Thinking Analytically

Analytical Thinkers typically are searching for the truth and the truth often implies hard, cold facts. The NY Times article Mining the Web for Feelings, Not Facts might seem hypocritical but speaking from experience, “there’s gold in that ther’ text.” In the mid ’80s I managed a group of employee relations analysts that mined mountains of text in an attempt to quantify employee morale for a 10,000 person company.  Out of this work came “ERATS” or the Employee Relations Attitude Tracking System.  (We were really tracking morale but couldn’t come up with a good acronym with that pesky “M”. Sentiment analysis is exactly what we were trying to do but completely by hand.

An emerging field known as sentiment analysis is taking shape around one of the computer world’s unexplored frontiers: translating the vagaries of human emotion into hard data.

Two recently devoured books on my shelf explore the web-analytics from a few angles.  If you haven’t already, check out:

Click: What Millions of People Are Doing Online and Why it Matters

I’m a bit behind sharing my recent reading list so I’ll try to spend some time over the next few weeks providing some recommendations.

I “listened” to the audiobook of Click: What Millions of People Are Doing Online and Why it Matters on my iPod.  This is one of those fasicinating books that makes one think, “How can I get a job like that?”

Bill Tancer mines the gold found in search-engine data.  I imagine him sitting in front of a computer screen with a massive amount of data starting his day by saying, “OK. What can we learn today?” What he learns is fascinating.  From prom dresses to porn to politics, he uses search data to understand and predict consumer behavior.  No need to search for this book — just “Click” on the image and get a copy for yourself!

I just stumbled on a great article published at The McKinsey Quarterly earlier this year. In it, Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist, urges executives to sharpen their understanding of analytics and the relationship between technology and innovation.  Buried in the article was this quote:

I keep saying the sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians.
People think I’m joking, but who would’ve guessed that
computer engineers would’ve been the sexy job of the 1990s? The
ability to take data—to be able to understand it, to process it,
to extract value from it, to visualize it, to communicate
it—that’s going to be a hugely important skill in the next
decades, not only at the professional level but even at the educational
level for elementary school kids, for high school kids, for college
kids. Because now we really do have essentially free and ubiquitous
data. So the complimentary scarce factor is the ability to understand
that data and extract value from it.

Well…maybe there’s hope!

A clever tip was posted on Digital Inspiration on Wednesday. Interested in reading the most popular full-text Wall Street Journal articles? Simply add this RSS feed to your newsreader and you’ll receive any article that has at least one “digg” by full subscribers. It could be interesting to track the number of articles per day and diggs per article over time to measure the acceptance of the digg concept with WSJ readers.

In this model, the paying subscribers are feeding non-paying subscribers by digging the articles. Interesting concept. On the one hand, WSJ is giving away content. On the other hand, what if there was a way for them to create a feed of other “undigged” articles to encourage non-subscribers to get the full package?

See the full tip at http://www.labnol.org/internet/tools/read-wall-street-articles-from-digg-without-subscription/1788/

Cross posted at Random Thoughts