Today’s discovery by TechCrunch that HP filed for a trademark on Palmpad confirms what many have guessed would happen. The acquisition of Palm will likely make its way into larger devices.

Palm’s webOS is the best mobile operating system and should translate better to a tablet than Apple iOS. However, I hope that HP does not make the same mistake that Palm did when it was independent — namely, chase Apple — because it still cannot compete with their head start, rabid fan base, or number of applications. At best, a simple webOS tablet could perhaps gain a #3 or #4 position behind the iPad but ahead of some eBook readers.

HP must redefine expectations to be in a position of strength. It can capitalize on the many false starts of its Microsoft Windows brethren and Google Android cousins.

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Readers of my last post no doubt expected that I would write about HP and Palm next. I applaud the move for reasons I will explain later, but for now I want to talk about something perhaps more important: privacy.

Some people want to share absolutely everything online. The Foursquare satire, Please Rob Me, and heavily funded startup, Blippy, have shown that doing so is not always a good idea. Some Blippy members’ credit and debit card numbers were published to the world in Google search results. The privacy breach continued even after a supposed fix. Whoops.

(Credit card numbers in search results — every webmaster’s worst nightmare and every thief’s dream)

Before you call me a Luddite, I should say that I love social networking sites as long as I retain control over who sees what. Of course Blippy’s problem was due to a lapse in security, but it never would have happened if users had chose not to discard their privacy by volunteering their credit card numbers in the first place. And lest you ask, Blippy is different than a typical eCommerce site because its raison d’être is the overexposure of sharing shopping behavior.

I think there needs to be a little more common sense from consumers and independent analysis in the online industry. It should not require FTC investigations or Congressional oversight, as was suggested after Google Buzz complaints (warning, contains justified profanity). It means the fourth estate doing their job.

For instance, despite the backlash against Google Buzz, initial concerns about Google Social Search have all but disappeared.

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Last night I gave a short talk on web traffic analysis to a data mining class taught by my friend, Dr. Aleks Jakulin, at Columbia University. Sharing the podium with Dr. Hilary Mason from Bit.ly and Blaz Fortuna from the Josef Stefan Institute in Slovenia, I decided to present a primer on the web analytics industry and leave the science to the experts.

It is a rare 400 level course with no prerequisites, so some students come from a statistics background while others study mathematics or business. What could I say that would be useful to all three disciplines? The main point I wanted to get across was simply the importance of acting upon your insights, regardless of whether you pursue such interests for academic or financial reasons.

I still find this to be the largest problem within web analytics today. At HitTail, we championed the idea of actionable analytics in 2006 (and even before that in Connors’ client offerings). Now, suddenly other companies keep using that word. I do not think it means what they think it means.

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As I reported three years ago, one of Google’s chief competitors has been the beneficiary of its own algorithm. Only this time it is Facebook, and not Yahoo, to receive a vaunted PageRank of 10.

For those unfamiliar with the story, the PageRank concept was integral to the original thesis of Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford. Essentially it rates the billions of pages based on a 0-10 scale regarding the number of inbound citations (or links). So while it is supposedly a play on words for Larry’s last name, the acronym is also conveniently PR (i.e. public relations).

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