Going off Search Radar for 2012 Q1

I just used the really handy tools at

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/crawl-access

, clicked Remove URL

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/crawl-access?hl=en&siteUrl=https://decisionstats.com/&tid=removal-list

and submitted http://www.decisionstats.com

and I also modified my robots.txt file to

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Just to make sure- I added the meta tag to each right margin of my blog

“<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”>”

Now for last six months of 2011 as per Analytics, search engines were really generous to me- Giving almost 170 K page views,

Source                            Visits          Pages/Visit
1. google                       58,788                       2.14
2. (direct)                     10,832                       2.24
3. linkedin.com            2,038                       2.50
4. google.com                1,823                       2.15
5. bing                              1,007                      2.04
6. reddit.com                    749                       1.93
7. yahoo                              740                      2.25
8. google.co.in                  576                       2.13
9. search                             572                       2.07

 

I do like to experiment though, and I wonder if search engines just –

1) Make people lazy to bookmark or type the whole website name in Chrome/Opera  toolbars

2) Help disguise sources of traffic by encrypted search terms

3) Help disguise corporate traffic watchers and aggregators

So I am giving all spiders a leave for Q1 2012. I am interested in seeing impact of this on my traffic , and I suspect that the curves would not be as linear as I think.

Is search engine optimization over rated? Let the data decide…. 🙂

I am also interested in seeing how social sharing can impact traffic in the absence of search engine interaction effects- and whether it is possible to retain a bigger chunk of traffic by reducing SEO efforts and increasing social efforts!

 

SOPA RIP

From http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2012/01/14/obama-administration-responds-we-people-petitions-sopa-and-online-piracy

  1.  Any effort to combat online piracy must guard against the risk of online censorship of lawful activity and must not inhibit innovation by our dynamic businesses large and small (AJ-yup)
  2. We must avoid creating new cybersecurity risks or disrupting the underlying architecture of the Internet.  (AJ-note this may include peer-to-peer browsers, browser extensions for re-routing and newer forms of encryption, or even relocation of internet routers in newer geographies )

We must avoid legislation that drives users to dangerous, unreliable DNS servers and puts next-generation security policies, such as the deployment of DNSSEC, at risk.

While we are strongly committed to the vigorous enforcement of intellectual property rights, existing tools are not strong enough to root out the worst online pirates beyond our borders.

We should never let criminals hide behind a hollow embrace of legitimate American values

and

We should all be committed to working with all interested constituencies to develop new legal tools to protect global intellectual property rights without jeopardizing the openness of the Internet. Our hope is that you will bring enthusiasm and know-how to this important challenge

Authored by

Victoria Espinel is Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator at Office of Management and Budget

Aneesh Chopra is the U.S. Chief Technology Officer and Assistant to the President and Associate Director for Technology at the Office of Science and Technology Policy
Howard Schmidt is Special Assistant to the President and Cybersecurity Coordinator for National Security Staff

————————————————————————–

AJ-Why not sponser a hackathon, White House and create a monetary incentive for hackers to suggest secure ways? Atleast a secure dialogue between policy makers and policy  breakers could be a way forward. 

SOPA in its current form is dead. We live to fight another day.

—————————————————————————–

Quote-

Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate. John F K

Revolution Webinar Series #Rstats

Revolution Analytics Webinar-

 

Featured Webinar
David Champagne REGISTER NOW
Presenter David Champagne
CTO, Revolution Analytics
Date Tuesday, December 20th
Time 11:00AM – 11:30AM Pacific 
Click here for the webinar time in your local time zone

Big Data Starts with R

Traditional IT infrastructure is simply unable to meet

the demands of the new “Big Data Analytics” landscape.   Many enterprises are turning to the “R” statistical programming language and Hadoop (both open source projects) as a potential solution. This webinar will introduce the statistical capabilities of R within the Hadoop ecosystem.  We’ll cover:

  • An introduction to new packages developed by Revolution Analytics to facilitate interaction with the data stores HDFS and HBase so that they can be leveraged from the R environment
  • An overview of how to write Map Reduce jobs in R using Hadoop
  • Special considerations that need to be made when working with R and Hadoop.

