Sunday, December 27, 2009

Saturday, December 19, 2009

Google's Wonder Wheel

I found out about this cool search tool via Powerful Seo tool all bloggers should know about. Google's Wonder Wheel lets you view related search terms. It is interesting to follow the path for a few steps to see where it leads.



Related: Viewing Unpersonalized Google Search Results - PageRank Distribution

Sunday, December 13, 2009

Photo Management and Web Gallery Creation Software

What suggestions to people have for photo management and web gallery creation software. I don't need anything fancy. I have been using Picasa and it is ok. It does take me a long time to do some things though. And the latest version (Picasa 3.0 for Linux) seems to eliminate the main function I liked (replaced with only letting you upload photos to their web site).

Essentially what I have been doing is


  • putting the photos I want in this gallery in one folder (these are the high resolution unedited photos)

  • cropping the some of the photos

  • using Picasa's make a web page feature (which automatically created thumbnails and let me set the maximum size of photos [say 800 pixels] and it reduced the image size - for web display)

  • it also created pages for each of the photos (the idea is you could just upload the resulting files (html and jpg) to your site and you had a live web page



I like this model. I want to keep the photos on my Curious Cat Travels site - not some third party site (like Picasa Web, Flickr...). The most annoying thing about old process was I had to manually edit each page and the html Picasa generated wasn't really what I needed - so I just cut out a portion of the html from each page and pasted it into the template I had for my photo galleries.

Does anyone have suggestions for the best tools to do this using Linux?

I am installing digikam, now and will try it out.

Related: Curious Cat Travel Photo Blog - Using Your Digital Camera

Saturday, December 05, 2009

Interactions and Data Analysis

Re: Context Matters

Multivariate testing is great. And it a great way to determine interactive factors - which are essentially not possible to determine with one variable at a time testing (though a smart person can see indications within this type to view them).

Your example though seems to largely be about properly stratifying the data for optimization. While it is always difficult to tell with short examples it seems like it may well be that you have 2 different audiences and a solution that, for example, intercepts the search engine traffic and gives them some context might help a lot (you see this on many blogs where they say - "I see you find us search on X - you may also be interested in Y...

But the biggest point I think your story illustrates is the importance of the experimenter. They need to think. Their role is not just to calculate some numbers and whatever number is higher wins. George Box: "it’s not about proving a theorem, it's about being curious about things. There aren't enough people who will apply [DOE] as a way of finding things out."

Related: YouTube Uses Multivariate Experiment To Improve Sign-ups 15% - Using Design of Experiments - Statistics for Experimenters