"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics" – Mark Twain
You be the judge. But here are my grievances: Ridiculous amount of wasted space Terrible visual clutter – users will get bored of the faux-steering wheel within about 10 minutes; everything else is squashed together as a result Overarching metaphor puts users into the wrong mindset to make sense of the data – people are … Read more
Yet again there’s an interesting post on Avinash’s blog about whether web analytics applications should be free. Avinash has been unjustly accused by a friend of his of asserting that all web analytics applications should be free, which he doesn’t believe, though he does believe that a lot of people spend too much money on … Read more
Whilst everyone else is blogging about Google buying YouTube, here’s a post about something else – IceRocket, a free web analytics service for your blog. From the demo, it looks pretty rudimentary, but its USP (which is probably not unique, but the most interesting thing about it) is that it will provide you with a … Read more
News reaches me of the launch of the first open-source web analytics tool – Breadboard BI Web Analytics, from the folks at Breadboard BI. When I was at WebAbacus, we had some quite lengthy discussions as to whether we should make the WebAbacus platform available as open source software. In fact Dan Drury even wrote … Read more
The $64,000 question (actually, $64,000 is a very low price to put on the value of this question) in online marketing response analysis is whether data from your ad server or your own site is better for understanding the effectiveness of your online (and possibly off-line) marketing. My colleague, Brendan Riordan-Butterworth, recently sent me an … Read more
There’s a great post on Ron Garrett’s blog entitled ‘Top ten geek business myths’, about the lies geeks tell themselves about their startup business. Many of the entries in Ron’s list strike a chord with me from my days getting WebAbacus off the ground. In particular I remember fretting about the amount of competition (in our … Read more
Manoj Jasra has an interesting interview with the Senior Manager for Google Analytics, Brett Crosby, on his Web Analytics World blog. Here are the highlights: He won’t say how many Google Analytics users there are (we think it’s about 250,000) They have some plans (undisclosed) to address measurement of AJAX applications using the MeasureMap technology they … 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
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