"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics" – Mark Twain
Yahoo is not letting the grass grow under its feet with its integration of IndexTools. Today IndexTools partners received an e-mail from Yahoo informing them of a change to the terms & conditions of the service, which need to be agreed to by October 15 in order to retain access to IndexTools. The e-mail calls … Read more
Once upon a time, when I was a young turk, I would assiduously download every last doodad that my employer created as soon as it shipped – or often long before, happily reaching for the pile of floppy disks as I rebuilt my computer for the umpteenth time following the latest toxic combination of untested … Read more
There’s been a lot of chatter recently about the “dark side” of online advertising, in particular, the activities of companies like NebuAd and Phorm using somewhat shady techniques to gather behavioral data about users and using this data to target ads. I’ve even blogged about it myself. And click fraud remains a significant challenge to … Read more
There’s been plenty of buzz (more of the angry hornet variety rather than the just-inhaled-a-lungful-of-dope variety) about Phorm of late, precipitated by a press release that the company put out on Feb 14 in the UK, announcing partnerships with three major UK ISPs to provide a system “…which ensures fewer irrelevant adverts and additional protection … Read more
Sigh. Blog post topics seem to be like buses – you wait ages for one to come along, and then three come along all at once. Actually, I’ve got four things to post about, but I’m going to leave two until after the weekend. Here are the other two. Funnily enough, they’re related – both … Read more
I promised some time ago that I’d post more information on the process by which we get the demographic data into Gatineau. As I mentioned before, this information comes ultimately from data that people provide when they sign up for a “Live ID” to access one of Microsoft’s online services, such as Messenger or Hotmail … Read more
A bit late to the punch with this one (as ever), but Comscore have published a white paper which contains more detail about the methodology behind their recent study which showed that both first and third-party cookies are deleted more than we thought (or at least more than we hoped). It clears a few things … Read more
There’s a lot of chatter on the wires here (ooh, I make it sound so glamorous and newsroom-y – it would be more accurate to say there are a lot of e-mails going back and forth) about Comscore’s press release about cookie deletion. It makes for somewhat alarming reading – according to the report, 31% … Read more
I came across a very interesting article in last week’s Economist Technology Quarterly the other day (which I was reading a week late, thanks to the efficiencies of the US Postal Service). The article mentioned a couple of sites such as AttentionTrust and Agloco which have sprung up to help users take ownership of their own online behavior … Read more
A colleague brought to my attention the dubious practices of LogStats.de, a German provider of free web analytics. LogStats is a typical teeny-tiny provider of free web stats, using a JavaScript-based tag for data collection. Free web stats is a pretty thin business to be in these days, what with behemoths like Google and us … Read more