So, these are the new digs. If you’re following over from the old blog, you get it. If you’re just now discovering me, I won’t bore you with all the gory details up front. Thanks for being here though.
Personal Detail: Occupation
Technical Business Analyst for ChaCha Search, inc.
This is possibly the most awesome job I’ve ever had. Moves fast, pretty challenging, essentially the culture of a startup with the funding of a much larger company. What exactly does a technical business analyst do? Well, as I said, it moves at the speed of a startup so one week I’m in charge of looking at web site analytics to figure out how to optimize getting expensive ads in front of people who are more-likely to click on them, and cheaper ads in front of people who aren’t. The next week, I’m studying web traffic patterns to figure out which of our market affiliates are just trying to cheat our referral system by identify who is a bot and who isn’t by their traffic patters. Think about this: if you’re in a chat room, you can intuitively tell if the person you’re talking to is a real person or a pr0n bot. Same holds true looking at site behavior. The trick is, can you with detail, explain HOW you know know this, so that you can teach a computer to recognize bots? Not so easy, and nobody has cracked it yet. I know, because I looked for a solution.
Now, currently, I’m in charge of analyzing ChaCha’s integration with the new Iris application. It’s Siri for Android phones. (Get it? Siri spelled backwards is Iris?) So, basically, every day I get a list of everything everyone asked their phones to do the day before (about 20,000 queries or so). Then, as fast as I can, I run through the responses, pull out large chunks of answers Iris got wrong, try to find commonalities in WHY she got them wrong, and then write this up so the engineers can fix it before the next batch of questions arrive tomorrow morning.
Or, more accurately, as Mr. Jones told me this morning, my job is to “find out how this happened, and make sure it doesn’t happen again!”
