"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics" – Mark Twain
So, a mere five months after announcing it on this blog, I’ve finally made it to Seattle with my family. Appendicitis, last-minute dramas with mirrormirror, and even having my car towed in London the night before I was due to sell it (I got it back, fortunately, but am now £200 lighter for the experience) … Read more
Last Thursday’s New Media Age carried a supplement about web analytics, and yours truly was interviewed by Nic Howell, talking about Microsoft’s entry into this space. I’ll leave it to you to judge whether I made a fool of myself. Plus, now you get to see what I look like!
As you probably know, Internet Explorer 7 is out in the wild. It’s a big improvement over IE6, but I am a wee bit disappointed that it doesn’t offer a bit more finesse in the cookie management department. There’s a new feature to delete all your cookies (separately from other temporary files), but you can’t delete the … Read more
Whilst browsing the Windows Live Gallery today, I came across a gadget from MetriServe Web Analytics which shows basic web stats in your sidebar on Windows Vista (they also have a Mac OSX widget). Gimmicky as this may seem to the hard-bitten web analytics warriors amongst you, I think this is cool because it helps to … Read more
Yesterday at the E-metrics Summit in Washington DC, Google launched a new service under their Adwords brand, called Google Website Optimizer. It’s an automated A/B testing/optimization tool for Adwords advertisers to enable them to maximize the conversion rates they get from the keyword campaigns. In essence, the system allows you to test the effect of … Read more
Via a post on Stowe Boyd’s blog, Genius.com‘s SalesGenius is brought to my attention. At first glance, I thought this was just another bulk e-mail marketing tool with post-click web analytics built in, but they’re doing something slightly more interesting here, by tracking the clicks from e-mails sent by company sales reps and then presenting … Read more
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
You remember I mentioned in my first post about Web 2.0 that I was preparing to deliver a presentation on the topic to some folks at McCann Erickson in London? No? Ah. Well, I was. And I promised to post the presentation on this blog. So here it is, courtesy of slideshow-hosting site Slideshare, which … Read more
Following on from my lengthy post on the topic of what the heck Web 2.0 actually is, an excellent paper on Web 2.0 [PDF format] has appeared on Pew Internet’s website. It draws on Hitwise data about the growth of usage of certain “Web 2.0” sites (such as Wikipedia) compared to the stagnation of “Web … 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