Whit Andrews

My colleague Brian Prentice, a sharp and distinguished practitioner of our occult trade, is utterly whelmed by the possibility of an exciting new operating system, at least insofar as evidence for its delivery is currently available mostly via a spare blog post.
Many of my colleagues sort of threw up their hands at the Google [...]

[Read more →]

Gartner’s redoubtable Bill Gassman has published a new research note on Google Analytics. It’s a lengthy, careful, detailed look at the Google Analytics product that serves as an effective window into the state of the current Web site analytics market. (Warning on that click — Bill’s note is behind the paywall. Sorry, folks; that’s how [...]

[Read more →]

It will come as no surprise to our clients or fans (we have fans!) that our internal discussion process is fecund but sometimes a tad groping. I’m looking at a 90+ message thread view of our (main) email conversation on Google Chrome OS that contains terse pith from some colleagues and scrollworthy analysis from others. [...]

[Read more →]

As the lead analyst for Google at Gartner, it is my responsibility to watch over our coverage and understand how we examine this massively complex, massively ambitious software vendor. My colleague Ray Valdes is the sort of person one desperately looks to at a time like this. He has posted his opinion of Chrome OS [...]

[Read more →]

I gotta admit I had to read this remarkable blog entry on philosophy and e-discovery multiple times and I will probably do it again. The entry at times reads like the most self-conscious columns I wrote in college for the college newspaper, including dismal ruminations on afternoon sunlight and…OK, don’t go look them up, please? [...]

[Read more →]

There you are, minding your own business, and somebody Amazons you before you can even finish installing all the Starbucks cafes to establish the value of your bricks-and-mortar operations. That going to happen to real estate agents? Not if they move fast. But Google’s shoring up its efforts around real estate. Here are the results [...]

[Read more →]

Remember the summer of Star Wars? We geeks were the ones who went more than once, or at least that’s how I remember it. Close Encounters was thinkier. Grownups went to see that on purpose. I only saw The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi once each, but I remember there being much [...]

[Read more →]

When you heard something was up about Sarah Palin, what did you do? Did you turn on the TV? Did you click to a newspaper Web site? Did you call a friend? I saw a friend’s tweet and did a hashtag search on Sara Palin. I used to work at a newspaper; I counted success [...]

[Read more →]

A friend of mine named Neil T. Heffernan who’s overseas at a conference on Educational Data Mining just emailed me to tell me that my very own name was bruited about in a Keynote presentation titled “Robust Social Recommendation on the Web: How Trustworthy is Personalization in the Presence of Adversaries?”by Bamshad Mobasher. He apparently [...]

[Read more →]

The New York Law Journal has a workmanlike and comprehensive look at reasons to worry about social media (not a lot of leavening, but one would not necessarily expect it from this source — the tone is one of risk management, and that’s fair enough). The title, “Social Networking Presents Challenges,” is a little like [...]

[Read more →]