- May 2010
- 4 Comments
Online behavior is not offline behavior done online. This is what Joseph Carrabis explains with a scientific rigour in his book: Reading Virtual Minds, Volume I. He takes the reader through a journey from the basics of human behavior and communication to how do users interact with the online world. Once the scientific basis is understood he takes the reader through a set of experiments and case studies on how online behavioral targeting can be used for increasing performance
What I loved the most about the book is that it comes with a scientific approach towards web analytics and behavioral targeting. On one side, Joseph has a strong background in sociology, anthropology, psychology and many other interconnected sciences. On the other side he loves the web. It was just a matter of time before putting them together (around 15 years of research, actually). The Internet is a very complex communication medium. HeĀ really treats it as such.
The book is mind blowing. At every page you find yourself saying out loud “Ohh Common, that can’t be real!” just that at the next page everything is explained and becomes common sense. Imagine this: the behavioral targeting software he built manages to identify if a user who logs in to his account really is him or is it somebody else having access to his login credentials based only by the the way the user interacted with the website. What about managing to identify the field of interest of the visitors just by the way they browsing through a website. Mind blowing, I tell you.






