Last week I had the opportunity to deliver a keynote at eTail West in Palm Desert where I spoke to retailers about how they can maximize revenues by using the collective intelligence of their Web site visitors to personalize the customer experience in real-time. I chose this session topic because increasingly, brands are struggling to [...]

The final installment in the 4-part series, “My Search Sucks,” discussing why search, well, sucks.
Over the past few weeks, we’ve explored how there are three key principles that explain why site search just doesn’t perform like we expect it to and what we can consider to help mitigate this.  So far, we’ve learned that:

The critical [...]

There are three key principles that explain why site search just doesn’t perform like we expect it to. Over the next few weeks, I’ll dive deeper into each issue surrounding traditional search and offer my insights and experiences to help you understand why your search sucks, and how you can improve it.

The central focus of Gartner’s Symposium/ITxpo this week in Orlando is all about implementing what they’ve recently dubbed as a “pattern-based strategy”. According to Gartner, a pattern-based strategy “provides a framework to proactively seek, model and adapt to leading indicators, often-termed ‘weak’ signals that form patterns in the marketplace.”

According to a new consumer privacy study by the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology at UC Berkeley, and the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, two-thirds of Americans object to online tracking by advertisers. The study is apparently the first national telephone survey that explores Americans’ opinions about the controversial practice of behavioral targeting.

On the internet today, people seem to be able to buy just about anything. Have you ever stopped to wonder about that? I mean, I’m not buying personalized garden gnomes, are you? How do these vendors survive? The answer is simple: they’ve put their faith in Long Tail economics and I think its time that [...]