This blog has been fun, but I have relaunched a new site at http://www.themichaelschneider.com.

Drupal was great and I will miss it.

Do you consider yourself a rational thinking person? Most people do, but there are factors that play into decision making that distort rationality in an the equation. Economics theories are based on entities behaving rationally, but in practice people often do not.

The Experiment

• Person A is given the ability to divide up the money.

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Thomas Schelling is a well known economist and social scientist. While reading The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki, I learned about a social experiment that Schelling conducted. The experiment posed the following problem to a group of New Haven based law students:

You have to meet a stranger in Manhattan. You don't know where you're supposed to meet and there is no way to talk to them ahead of time. Where exactly would you go?

The answer most given was under the clock at Grand Central Station.

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Why are there so many friggin social bookmarking sites? Did they all come up with the idea at the exact same time or did a bunch of developers have a brief moment of creative euphoria in which they actually came up with a cool URL and then, in a moment of panic before they forgot the URL, they decided to vomit forth yet another social bookmarking site (YASBS).

I first got on board this technology with FURL. My friend Jeremy introduced me to it back in 2003 when it was in Beta. My biggest worry at the time was that it would go away and that I would lose all of my bookmarks.

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With the recent purchase of Business Objects (BOBJ) by SAP and the rumors that Cognos is next, some are talking about the Performance Management space disappearing altogether. These people hypothesize that OLAP functionality from these vendors could just be rolled into bigger offerings from the new parent companies.

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Is Cognos Next?

The recent acquisitions of Business Objects and Hyperion have Wall Street asking the question: “Is Cognos Next?” COGN shares rose to an all-time high of $50.75 on speculation and are currently trading around $48.50 at post time.

Why the pullback?

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Imagine that Batman (I like Bale best) rushes into a factory to save Robin from the Joker. They find themselves on a catwalk over a tub of nuclear waste, facing a 10-foot-tall, presumably-nuclear mutant on one side who has just disemboweled one of Joker's minions with his pinky. He takes a look up and sees a perfect roof beam complete with ceiling-escape-window to roof, reaches down to his utility belt and finds that the trusty batarang-pulley is missing. The is arguably Batman's most useful toy aside from the keys to the Batmobile and his science and technology team simply left it out.

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In a previous post I talked about what I think needs to be in every comprehensive web analytics solution. Let's review. Quantitative: KPIs like pageviews, hits, time-on-site, unique visits and bounce rates tell a version of the story of what is happening on the site-- through the spectacles of the analyst reading the data. Qualitative: This lets us talk to the people on the site. We gets information on why people come to the site and how to improve it.

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Technology companies like Microsoft, Google and Apple, who constantly push the envelope and challenge our imaginations by dazzling us with i-should-have-thought-of-that technology have analysts everywhere looking for the next dynamo. Microsoft (stole Apple's OS and) made personal computing usable by the masses. Apple challenged the way we think about technology design and interfaces. Google made search simple and more relevant and then Google-ized many other digital tasks such as image galleries, desktop search, maps and blogging.

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• Jump through Hoops.
• Juggle swords.
• Eat Fire.

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Web analytics is often talked about particularly with web based channels (like paid search) becoming so popular. Free tools like Sitemeter, Google Analytics and the upcoming Microsoft offering make it easy for anyone to see their site performance metrics, also called key performance indicators (KPI), by adding a line of javascript to the footer (assuming it is a global object) of the site. Voila! Page views, geography, time on site sliced and diced however you like. If you think you are done there, you may want to consider reading the rest of this post.

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Every successfull company struggles to get as much behavioral information on their customers as possible in order to feed their decision making processes. While they may not always use the same analysis techniques, their goal of predicting their (potential) customers' next moves is the same. One of the the problems with our analysis of these topics is that it is largely limited to activity within the four walls of our organizations.

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So now you have completed a segmentation project and have a group of awesome business or customer segments. You are so excited about the results. Everyone in the company agrees with the philosophy and the groupings. The team came up with some creative names that tell you exactly what is in each of your segments.

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When talking to marketing managers, the subject of segmentation often comes up. The conversation can seem forced and usually takes a turn from casual talk about business to a certain bitter formality, probably because now we're talking about data. These marketing managers have never tasted our variety of data, theirs is like the grubs on Fear Factor .

Expensive : Complicated : Useless

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