We’ll also provide additional resources that are available to people interested in integrating R and Hadoop.

 

Upcoming Webinars
Wed, Dec 14th
11:00AM – 11:30AM PT
Revolution R Enterprise – 100% R and MoreR users already know why the R language is the lingua franca of statisticians today: because it’s the most powerful statistical language in the world. Revolution Analytics builds on the power of open source R, and adds performance, productivity and integration features to create Revolution R Enterprise. In this webinar, author and blogger David Smith will introduce the additional capabilities of Revolution R Enterprise.
 Archived Webinars-
Revolution Webinar: New Features in Revolution R Enterprise 5.0 (including RevoScaleR) to Support Scalable Data AnalysisRevolution R Enterprise 5.0 is Revolution Analytics’ scalable analytics platform.  At its core is Revolution Analytics’ enhanced Distribution of R, the world’s most widely-used project for statistical computing.  In this webinar, Dr. Ranney will discuss new features and show examples of the new functionality, which extend the platform’s usability, integration and scalability

 

Product Review – Revolution R 5.0

So I got the email from Revolution R. Version 5.0 is ready for download, and unlike half hearted attempts by many software companies they make it easy for the academics and researchers to get their free copy. Free as in speech and free as in beer.

Some thoughts-

1) R ‘s memory problem is now an issue of marketing and branding. Revolution Analytics has definitely bridged this gap technically  beautifully and I quote from their documentation-

The primary advantage 64-bit architectures bring to R is an increase in the amount of memory available to a given R process.
The first benefit of that increase is an increase in the size of data objects you can create. For example, on most 32-bit versions of R, the largest data object you can create is roughly 3GB; attempts to create 4GB objects result in errors with the message “cannot allocate vector of length xxxx.”
On 64-bit versions of R, you can generally create larger data objects, up to R’s current hard limit of 231 􀀀 1 elements in a vector (about 2 billion elements). The functions memory.size and memory.limit help you manage the memory used byWindows versions of R.
In 64-bit Revolution R Enterprise, R sets the memory limit by default to the amount of physical RAM minus half a gigabyte, so that, for example, on a machine with 8GB of RAM, the default memory limit is 7.5GB:

2) The User Interface is best shown as below or at  https://docs.google.com/presentation/pub?id=1V_G7r0aBR3I5SktSOenhnhuqkHThne6fMxly_-4i8Ag&start=false&loop=false&delayms=3000

-(but I am still hoping for the GUI ,Revolution Analytics promised us for Christmas)

3) The partnership with Microsoft HPC is quite awesome given Microsoft’s track record in enterprise software penetration

but I am also interested in knowing more about the Oracle version of R and what it will do there.

Statistics on Social Media

Some official statistics on social media from the owners themselves

1) Facebook-

http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics

Date -17 Nov 2011

Statistics

People on Facebook

Interview Scott Gidley CTO and Founder, DataFlux

Here is an interview with Scott Gidley, CTO and co-founder of leading data quality ccompany DataFlux . DataFlux is a part of SAS Institute and in 2011 acquired Baseline Consulting besides launching the latest version of their Master Data Management  product. Continue reading “Interview Scott Gidley CTO and Founder, DataFlux”

Interview Beth Schultz Editor AllAnalytics.com

Here is an interview with Beth Scultz Editor in Chief, AllAnalytics.com .

Allanalytics.com http://www.allanalytics.com/ is the new online community on Predictive Analytics, and its a bit different in emphasizing quality more than just quantity. Beth is veteran in tech journalism and communities.

Ajay-Describe your journey in technology journalism and communication. What are the other online communities that you have been involved with?

Beth- I’m a longtime IT journalist, having begun my career covering the telecommunications industry at the brink of AT&T’s divestiture — many eons ago. Over the years, I’ve covered the rise of internal corporate networking; the advent of the Internet and creation of the Web for business purposes; the evolution of Web technology for use in building intranets, extranets, and e-commerce sites; the move toward a highly dynamic next-generation IT infrastructure that we now call cloud computing; and development of myriad enterprise applications, including business intelligence and the analytics surrounding them. I have been involved in developing online B2B communities primarily around next-generation enterprise IT infrastructure and applications. In addition, Shawn Hessinger, our community editor, has been involved in myriad Web sites aimed at creating community for small business owners.

