The War On Bullshit

I don’t blog for the money, but for those who do, purported online marketing gurus provide a proliferation of epistemically baseless, if not bogus, advice. I prefer recommendations with some data behind them.

Recent research presented at the International Conference on Information Systems may be of interest. Researchers June Zhu and Bernard Tan of the National University of Singapore reported on three factors that determine the effectiveness of blog advertising: blogger expertise, advertising intent and product involvement. Here is a summary of their results.

Blogger expertise refers to how much the bloggers knows about the item being advertised. Advertising intent refers to whether the recommendation of a product is explicit or implicit, for ex., “You should buy my book” is explicit; “Recently my several of my friends read the last George R. R. Martin book and really like it” is implicit. Product involvement refers to how much consideration one gives a purchase, e.g., buying popcorn at the theater is usually a low-involvement purchase, while buying a car is usually a high-involvement purchase.

The study found that almost opposite between high and low involvement products. For low-involvement products, low-expertise bloggers should be explicit and high-expertise bloggers should be implicit. In contrast, for high-involvement products, low-expertise bloggers should be implicit and it doesn’t matter if high-expertise communicators are explicit or implicit.

The full citation of the paper is as follows. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find an online version to link to.

J. Zhu and B. Tan, “Effectiveness of blog advertising: Impact of communicator expertise, advertising intent, and product involvement,” International Conference on Information Systems, Montreal, Canada, December 2007

It turns out that Facebook’s idea of security is bullshit. Besides all the recent problems with 3rd party apps, you can also bypass photo security be simply deleting one of the URL parameters. Basically, if you look at a picture in an album, and you want to see the other pics in that album, but don’t have permission, you just delete the “&Subj=#########” parameter from the URL. Then you can see the whole album.

I’m not posting this to help all the Facebook stalkers out there. The point is that if everyone finds out about something, Facebook is more likely to fix it. This is not exactly nuanced, expert hacking we’re talking about. It shouldn’t be this easy.

Here is a more comprehensive discussion on the subject.

I’ve often read lists like this one, that suggest the skills IT employers want. Well, today at the Agile Vancouver conference, a room full of agile development employers was asked what they look for. I was expecting “machine learning,” “security,” “mobile applications,” and maybe “artificial intelligence.” Nope.

Here is the list they gave:

I’m not making any claims about the generalizability of this list. I’m just throwing it out there to let you know that maybe some of those popular lists floating about the web are not consistent with what one room full of presidents, CEOs and team leaders spent an hour and a half discussing.