Yesterday I sat in a meeting where someone declared that from just a zip code and year of birth, they can extrapolate all the information a marketing person would need. Huh?
I've never been one to believe statistics. Frankly, Mark Twain probably said it best when he said the bit about three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies and statistics. I figure marketers are usually full of crap when they think they know who you are, especially if they're depending on user-provided information, such as registration for online news sites. As far as the NY Times is concerned, I'm a 80-year-old Asian woman making $100K a year. Hey, they lie, so can I. I prefer to remain somewhat of an enigma, thankyouverymuch.
But it turns out I've been giving away more than I thought on my blog.
A new computer program can determine the sex of an author by detecting subtle differences in the words men and women prefer to use.
For instance, female writers tend to choose grammatical terms that apply to personal relationships, such as "for" and "with," more frequently than men do.
[...]
Men, on the other hand, use more numbers, adjectives and determiners - words such as "the," "this" and "that" - because they apparently care more than women do about conveying specific information.
I haven't applied this theory to blogs, because honestly, I just don't feel like counting a bunch of words and putting them in the male/female columns. But I figure if I can find a font that lets me dot the "i"s with little hearts, and finish up that Hello Kitty template, I might be able to wreck the curve a bit. Wish me luck.
For awhile now I have tried to follow the workings of Steven Johnson - I was first introduced to him through his first book - Interface Culture - because of my Survey of Multimedia class a few years ago... then I found out he had a second book - Emergence: The connected lives of ants, brains, cities, and software - and this was something I really wanted to read but just didn't have the time when I first discovered it. I was also lucky enough to see him speak at my own college during a design conferrence during this past school year. I am currently reading Emergence now, finally, and I'm loving every bit of it!
He writes on so much of what I'm interested in right now. The latest thing I found tonight that I wanted to share here was an article he wrote for WIRED called Blog Space. It talks about how everything is connected thanks to blogs and other social software. Definitely worth a read if you are interested in this at all... and if you are at this site then chances are you are quite interested ;)
Just finished reading this excellent post talking about the way social network theory is applied to weblogs. It's not super technical at all, so it's a fairly easy read and easy to understand... very interesting - at least to me since this is the area I've been focusing on lately. I'd love to know what some of you think.
This is another survey on blogging that I've recently come across. This one is currently active, so feel free to head on over and help them out with their research.
I participated in this study a few weeks ago. The questioning period is over and the results are up. The results are semi interesting. It compares current bloggers with "would be" ones too. Worth checking out.
Just read an interesting article over at A List Apart offering tips for writing for the "living web" - how to keep your blog interesting and the importance of updating it all the time. Might be worth a read if you are interested in that sort of thing. It was well put at least.