What is a "data miner"?

Is it different from just a plain ol' cookie?

[HeyJim]

I had a company contact us about marketing for some of their clients. They had me interested enough to read their TOS. Well, I never got past their first page before I knew there was no way they were getting their claws in to us and our websites.

The TOS was so bad I was less than gracious in telling them to get lost.

Anyway, one of the things I read along the way was references to "data miners" that I'd be putting on selected pages. Just curious to know if data miners are more sinister than cookies or is it just another name for them? It wasn't the reason I tossed the TOS back at them but I'm obviously wondering if the data miner reference was another good reason for dumping them.

Oh, and there was also reference to "imbedded bots". Whatheheck is that!

[ned911]

I am a "data miner" by profession. It's basically looking for patterns within customer information, specifically transaction history. A lot of the work is statistics based - predicting response rate, what products someone is likely to consider for cross/up-sell.

Started in the direct mail world as a way to reduce production costs. The smart companies use it everywhere (Amazon - people who bought this also bought that) including email. Unfortunately the low cost of email/spam is a excuse to ignore targeted messaging.

[AffiliateDreamer]

Hi,

Do you have any recommended readings for people to be a little more informed in this field/science?

[ned911]

The best book is "The New Database Marketing" by David Shepard. Also do a Amazon search for books by Arthur Hughes.