Technical Happenings

Can you Predict the X Factor Winner using Twitter?

I thought this was pretty interesting,  the  full article is worth a read, see the link below.

Bil Tancer at Hitwise occasionally tries to predict talent show winners by studying Search activity, but there are now too many dynamics to interpret to be able to use internet data to easily predict X Factor winners and losers this year. When the internet was a one way street, then Search volumes were good indicators of intention / preference. However, new platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, blogs and Twitter fuel ’social influence’ and contribute to the ‘cumulative advantage’ dynamic studied by Duncan J Watts. Watts’ argues that Justin Timberlake is a product of cumulative advantage, putting forward the idea that the ‘most popular tend to get more popular’ as social influence affects people’s perception of quality. The herd mentality affects hits - rankings like the Top 40 / bestseller lists distort perception of quality and influence people’s likes.

The visibility of shows like the X Factor in social media means that using search volumes to predict winners is not going to give the whole picture. The only way to use online data to predict X Factor outcomes would be to combine Search data with real time sentiment analysis in the period between the performances on Saturday and the results show on Sunday – not easy, or particularly cheap, to do. It is clear though that compelling TV content does drive people to go online, often simultaneously – and you don’t need research to tell you this when shows like the X Factor have such an obvious online echo!

see for full article http://www.nickburcher.com

Cookie Sniffing and Trading

What does that mean?
There are networks of  companies  who create cookies on your machine and use these to track  your behaviour  across multiple websites.
                       
And in English?
You will see ad  based content on one site based on  your activity on another and you won’t even  know it  happened.
                       
Who invented   it?
Netscape invented cookies to allow state to be maintained  between  HTTP transactions. However Microsoft filed for  a patent  in 2000 which  was granted in 2006. So it’s been around for many years.   It’s typically  used to authenticate or identify a registered  user of a website without  requiring them to sign in again, provide a  personalised view of the site or  track pages visited and use this data  for marketing purposes ( that is  refereed to as cookie  sniffing)
                       
What does it mean for my  business (what  are the marketing implications)?
It’s very likely you’re   already using the technology, but are likely not part of a network of   companies who share the  gathered information.  But, be  careful as  storing cookies on a users machine opens privacy issues. So  speak with you IT  team/tracking vendor to get more information   before going for world  domination through a proliferation of  cookies.
                       
What do I need to do  about it?
I you want to  opt out of tracking cookies from some of the  larger players follow the  little advertised link (surprise, surprise) http://www.networkadvertising.org/managing/opt_out.asp
                       
How   or where do I find out more?
Speak to an expert or get talking  to the  players on the list found in the above link.

 Is it a paradigm  shift or just another  TLA?
Its nothing new cookies where  invented partly for marketing  purposes. But, lets face it cookie  sniffing and trading sounds   better.

Amazon CloudFront – Replacing the content database

Amazon launch of Cloudfront, a tightly integrated content delivery service built over their S3 offering promises content delivery routed to the nearest edge location, giving optimal performance to the content user. This extension to S3 should get the content management system (CMS) providers and companies such as Akamai thinking. The service will allow the database (currently at the heart of any CMS) to be decoupled and replaced instead with Cloudfront; a potentially painless process for any well designed CMS. Having Cloudfront at the heart of content delivery provides all the benefits of cost and scalability of S3, together with a slick API and the big performance advantages (leveraging Amazons ever growing infrastructure, The Edge locations). I hope to see some good content service applications appearing using this technology, hopefully EPiServer will be one of them.