Apparently the iPhone 4 has antenna issues that prevent normal human beings from holding it naturally. Kind of reminds me of an old Nokia problem, sidetalking on the N-Gage…

I might have actually considered getting one of those back in the day if they made a screen with a horizontal aspect ratio instead.

Most games just haven’t designed to run vertically unless it’s Tetris. Of course I’m still hoping Ben Heck will make a handheld Vectrex one day.

Sorry for the silly post. I just can’t believe no one has written a post comparing the two yet!

Another recent online power grab involves Facebook’s changes in privacy SEO. Most of the information gathered in social networking is used to improve the relevancy of advertising presented to you (be it behavioral or retargeting).

Yet Facebook’s recent changes in layout and linking unveil an even more ambitious plan. They want to become a hub for all brands, products, and artists on the web.

It’s true that you can hide all of your fan pages in green that fit into Facebook’s pigeon holes of activities, interests, movies, books, or music. There’s a good chance that most listings here will have their own fan pages, except for books which should list authors instead.

(Mark’s profile information that is publicly available; the interests in green can be hidden but the section in yellow must be visible to everyone, even outside of Facebook, if your settings allow visibility in search engines)

However, when you log in, you can discover some interesting user experience decisions that determine the data displayed above.

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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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One of my good friends was browsing through the bestseller list for an audiobook to buy yesterday when she found an author totally against her philosophy ranking at #9. That led her to discount the entire list as “garbage” and untrustworthy.

Are bestseller lists and platinum records obsolete in the Internet age? Does anyone care what is popular now that we have access to the long tail and customization?

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