Information - Man(agement) :: Data Mining :: Psychology :: Future

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I’m just a decent person trying to do some research with google almighty search and they have to confront me with such terrifying messages. No virus found on my system!

Wanna terrify your relatives?

lure them to	http://www.google.com/sorry/
don’t try	http://www.google.com/story/
or	http://www.google.com/scary/
or	http://www.google.com/horror/

english version of google sorry

I encourage my readers to make a screenshot of google sorry in their language, blog about it and send me a trackback or comment or whatever …

Is there one program or online service in the world where you can search for functions or filter menu items? It is very painful if you try to find a function and you aren’t sure where it is “hidden” in the whole menu structure.

Some big companies made efforts and did a really good job to arrange the menu items in a very useable way.

For example:

MS Excel 2007

MS Excel and almost every new Microsoft Office product have this new ribbon structured menu which improves usability and navigation. Anyway there are hundreds of functions you will never find without a good “search for functions” button. Well you could search in the manual. Everybody likes manuals…

Google Analytics

Google Analytics has about 50 menu items in the main menu. Well structured but still painful to find the right report if you aren’t sure where the relevant menu item is.

Ok, you are an expert in Google Analytics and can find the right way through the menu in seconds. Wouldn’t it still be nice to have a filter that blends out the irrelevant menu items, so you can concentrate on the 2-3 items you really need?

Guess who has just received the activation codes for SPSS 15 and Clementine 11.1 with the Textmining for Clementine module. What? You don’t know who or what Clementine is? Check out the latest poll about the most popular data mining tools.

By the way the picture in the header of this blog is made of Clementine Icons, where each icon represents a function or algorithm that you can use to analyse your data.

I’m looking forward to find out what Textmining for Clementine is capable to do for analysis in Competitive Intelligence, SEO and Webmining in general.

SPSS Directions. So many things to learn there in the coming days.

On Tuesday I attended a conference “Trendtag” which is hosted by “Trendbüro” a leading german trend (and future) research company. This years theme was “Karma-Capitalism _ Values instead of Prices”.

One of the speakers was Josephine Green - Head of the Trends and Strategy division at Philips Design. She spoke about the great impact that web 2.0 had on the industry. Since everybody can easily find information about products on the web and discuss them in an adequate community or network, the former consumer becomes a user of a product who gets involved into the production cycle and than becomes a co-producer.

Somewhere in the speech Ms. Green asked the audience to please come up with a better term for this new kind of “user co-producer” wich would not be burdened with the negative connotation which comes with the word consumer. In 1980 published book The Third Wave, Alvin Toffler coined the term prosumer, but as you see it contains the unbeloved term consumer and can nowadays also be interpreted as professional consumer.
So I took the challange and after 5 minutes of thinking and writing I had the very simple but appealing idea of calling them us produser wich is apperantly a combination of producer and user and can not be confused with a professional user because of the “d” in between

In the 6th minute I got a little depressed because I recalled that we live in the age of google and sure there would be somebody who had the same idea before me. But anyway I thought the idea was good enough to go and speak about it with Ms. Green.
She liked it and maybe she’ll use it now in her speeches rather then such monstrous combinations like “user and co-producer”.

Here I’ve got to give credit to somebody who seems to be the first person who used the term produser on the net, Dr. Axel Bruns. Hm.. nice site. I’ll stay a little longer and explore ..