"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics" – Mark Twain
It’s just come to my attention (on account of installing the latest security patches for Windows from Microsoft) that a small but profound change has been made to the way Internet Explorer handles ActiveX plugins (such as Flash, PDF, Quicktime and Java). Owing to a patent dispute with a no-name company called Eolas, who licensed … Read more
Found this cool experiment on the Bio Motion Lab website, which demonstrates our ability to interpret a collection of moving dots as a human (or, indeed, animal) in motion.
Nice little JS library to do nice-looking tooltips for websites. (via SwissMiss)
Only a week after the event, but I learn today that Omniture is preparing to IPO and that Coremetrics has bought IBM SurfAid Analytics. The Omniture IPO I could see coming, but the Coremetrics/IBM announcement is more of a curveball. However, given Coremetrics’ focus on the e-commerce sector and IBM’s strength in the field (with … Read more
Following a $40m funding round, Claria, previously known as Gator and notorious peddlers of adware, have launched a new product called PersonalWeb, which is an automatic personalised desktop (the user has to install a plug-in), which monitors your browsing habits and creates a desktop which contains links to your favourite stuff. It’ll be a competitor … Read more
Very interesting article from the New York Times about how newspaper websites are having to tone down their article titles to pander to the needs of search engines, which deliver up to 30% of their traffic, and which are somewhat more literal-minded than their human readers. Does this mark the demise of the sub-editor’s craft? … Read more
Had an interesting conversation with one of my team today – our lead software developer, Matt, with whom I’ve worked for the last six years, and who’s become a good friend during that time. For reasons that will become apparent in due course, we were discussing Matt’s career and how he could expand his responsibilities … Read more
Interesting study by "art-technology-philosophy group of basket weaving enthusiasts and theory do-it-yourselfers" (their words) monochrom into brand recall – they asked 25 people to draw various well-known brand logos from memory. The results are interesting, particularly for brands (such as BP, Adidas, Philips & Eskimo/Algida/Walls) who have changed their logos of late. How well would … Read more
Perhaps not the most exciting post for my brand new blog, and perhaps I should be extolling the virtues of WebAbacus rather than name-checking a competitor, but I happened upon WebTrends Analytics 8 today, which is at the core of their new MarketingLab poduct. Version 8 seems to be much of the same-old, same-old from … Read more