THE Y-AXIS by Rajesh Kumar

What is known about you : That’s the question I left in my teaser last time. A lot , is my answer. It is widely known that most sites, including commercial sites analyze visitor data for references. Marketing departments do analysis of what is drawing visitors to the site, what they are buying and what they are not. This data is used to manipulate content and offerings and plan promotions, pretty much as the shelf-movement data is used in FMCG companies to analyze buying behavior. Welcome to web traffic analytics. Blogmeisters will do well to learn a leaf or two out of this practice. But you can give appropriate cues only if you know who your visitors are. On the left side panel, you would find a greeting message, which also tries to guess your city and country, and in quite likelihood, would have got it right. Blog as a medium is not so evolved at this point to natively allow dynamic content generation. But the day is not very far off, and even if you do not know the visitor profile, ...

In my next post, we would cover what information ordinary looking website such as this blog gather about you, and what they know about you, most of which you never thought is being available to anyone. Also, how this information is being used for better targetting. Beware, Big Brother is watching you, and unfortunately, it is largely available free of cost. Somewhat like Google.com, which on Indian Independence Day ( 15 August 2006), not just figured out that I am from India, directed me to Google.co.in where it offered me Independence Day greetings!!! I shall be back with more.

Finally, the Blogging Capital of India, Chennai is having its own bloggers meet. Titled BlogCamp, it will be held in the campus of IIT Madras. Some of the stars of blogosphere, such as Robert Scoble (former employee of Microsoft, currently VP of Podtech and perhaps the best known corporate blogger) are likely to be present apart from our own desi stars. The event itself is perhaps the first of its kind in India. The details are available at the event website, http://www.blogcamp.in

I finally read Freakonomics the fourth time!. As I have mentioned in my previous post, this title is an international bestseller. Levitt is an accomplished economist, and Dubner is a journalist. The title gives the impression that this is an economics book and you would be burdened with intepreting curves and lines. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Read the complete title carefully, it reads ' FREAKONOMICS- A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything ' This book analyses some day to day phenomena in life which we tend to ignore. The authors have applied some statistical techniques to analyse some situations/happenings and that's about it of the Economics. (But then, statistical tools are used in studying genes as well, and that does not make genetics a subfield of Economics!). The only term from the field of economics is the the role of 'reward' on our actions and what are these rewards. Example, what is the correlation between a lawsuit of th...

I have read Freakanomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (by Levitt & Dubner) three times so far. Frankly, still trying to figure out what this book is about! Wait till I gather my thoughts. Should not be very long, possibly this very week.

In 1999, Carlos Ghosn ( Rhyming with Phone) was among the leaders at Renault. He had a well established reputation of an achiever, having worked in Michelin as well as Renault. At that time, Nissan was struggling to stay afloat. Nissan and Renault came into an alliance in which Renault took a 44 % stake in Nissan, and Carlos was marshalled off to Japan to change Nissan's fortunes. He took over as COO and later the CEO of Nissan.That explains the context of title of the book. Born in an Brazillian family of Lebenese descent, Ghosn was a brilliant student and received his advanced education in France. This book is co-authored with Phillipe Ries and was originally written in French. Under Ghosn's leadership, there has been a stark change in Nissan's fortunes. So much so that Renault called him back to lead Renualt as CEO, while holding charge as CEO of Nissan. Today he is a widely respected name in business transformation. When there is talk of a business transformation of t...