The Intelligent Web by Gautam Shroff

 Synopsis  

• Describes cutting edge developments in the power and possibilities of the Web
• Explains how Google and other leading companies have developed ever smarter searching and advert placement
• Shows how 'Web intelligence' is emerging from increasingly smart algorithms that can sift, select, aggregate, and weigh up relevant information
• Explains the principles of logic and computer science behind these apparently intelligent procedures
• Considers possible similarities with how the human brain handles data
• Looks at new applications such as self-driving cars

As we use the Web for social networking, shopping, and news, we leave a personal trail. 
These days, linger over a Web page selling lamps, and they will turn up at the advertising margins as you move around the Internet, reminding you, tempting you to make that purchase. Search engines such as Google can now look deep into the data on the Web to pull out instances of the words you are looking for.
And there are pages that collect and assess information to give you a snapshot of changing political opinion. 
These are just basic examples of the growth of "Web intelligence", as increasingly sophisticated algorithms operate on the vast and growing amount of data on the Web, sifting, selecting, comparing, aggregating, correcting; following simple but powerful rules to decide what matters. 
While original optimism for Artificial Intelligence declined, this new kind of machine intelligence is emerging as the Web grows ever larger and more interconnected.
Gautam Shroff takes us on a journey through the computer science of search, natural language, text mining, machine learning, swarm computing, and semantic reasoning, from Watson to self-driving cars. 
This machine intelligence may even mimic at a basic level what happens in the brain.

Readership: Popular science and mathematics readers interested in computer science and artificial intelligence, as well as students of these courses.
[Source: Oxford University Press website.]
 My Comments: 
I completed an online course "Web Intelligence and Big Data" taught by the author a few months back. This book was released towards the ending of the course and I bought a Kindle edition to understand the topics better.
Gautam Shroff has taken a very logical and systematic approach to explain the fascinating area of Web Intelligence.
While the topics in this book are really interesting, the verbose explanations given by the author on many of the concepts were quite confusing. More illustrations would have helped. The book has just about half-a-dozen pictures, which for a content of 300 odd pages on technical topics is quite less.
It will take another reading of the book for me to fully grasp the explanations.
But overall this book is quite a good introduction to Web Intelligence, though not a very light read.

Links:

• Read Chapter 1

Goodreads Rating - 4.2 out of 5 ( 5 Ratings)

 

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Inbound Marketing

Authors:     Brian Halligan, Dharmesh Shah

Published:  2010

Publisher:  John Wiley and Sons

Hardcover: 250 Pages

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The traditional way of marketing is Outbound Marketing where the businesses bombard the prospects with promotional brochures, TV advertisements,  spam mails, telemarketing calls and so on. The authors are of the opinion that  the prospects have become smart enough to avoid such interruptions and get the information they need through online searches. In this book they propose Inbound Marketing as a solution to this problem. Inbound Marketing is all about the businesses creating an effective online presence which results in their "getting found"  by the prospects (vs searching for prospects) through online searches and social media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn etc.

The book consists of  four parts.

Part I - Inbound Marketing

This part stresses the need for matching the way one markets the product with the way the prospects learn about and shop for that product. This can be done through inbound marketing. First and foremost the website of the business must change its marketing mode from a one-way sales message to a collaborative hub for its  marketplace. 

They should  focus on creating communities outside of their web site for people to connect with them and others within the community. 

This “outside” focus will drive people back to the website of the business. 

This involves adding some collaborative tools like a blog and creating lots of compelling content (not  overt sales pitches) which people want to consume. 

This should be followed by creating a presence in  Google,industry blogs, and social media sites. 

Through internet one can  reach many more prospects and much more quickly as compared to traditional mode of communication. 

To take advantage of such a reach and speed, one should think beyond the competitors and create alternatives to conventional marketing. 

Also one should strive to offer the best product/service within the market.

Part II - Get Found by the Prospects

This part offers umpteen number of  useful ideas, tips, tools and techniques for creating a remarkable content and getting discovered in blogosphere, in Google through Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and in social media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon and YouTube.

Part III - Converting Customers

Visitors drawn to the business website need to be converted into leads by encouraging them through some compelling call-to-action to further engage with the business.

Good calls-to-action  involves giving them helpful and useful information to enable them to do their job better or improve their job prospects. 

This can be asking them to register or subscribe for free Webinars, White papers or reports, short consultation sessions, demos, or trial offer etc.

This part also talks about  various ways of nurturing the leads to convert them into customers.

Part IV - Make Better Decisions

Better marketing investment decisions can be made using the Marketing Funnel technique introduced in this part  to define various levels - prospect, lead, opportunity, and customers - and measuring the conversion rates to  calculate the Return on Investment (ROI) of various marketing channels. 

This part also advises the reader on how to hire  marketing staff  and PR agencies for inbound marketing.

Tools to keep tabs on the competition are also dealt in this part.

Finally the book concludes by reinforcing that age of inbound marketing has dawned and the days of outbound marketing are over. 

However inbound marketing requires commitment, patience and continuous learning. The benefits will be slow in coming initially but the floodgates will be opened once the tipping point is reached.

The book consists of 16 short chapters written in a very simple and easy to understand language, illustrated with several real life examples. In every chapter there are recommended measurements to track the progress in inbound marketing journey.

The chapters also have short case studies in inbound marketing. 

These case studies covered  include - the presidential campaign of Barack Obama, the music group The Grateful Dead, Wikipedia, and Google.

As a bonus there is a fairly comprehensive list of 26 Inbound Marketing tips for the Startups.

Overall a very good introduction to Inbound Marketing..

Useful Links:

• Inbound Marketing - Wikipedia Entry
• Hubspot - Website of the company founded by the authors.

 

Web Analytics - An Hour A Day

Author: Avinash Kaushik
Published: 2007
Publisher: Wiley India Pvt. Ltd.

After laying a strong foundation to the subject of Web Analytics in first 5 chapters, the book proceeds further to provide a practitioner's perspective of what it takes to be successful at web analytics. Author who is a well known authority on this domain is lays out a day by day action plan on each day to establish an effective Web Analytics program in 8 months. The scope of this book is pretty vast covering topics like Concepts, Data Analysis, Search Analytics, Measuring Email and Multichannel Marketing, Website Experiment and Testing, Competitive Intelligence and Web 2.0 Analytics. The author lays high stress on taking a customer centric approach towards web analysis. He warns us of several pit falls like totally relying on Clickstream data like page views, path anlaysis etc. He strongly recommends developing a Trinity Approach which focuses on fundamental understanding of the customer experience, so that one can influence the optimal customer behavior which leads to win-win outcome for both customer and the service provider.
A fairly comprehensive book on Web Analytics which evolved out of Author's postings on his popular blog Occam's Razor.
The book is accompanied by a very useful CD which has several presentations and podcasts based on the content of the book.
The book is written in a very easy to understand manner. I strongly recommend it to anyone who wants to develop a good understanding of web analytics.