The ability to take data—to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualize it, to communicate it—that’s going to be a hugely important skill.”

In prepping for tonite’s talk at the Google IO Ignite event, this quote inspired me to muse about how sex appeal and statistics might go toget… Continue

GERMANY— Data protection officials in Germany are warning website owners that the use of Google Analytics to track people’s online behaviour is against the law, reports national newspaper Die Zeit.

Google’s web analytics tool can be used for free by any website, and according to research agency Xamit it is used by around 13% of German sites. But because web users are not given the chance to opt out of having their activity tracked, the federal data protection commissioner, together with regiona… Continue