Archive for the ‘analytics’ tag
Blown to bits
Perhaps the most thorough discussion of the changes to privacy created by today’s Internet is carried out by Abelson, H. et al. (2008), Blown to Bits, Addison-Wesley. This book is written by three MIT and Harvard professors, one of them (Hal Abelson) a co-founder of the Creative Commons initiative.
Its subtitle is Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness after the Digital Explosion. One of its most provocative chapter titles is Naked in the Sunlight: Privacy Lost, Privacy Abandoned.
Next time you do a search on Google, you may want to think just how much information you are revealing about yourself. As you are probably likely also logged into Google Mail at the same time, Google already has a pretty good picture of you. It’s a trade-off we face (see What the Web Knows About You). Can we live without search engines? Probably not. Social media sites are not that different in that light
Google trends and hype cycle?
Has anyone tried to compare Google trends and the Gartner hype cycle? The hype cycle says that any technology goes through phases of hype and disillusionment, and looks like this:
From Wikipedia article on hype cycle
It seems that overlaying both should be possible. For instance, if you look at the trend for Web 2.0, we can see that the popularity of the term peaked sometime 2007, and is in decline since. Does this correspond to peak of inflated expectations followed by the decent into the trough of disllusionment?
Google Trends for web 2.0
Found a short article on Google trends that suggests to a comparison to the hype cycle model. Seems that the guys from Gartner agree. In the blog on Mastering the Hypecycle, they quote a New Scientist article that traces the uptake of the Chrome browser, and found the shape of the curve to correspond to that of the early part of the hype cycle. Would be interesting to examine this more systematically.
R as a lingua franca for analytics
The open source statistics package R is quickly advancing to a lingua franca for companies like Google (search) or Pfizer (pharmaceutics) that rely heavily on analytics. Today it made the New York Times.