Web Analytics in the movies

So if you thought you were destined to spend the rest of your life explaining what web analytics is to bored-looking people at cocktail parties, think again, because Sony Pictures is about to take the industry mainstream (kinda) with the release of Untraceable, a movie about a serial killer who uses real-time traffic data from site visitors to decide how quickly to kill people. I always knew it was a dark art...

One of the more amusing details about the movie is the location that it was filmed in - none other that Portland, Oregon, home of Webtrends, and, of course, the one and only Eric Peterson. Anything you want to tell us, Eric? ;-)

Comments

[Lars]

The more you engage with the website the more someone suffers -- and this time it's not the visitor suffering due to poor web design.

Despite being filmed in Portland, the green screen in the beginning suggests a different vendor.

On the other hand, I thought most movies were filmed in Canada these days -- even if they're set in the States. And what's in Canada... Gatineau.

The plot thickens!

;-)

[Fulton]

As the text about the movie does state that "real-time traffic data" is being used that kind of limits the number of vendors down to very few.

But the plot is rather lame, any decent bot would have shortened the time for things to occur in seconds. That serial killer would have a hard time!

[Juan Damia]

Heheh...Well Omniture, Webtrends, Clicktracks, Gatineau, Google Analytics and Indextools (among others) when is gonna be ready the "murders beta version"?

[Kelly Rusk]

I wonder what impact this could have on privacy concerns??