"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics" – Mark Twain
Have been failing to keep the blogmonster fed over the last few days because my wife’s been in hospital with appendicitis. People (mostly who’ve never been there) keep telling us how lucky we are to have St Mary’s hospital, Paddington, so nearby. All I can say that if this is how a well-run NHS hospital … Read more
There’s a great post over on Avinash Kaushik’s blog about how to measure the success of a blog – which entails much more than just measuring traffic. Avinash distils the measurement down to the following six items (slightly paraphrased by me): So what have you actually contributed (how much content have you created)? Is anyone … Read more
Last Thursday, Microsoft took the beta badge off Windows Live Search and installed it as the search engine behind MSN.com. It’s pretty good – not quite as fast as Google (which is bad), but better looking and more functional in certain areas (such as image search). Try it at search.live.com. The reason it’s worthy of mention … Read more
Was intrigued and amused to see an ex-colleague of mine, Steve Johnston, on the BBC programme Dragon’s Den on Thursday night, pitching his StoryCode start-up. Steve was admirably sanguine about the moderate savaging he got on the show – at least his idea was deemed interesting enough to get one of the four or so 15-minute … Read more
This just in (well, it came in at about 10pm UK time last night, but I was watching thirtysomething) – Intuit will be incorporating Google functionality (mainly AdWords and Froogle, by the looks of things) into its next version of Quickbooks. I’m a big Quickbooks fan – we use it to manage the books for … Read more
It looks like this: The picture above is a map of the blogosphere from Matthew Hurst’s fascinating Data Mining blog. Here’s Matthew’s description of the above image: The dark edges show the reciprocal links (where A has cited B and B has cited A), the lighter edges indicate a-reciprocal links. The larger, denser area of … Read more
Presentation Zen is a blog I’ve been following for some time; it’s written by Garr Reynolds, who is an evangelist for clear visual communications – presentation skills, in other words. In an interesting post from April this year, Garr talks about the increasing wave of “slideuments” – documents masquerading as collections of slides. You know … Read more
No, not the UK credit card. Nor the shop on Wigmore Street in London where I bought my wife a very nice chandelier a few years ago. Mint is a nice little web stats app written by Shaun Inman. Unusually for such things in this day and age, it’s not a hosted service but a little … Read more
Following on from my previous post on this topic, I’m amused to see this innovative application of data visualization via Juice Analytics. I sure could have done with this when my own daughter was younger (now, at 19 months, her daily schedule is something that you can actually keep in your head without needing to … Read more
There’s an interesting post over on Marketing & Graphic Design ROI which raises the point that web analytics dashboards can do more harm than good in some cases, by encouraging users to focus on (and get excited about) metrics that are not necessarily the most important ones that they should be measuring (Joseph cites an example … Read more