Towse: views from the hill

Ev pointed me to Microsoft adCenter Labs which has this nifty beta tool, Demographics Prediction that alleges to predict “a customer’s age, gender, and other demographic information according to his or her online behavior—that is, from search queries and webpage views.”

Want to take it for a spin? Pop in a search or a URL and well, here, let me show you.

Say someone heads off to Miss Snark’s blog: http://misssnark.blogspot.com/. What does that foray out on the Web tell the predictors at the Labs about the person?

Gender Unknown with following probability:

:0.51 male
:0.49 female
Age: <18 Oriented with following distribution: [distribution set out]

Seems the usual <18 demographic should clock in at 9.8%, but for Miss Snark clocks in at 25.06%, the highest percentage of any of the age groups.

Try another: Preditors & Editors: http://www.anotherealm.com/prededitors/.

:0.44 male
:0.56 female
Age: 18-24. but hard to call, really. the <18 demographic clocks in at 20.34%, the 18-24 at 21.22%, well, you get the idea. The distribution is pretty even.

So what does this all do for you? If you’re someone looking to place ads for guy stuff aimed at the 18-24 age bracket, it behooves you to put those ads on Web sites that attract 18-24 year old guys.

Ev has been playing around to see how wildly he can skew the results by searching for things that might be obviously girl stuff or boy stuff. His most skewed was “prom dress” which clocked in with 82% female.

I searched /brangelina/ and /brad pitt/ and /angelina jolie/. Amazed I was to find out that the /brad pitt/ search was a more-likely female search and the /angelina jolie/ search was a more-likely male search.

/ethnic beads/ came up 83% female.

Lars mentions in the comments tail that a search for “Ruby on Rails” is 93% male.

Heh.

[ref: evhead is tinkering]

NNDB: Tracking the entire world:

What is NNDB?

Eventually, we will have synopses and analyses of creative works by the people in the database, including their books, films, and recordings.

Found this while I was helping someone answer a question about a Michael Korda quote. She had two Michael Kordas on her radar: one born in 1919 “who was a famous publisher” and one born in 1933 “a novelist.” Which Michael Korda said those words?

Well, the Michael Korda I knew of was the former Editor-in-Chief, Simon & Schuster, who retired last year at age 72. Korda has also written fiction and non-fiction, which I knew because of titles I handled back in the day when I was worrying about library book stock.

I gave her some links and told her I thought her quote was from Michael Korda (1933- ) and, specifically, more than likely from a book he’d written titled SUCCESS! How Every Man and Woman Can Achieve It (1977).

I went off wandering trying to find this other Michael Korda who also had something to do with publishing.

Never found him, but I did find NNDB, which seems from a quick trial run to be a useful tool.

The quote she was trying to pin down?

Success on any major scale requires you to accept responsibility. In the final analysis, the one quality that all successful people have is the ability to take responsibility.

Quotiki

Be interesting to see, as Quotiki evolves, whether general misinformation about quotations and attributions gets picked up as gospel.

Case in point: a recent discussion on ADS-L discussing “Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.”

Oft times attributed to Groucho Marx, this quote is now attributed to Tony Oettinger, a professor with interests in computational linguistics with a 1966 cite.

The gang of word huggers on the ADS-L list are merrily trying to antedate the quote and/or confirm it with Oettinger.

[snagged from Cygnoir‘s del.icio.us list.]

The Web is a Wonder.

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