One of the best things about marketing online is that you can collect fine-grained evidence to help you decide where/how to spend money in the future. That's especially true when you're advertising on Google search results pages, because every end-user click and every advertising penny paid is trace...

Thursday I went to hear T. Boone Pickens talk about his bold new energy proposal for the United States. He gave the keynote at the Rocky Mountain Energy Epicenter in Denver (he still knows how to turn on the charm, and attracted a big, enthusiastic crowd). Pickens believes "a fool with a plan can be...

Thought for today: Heaven is where we get all our old dogs back. Over the last few years, there's been lots of talk about web site usability: People have found ways to track user behavior and, based on their findings, modify software so it's easier to work with (thank you, Flickr, Google, and Netfli...

I've written before about the long-tail theory, and how some have questioned the validity of claims made in Chris Anderson's book, where he suggested that "the future of commerce and culture isn't in hits, the high-volume head of a traditional demand curve, but in what used to regarded as misses--th...

Someone, somewhere has sparked the idea that more and more educated, professional women are opting out of the workforce -- primarily to raise children. Only problem is, the hard evidence doesn't really support this. Among others, the Wall Street Journal has reported on this fallacy. In Opting-Out Tr...

On the Talented Apps blog, Mark Bennett posted a discussion about evidence-based management, and how non-traditional techniques can provide important evidence -- maybe even help a manager convert some intangibles into tangibles. Mark was responding to a recent CIO article that described how Steve Ra...

The article Is Google Making Us Stupid? What The Internet is Doing to Our Brains appears in the July/August issue of the Atlantic. As explained in the Good Morning Silicon Valley post Things that make you go "hmm...", the author, Nicholas Carr, is asking whether "with the advent of Google and the In...

Second in a series of posts on how to get more good evidence into the hands of people who can benefit from it (post #1 is here). The starting point for this was the idea that The medium is the message. When someone makes a decision we don't like, it's easy to accuse them of not following the evidenc...

Talent shortages are here to stay, especially wherever engineering is concerned. So tech and energy companies are trying to figure out how to keep highly skilled, experienced people. A recent study examined why women leave the science, engineering, and technology (SET) professions in disproportionat...

Dear Wells Fargo,I heard that you want to surprise and delight your customers, which got me wondering how you measure success at that sort of thing. I've been keeping score here at home, and it looks like you're getting it half right: You did surprise me recently. I'm still waiting for the delightfu...