As I explained a couple of weeks ago, Houghton Mifflin is doing a behavioral advertising campaign for the book with Platform-A, a division of AOL. (AOL last year bought Tacoda, whose work I describe in the introduction to the book) So, the idea is that we're using the tools and methods of the Numerati to promote the book.

Now I have some details. The campaign, by industry standards, is pretty small. It will deliver some 8 million targeted ads. The first stage, which starts in the next couple of days, will scatter them to a general audience, people in every sort of behavioral tribe imaginable. Some might be romantic movie lovers, others John Deere aficionados. Some may dwell at length on obituary postings. Platform-A will see if any of these groups seem especially interested in the book. They will also note which ads they click on. Some are cheerfully promotional, others much more scary. (One flashing ad says: Meet The Numerati... They've Already Met You.)

On Sept. 15, they will have the data to launch the targeted campaign. They start out with the hypothesis that the two interested groups will be readers of book reviews (the so-called "arts and literature" crowd. I think of them as New Yorker readers) and those interested in "business strategy." Unless the preliminary tests show that another group merits their attention, they'll divide the ads between those two. The business readers will get about 20% more, since they're a larger group.

I should add here, especially since some of the publicity focuses on the creepy and invasive nature of the Numerati, that neither we nor Platform-A will know details about the Web surfers we track. No names, no addresses, no professions. They're anonymous surfers, each defined only by the pattern of the pages he or she visits.

I'm going to post this on the book blog. I'll be covering this in more regular and lurid detail there. But I'll do round-ups on this one.

If you have time to take a look at the ads please leave your thoughts about them. Are some of them offensive? Exaggerated? Do any make you want to interrupt what you're doing and buy the book? Of course, if you supplement your views with information about yourself, that will give us even more data to work with...

Ahh, the Internet and its metrics.

Net Applications, which tracks browser marketshare, has a report up that's tracking Google hour by hour.

So far, Google's a about 1% marketshare.

So good to see Matt Cutts do a post, called When Does Google Chrome Talk to Google.com According to his analysis, so far, so benign.

Lauren Weinstein also did a quick analysis and he seems to agree, with one proviso.

Cutting to the chase, it appears that -- with one exception that I'll discuss below -- Google's Chrome by and large is defined to behave in a conventional manner when it comes to handling of privacy-sensitive data, including the provision of a "private browsing" mode similar to that in the latest version of Internet Explorer.

The only really new privacy-related aspect that may concern some users in Google Chrome appears to be its "Google Suggest" feature tied into the URL address bar. By default this will send information to Google regarding the URLs that you enter directly, to enable URL suggestion data to be returned to the browser from Google. Note though that -- as described on the relevant Google pages -- virtually all of these related features can be disabled by users if they choose to do so.

Speaking with Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Land last night, he mentioned that of course this would change if you install the Google Toolbar, for instance. That does send data back to Google. Or search, as well.

But, I said, those were my idea! I urged Bruce and Jon to use their own names in the blogs. It was a way to build their personal brands. Yes, but who looks for a Nussbaum or (tougher for Google) a Fine? Well, I said, I'd bet plenty of people look for NYT brands like Friedman and Dowd. It's in Nussbaum and Fine's interest to have their own brands, and not just be the interchangeable BusinessWeek person covering one thing or another.

But what happens to BW if they leave? she asked. They take their brands with them, I said, and BusinessWeek encourages others to build personal brands. We went back and forth. I never convinced her. But I think this branding battle, between the enterprise and its bloggers, will continue. David Armano, captures some of this dynamic with this illustration:

Now, maybe there are people who bought my book and also bought those. I should alert them, and others, that anyone capable of reading those books will learn next to nothing about math in mine. It's written for a general interest audience. There's not one formula in the book, not one Greek letter. I issue a stark warning in my book blog. (My fear is that they'll buy my book expecting sophisticated math, be disappointed not to find any, and then trash it to their friends and on blogs.)

The Amazon recommendations are entirely different. They point to popular books, like Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational Dan Roam's The Back of the Napkin.

What's the difference between the two approaches? I can only guess. Let's assume that they're being honest, and that buyers of my book actually purchase the ones they list. But which ones best represent the readership? It would seem to me that B&N has a set of key words associated with mine (mathematics, calculus, etc) and it links mine to books with similar tags. Amazon, by contrast, appears to pick the books that sell the best. (Irrational and Napkin are both best sellers.) It's not a sophisticated formula. But it makes more sense for me--and for Amazon.

