Sean Mountcastle

Whether you realize it or not, there are several companies gathering a tremendous amount of data about you. One such company is Acxiom which maintains consumer information on nearly every household in the U.S. (and has branched out to other countries). Acxiom combines tax records and public census data with transactional data from its clients (the corporations you deal with on a daily basis). Using this data, Acxiom has created a product called PersonicX which is a finely-grained household level segmentation system based on consumer and demographic characteristics.

The idea of such a classification system both interests and appalls me quite a bit, so I’ve done some research into the 70 segments and 21 life-stage groups.

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My how time has flown. It’s been four months and a day since I last blogged and I need to get back to it. By now I’ve probably lost all of my subscribers and NetNewsWire doesn’t even recognize it as a dinosaur (I guess that means my blog’s turned into oil — yay for me with it nearing $100/barrel).

I have several unfinished posts stuck here in WordPress and several more rattling around in my head. For those of you who are still hanging around, here are some of the topics:

• The Advanced Ruby Studio (I attended this back in July).
• How to distribute your Ruby app without giving away your source code.
• Performance tuning a networking application (in C).
• Developing for mobile phones (specifically the iPhone and Google’s Android).
• Game programming in Ruby (with and without Rails).
• Interviewing technical candidates.
• Startups.
• Book reviews.

You know how you go to a conference and most of the smart, interesting folks are using Apple hardware? I’ve been noticing a trend among my colleagues at work and those whom I’ve met at user groups and conferences–the very same folks who are at the top of their game developing software also drive Acuras. Coincidence?

Disclaimer: Yes, I drive a 2004 Acura TL and one reason (out of many) that I bought the car was for the technology (bluetooth hands-free-link, for example). Though I’m not conceited enough to consider myself a kick-ass software engineer.

I just took the MIT weblog survey, did you? Help Cameron finish his Ph.D. thesis.

Tristan Louis has an excellent analysis up on his site comparing Yahoo and Google (and Technorati too). His findings are quite interesting and mesh with my ad hoc searching for blogs in both Yahoo and Google. I urge you to go to his site and read his work, but here are the salient points:

# Yahoo! generally does a better job at indexing the blogosphere than Google does. We know they have been working hard to improve their index and here’s proof that they are getting results

# Even if Google is the one with the motto about not doing evil, Yahoo! seems to be the one interested in giving equal opportunity to the little guy: smaller blogs seem to have a better chance of being recognized by Yahoo! than they do of being recognized by Google.

Thus the reason for a higher rank for this unknown blog in Yahoo than in Google.

It looks like the Beta for Rojo has finally ended. I’ve been using the on-line news reader for several weeks now. Unfortunately, there is something about it that I just don’t like. Perhaps I’m spoiled by NetNewsWire and other client-side applications. I think the idea of sharing interesting feeds among your friends/contacts is a good one and the new site-layout is much improved from when I first joined the beta. I guess I just prefer client-side apps for news reading — this is why I never really got into Kinja. Oh well.