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The first thing I do when building any new piece of software is build a prototype. Many times, though, that prototype is on paper, not on the the computer. I’d much rather get all the kinks worked out before investing any time staring at a glowing screen wondering why X doesn’t do Y like it’s…
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A few days ago, I asked a question on Stack Overflow regarding the Google Reader API. What I wanted to do was build a WordPress plug-in that would import my feeds from Google Reader into my dashboard. I’ve already pulled in my site statistics and Facebook, Google Reader is the last holdout keeping me from…
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Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love my eReader. It holds almost 200 books so far (of which I’ve read maybe 20) and has space for several hundred more without even adding external media! It’s truly a revolutionary device, but I would never go so far as to swear off my old-fashioned printed books. Call…
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One of the most widely recognized social media applications in the world today is Facebook. People use it for everything from email to event planning to entertainment. You can manipulate your profile to display every detail of your life or nothing. You can build an online profile to represent yourself in any fashion you want…
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Just to forewarn you, this might come across as a more technical post than I normally throw at you. Still, I did something exciting last night that I wanted to share and perhaps educate you about. I built a custom XML-RPC server. And with that statement I know I’ve already lost most of you. Rather…
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People groan whenever I bring up statistics in relation to marketing theory. In reality, though, most marketing decisions are made based on numbers. Without some level of smart statistical analysis, you can’t make an informed decision based on your data and all of those research dollars are wasted. Given, the case study I posted yesterday…
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Understanding the Bayesian average is one thing. Understanding how to calculate it is something different. Understanding how to apply it is something in a whole other league. So here’s a quick and simple case study regarding product feedback and comparing aggregate product ratings using Bayesian statistics. Situation Your widget factory produces three different widgets and…
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A traditional average is easy to understand. If you take a group of people, add their heights together and divide by the number of people in the group, you know the average height. A simple average is a relatively easy way to create a prediction for future behavior – in many cases, you can reasonably…
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Most statistics are based on solid, static data. The average for a group of numbers is independent of what numbers are actually included in the group. Statistics give us a snapshot of our data so we can make high-level decisions based on it without knowing the details of each discrete measurement. This simplicity makes statistics…
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In our careers as marketers we are often presented with problems that require some kind of statistical analysis. One of the most frequently-faced issues is that of content or quality ratings. Let’s say your company produces 5 different widgets. You ask 100 of your customers to rate these widgets and ask them to rate all…