I've been asked to give BW colleagues a how-to on blogging next week. This is for the basic stuff that Jeff Jarvis zipped past when he tackled the more substantive issues here last spring. So, we'll go over: 1) How to set up an aggregator page (and which ones to choose), 2) How to follow what others are writing about you, and 3)how to optimize a blog post for search engines. (I'm not the expert on that part.)

I agreed to all this. And now I'm coming to grips with the sad fact that I sort of figured this stuff out about three years ago, and a lot of what I "know" dates from blogging's Pleistocene era.

So, any advice? What are your favorite aggregators? (I use Google Reader and Netvibes, and have a long-ignored MyYahoo page) Any good widgets for tracking links to blogs?... This reminds me, I chatted yesterday with our SEO guru--and she told me that Blogspotting was an absolutely miserable name for the Google world. Hurt my feelings a little.

It's the first election that they've done this. Still, what a doozy of a time to do it, with all the privacy issues hanging around.

There's also an excerpt from the Introduction, essentially the first five pages of the book.

The package also includes a narrated slide show, where I try to connect the dots between F.W. Taylor, the pioneer in scientific management, and the current Numerati at IBM. Then there's the podcast, where I chat with Executive Editor John Byrne. More details on TheNumerati.net

This can't be good. Isn't that kind of approach basically the first thing you would think of after taking over a company? But it's so obvious and so limited in how much it can wring out of the potential of the whole property that naturally you would think, oh hey, I need to focus on coming up with something else, something bigger, something more innovative.

So, after nearly two years (can it be that long?) of trying to come up with something else, they're back to this? Yikes....

But what caught my attention was that the company's making pretty good money for its size. Hall writes that Mixi has 15 million total members. That's dwarfed of course by MySpace's 122 million.

But here's what's interesting. For the fiscal year ended March 2008, Mixi posted revenues of $88 million. By comparison, for the fiscal year ended June 2008, MySpace had sales of $606 million, estimates Goldman Sachs. So Mixi is making $5.87 a person, while MySpace is making $4.97. Not bad, for a company I frankly had never paid attention to.

Here's a video I did with Peter Elstrom about the book. It focuses on a group of Numerati at IBM, who are busy trying to build mathematical models of their colleagues.

I'm quite sure I don't follow all of the advice, but it's all interesting. My favorite passage:

"Blog posts are written, not defecated. They show some level of craft, thinking, and continuity beyond the word count mandated by the Owner of Your Plantation."

This week, we examine HP’s earnings, Comcast’s reaction to the FCC, and whether Microsoft’s new ads starring Jerry Seinfeld will solve Vista’s perception problems

The idea of Newscred is that the community will rank the credibility of a whole host of news sources, both mainstream and blogs, and that the cream--the honest, believable and accurate stories--will rise to the top. One trouble is that in a politically polarized society, at least some people will trash the publications they disagree with. People who hate Rupert or the Wall Street Journal editorial page, to pick one example, are likely to pummel the WSJ. The New York Times will also suffer, partly from the same polarization, and partly because readers remember recent scandals there, from the Jason Blair fiasco to credulous pre-Iraq war coverage. But are there more rigorous and thoroughly edited papers in the U.S than those two? If so, I don't know of them.

So the result, it seems to me, will be that the big famous papers, whose gaffes create headlines and whose choices for columnists stir outrage, will sink to the middle of the pack, or lower. Media outlets we barely know will rise. Are NewsCred's algorithms going to adjust for that?

UPDATE: Following a couple of complaints, I changed the headline from "Why NewsCred lacks Cred." The headline was not fair, given that I only posed questions about their methods. I'm sorry I didn't choose my words better.

As Jeff Jarvis notes, we're eating our own dogfood. One fellow twitterer this morning called it "creepy and invasive."

Well, we'll see if that's the case--and also if it works as well as advertised. I'll be blogging about the campaign day by day as we try to figure out which types of Web surfers appear to be interested in the book, and which types of ads they click. I'm planning to cover the bare bones on this blog, and go into far more detail on the other one. If you think it's creepy or scary, or if you have advice on how we should target readers, I'd love to hear your thoughts, either here or there.