Fascinating Post Regards DPI

There is a fascinating post with regards Deep Packet Inspection and the ability to monitor the lines of internet users as opposed to their software?

The advertising benefits are intriguing, but it really is blurring the lines of acceptable targeting and pure targeting.

Permission based marketing is an ethically sound marketing tactic, online cookies is a controllable method of targeting to a degree. This method though has highly questionable legitimacy as a marketing tactic?

I'll be watching this development with interest!

Read the article here

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Facebook Stats Part 1 - 17% of UK on Facebook???

Well what is the level of penetration of Facebook in the UK?

Well according to Facebook there are 10, 378,460 18+ adults on the site who are located in the UK, and as of July 07 there were 60,766,238 people living in the UK, so a potential 17% of the UK population is on Facebook.

Of course this does not take into account the duplicate and false profiles which litter facebook.

That said If you consider all age groups on Facebook the figure goes up to 11,218,260!!!

When I first looked into the Facebook stats a year ago the number was just over 6,000,000 and as of May this year according to ALEXA Facebook finally overtook Myspace online.

That said, an interesting post on Ilovedata back in Feb discussed the possibility of seasonal patterns developing on facebook, whats great about this article is the impressive growth graphs...take a look

I will delve into more Facebook stats later on....oh the excitement.......

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Firefox 3 is here!

Downloaded Firefox 3 and slowly getting used to it.

Love the new url bar "awesome bar". But even better is the flexibility to revert back to the old feature.

There's a great article about other firefox 3 features here at Lifehacker.com

Or just download it here

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The key to blogging is keeping it up to date, and fresh. Well here i go, wish me luck!

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Wow just got a sniff of Google Health over at Search Land. Talk about Google going into all areas of your life. Distinctly aimed at the US market, but i must admit that this online development really intrigues me. Self diagnosis is at an all time high, not always accurate i might add, but the idea of a Google algorithm giving possible outcomes really does intrigue me.

Hope the NHS here are looking into this in detail!!

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Cookies

I recently read that 42% of people clean their computers of cookies at least once a week. This piece of information came from a survey run byTRUSTe .

What’s fascinating about this survey is the statement that only 15% of people never cleaned cookies, opting for the cookie to time out or be over written. Cookies are a vital ingredient for any online business which is seeking to improve their targeting and understanding of conversion, campaigns and not least the user journey among a mirad of other many things......

Now I doubt personally if this survey could be regarded as representative of the whole online world, but with security and privacy being the main drivers for all online users - cookie awareness will continue to grow. Consider the outcries from Facebook’s Beacon initiative?

I think it is a major indicator of the decline in cookie adoption and more importantly it raises big questions with regards to our chosen methods of improving targeting online.

Behavioural targeting is a powerful proposition for any online marketer but can its effectiveness be trusted, if user clean out cookies so regularly?

Perhaps it is time for us O M's to think about how to engage our visitors more transparently in the future. Online user are willing to share key information, their likes and dislikes, just take a look at MySpace or Facebook - but only when they want to or they think it will benefit them. So let’s think how we can explain the benefits of cookie tracking for a user?

A cookie category system could be developed, whereby the key components of the cookie are easily understood, not hidden away.

Imagine if when deleting cookies, the cookie contained a read me explaining its purpose, its limitations.

A universal cookie standard could be developed which would enable an easy opt in opt out solution integrated into all browser, so user could easily choose and more important tell the difference between the different cookies and their purpose?

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