What I have been reading

Web Rankings Shakeup: It’s About Time. A fascinating article from Business Week concerning the latest fad in website metrics. In short: pageviews are out, time spent on site is in. Strangely absent from the heated conversation about web rankings is the utter futility of trying to capture a website’s value in one metric. It is part of our nature to oversimplify things, especially coming up with a more realistic view of website relevance would require grappling with so many complicated factors. Nicholas Taleb would cite the whole rankings shamble as an example of Platonicity. Of course, big bucks are riding on this game, this battle for the ultimate metric. The winners can expect a lion’s share of advertising revenues; the losers will see their perceived importance and their market share wither. Of course, a few insightful marketers will recognize that value is highly relative and ignore the lure of a single metric view of the world. They may find that advertising on “out of favor” websites will actually bring them better results at a lower price tag than the top-of-the-charts websites.

The Black Swan. Nicholas Taleb’s book on the impact of the highly improbable is an essential read for anyone in the analytics industry. Web analysts live in a world of numbers and many practitioners are trained in statistics, econometrics, or mathematics. Taleb challenges the conventional wisdom and many of the basic assumptions which underlie the modern science of analysis. If your universe revolves around concepts like variance, standard deviation, correlation, R square, Bell curves, and forecasting than prepare for a disconcerting revelation: “It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you.” I’ve always been extremely suspicious of forecasting and those who purport to predict the future. The Black Swan has finally provided me with a plausible explanation for this personal bias. Opps, was that just an example of Confirmation Error?

Thursday, July 12th, 2007 @ 11:59 am what i am reading
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