 Ajay- Technology geeks get all the money while journalists get a story. Comments please

Beth- Great technology geeks — those being the ones with technology smarts as well as business savvy — do stand to make a lot of money. And some pursue that to all ends (with many entrepreneurs gunning for the acquisition) while others more or less fall into it. Few journalists, at least few tech journalists, have big dollars in mind. The gratification for journalists comes in being able to meet these folks, hear and deliver their stories — as appropriate — and help explain what makes this particular technology geek developing this certain type of product or service worth paying attention to.

 Ajay- Describe what you are trying to achieve with the All Analytics community and how it seeks to differentiate itself with other players in this space.

 Beth- With AllAnaltyics.com, we’re concentrating on creating the go-to site for CXOs, IT professionals, line-of-business managers, and other professionals to share best practices, concrete experiences, and research about data analytics, business intelligence, information optimization, and risk management, among many other topics. We differentiate ourself by featuring excellent editorial content from a top-notch group of bloggers, access to industry experts through weekly chats, ongoing lively and engaging message board discussions, and biweekly debates.

We’re a new property, and clearly in rapid building mode. However, we’ve already secured some of the industry’s most respected BI/analytics experts to participate as bloggers. For example, a small sampling of our current lineup includes the always-intrigueing John Barnes, a science fiction novelist and statistics guru; Sandra Gittlen, a longtime IT journalist with an affinity for BI coverage; Olivia Parr-Rud, an internationally recognized expert in BI and organizational alignment; Tom Redman, a well-known data-quality expert; and Steve Williams, a leading BI strategy consultant. I blog daily as well, and in particular love to share firsthand experiences of how organizations are benefiting from the use of BI, analytics, data warehousing, etc. We’ve featured inside looks at analytics initiatives at companies such as 1-800-Flowers.com, Oberweis Dairy, the Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden, and Thomson Reuters, for example.

In addition, we’ve hosted instant e-chats with Web and social media experts Joe Stanganelli and Pierre DeBois, and this Friday, Aug. 26, at 3 p.m. ET we’ll be hosting an e-chat with Marshall Sponder, Web metrics guru and author of the newly published book, Social Media Analytics: Effective Tools for Building, Interpreting, and Using Metrics. (Readers interested in participating in the chat do need to fill out a quick registration form, available here http://www.allanalytics.com/register.asp . The chat is available here http://www.allanalytics.com/messages.asp?piddl_msgthreadid=241039&piddl_msgid=439898#msg_439898 .

Experts participating in our biweekly debate series, called Point/Counterpoint, have broached topics such as BI in the cloud, mobile BI and whether an analytics culture is truly possible to build.

Ajay-  What are some tips you would like to share about writing tech stories to aspiring bloggers.

Beth- I suppose my best advice is this: Don’t write about technology for technology’s sake. Always strive to tell the audience why they should care about a particular technology, product, or service. How might a reader use it to his or her company’s advantage, and what are the potential benefits? Improved productivity, increased revenue, better customer service? Providing anecdotal evidence goes a long way toward delivering that message, as well.

Ajay- What are the other IT world websites that have made a mark on the internet.

Beth- I’d be remiss if I didn’t give a shout out to UBM TechWeb sites, including InformationWeek, which has long charted the use of IT within the enterprise; Dark Reading, a great source for folks interested in securing an enterprise’s information assets; and Light Reading, which takes the pulse of the telecom industry.

 Biography- 

Beth Schultz has more than two decades of experience as an IT writer and editor. Most recently, she brought her expertise to bear writing thought-provoking editorial and marketing materials on a variety of technology topics for leading IT publications and industry players. Previously, she oversaw multimedia content development, writing and editing for special feature packages at Network World. Beth has a keen ability to identify business and technology trends, developing expertise through in-depth analysis and early-adopter case studies. Over the years, she has earned more than a dozen national and regional editorial excellence awards for special issues from American Business Media, American Society of Business Press Editors, Folio.net, and others.

 

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