There is one question weighing on almost every marketer’s mind, or at least should be: what is better, quality of content or the quantity produced? The debate is ongoing and seems to be picking up momentum, but is there a clear and definitive answer to this question? … No. The answer is that simple."

What is Hummingbird? How big a change is it? Andrew Girdwood, Media Innovations Director at LBi 

Hummingbird isn’t an algorithm update. It’s a new algorithm and that’s incredible. It’s incredible because it’s a huge change and no one noticed.

Sure, there was some odd behaviour and some ripples over the last month but they’re all too common in search and I don’t know a single expert who looked at them and came to the conclusion Google had dropped its old algorithm entirely in favour of a new.

In fairness, the Hummingbird algorithm uses many of the old rules, weights, filters and systems of the old.

But the PRISM spin taps into fears and worries over keeping data secure from prying eyes — in this case, government agencies.

As far as deploying the prevention program, Egnyte CEO Vineet Jain explained in the announcement on Wednesday that "businesses want to combine the simplicity and ease-of-use associated with cloud-file sharing with the security and privacy of their own infrastructure."

When asked what they are most concerned about, marketers tended to rank proving ROI as their 3rd-biggest concern behind reaching customers and understanding whether campaigns are working. For digital marketers, though, demonstrating ROI ranked second behind reaching customers.

Sixty-four percent of respondents said they clear cookies and browser histories to avoid detection, and a surprising 14 percent said they go as far as encrypting email and using virtual networks that disguise IP addresses to duck surveillance.

Read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/business/news/consumers-seek-ways-to-avoid-data-mining-704378/#ixzz2fjmzIC2e

It seems like data and the ability to use data is the secret sauce in so many of the big success stories. Look at Google. They managed to think of the entire web as their data source, and have earned quite a bit of respect and advertising money for their chore of organizing it like a huge-ass free library for our benefit. That took some serious data handling and modeling know-how.

A data scientist needs good communications skills, and the Zipfian course addresses this requirement. "At the end of this project, not only do you have a full data science project under your belt, but we also require you to write up and present your results, because your insight is only as good as how effectively you can communicate it," Orban said. "If you’re talking about complicated predictive models, you need to not only understand how they work, but also be able to explain how they work in layman’s terms so that people can understand them and get on board."

With the new segmentation functionality beginning to roll out to GA accounts, let’s take a look into the Advanced sections of the updated Advanced Segments functionality, Conditions, and Sequences.

“Technical advances and digital connectivity are taken for granted by people at work, while driving or exchanging information with friends. Only homes seem to be 30 years behind current technology. We are filling this digital gap at home,” Vesper stated.

It’s a very simple idea, but A/B testing runs into a lot of resistance. Most people don’t know how to do it properly, and in the past, it has required people to enlist the support of web developers — a scarce resource for many companies, said Siroker, who was director of analytics for the 2008 Obama campaign and has a new book out entitled, “A/B Testing: The most powerful way to turn clicks into customers.”
Read more at http://venturebeat.com/2013/09/10/your-company-needs-a-champion-for-ab-testing-not-ab-testing/#iZIzcvRtC83AWoVI.99