The unwisdom of the crowd: marketing, metrics & machine learning

“Vanity metrics” is a phrase I’ve heard cropping up a few times recently, in the context of growth engineering, the lean startup movement, and discussions around product lifecycles. In trying to understand what this refers to, I had a small epiphany: people in the digital marketing world are dismissing really important data as “vanity metrics” because they’re only talking about aggregates. But the same data at the level of individuals can make or break a business. If you’re trying to grow, you need to understand this.

Lyric clouds, genre maps and distinctive words

Repost of an article I wrote for the Last.fm blog in 2011. What do different genres of music look like if you visualize the words used in their lyrics? The results are… Eye-opening.