I had a chance to talk to Celia Jones when she was in Toronto a few weeks ago. Celia is a marketing director, and a really brilliant one at that. I remarked, sometime between my second and third crantini, about the precariousness of the professional Web 2.0 -ness. Specifically, I quoted something I had heard just the previous week at eMetrics Toronto – “Once you post something on your blog, it’s out there forever”. If you’re reading that quote as though it’s a good thing — good for you. That was opposite of what a speaker at eMetrics was saying. I explained to Celia that the risk of even starting a personal blog, on a specific topic, can be fairly[…]
Category: Uncategorized
Joseph Carrabis Posted the definitive answer on “The Vexing Problem” here. Which is just great. A really awesome answer that takes into account a large amount of dialogue. I thank him for the engagement on the topic. Next Web Analytics Wednesday will be really lively. This is really what blogging ought to be about. 🙂
I had the chance to read “The Social Web Analytics eBook 2008”, which I might add is FREE! from www.socialwebanalytics.com and authored by Philip Sheldrake. Philip does a great job in summarizing some of the most popular literature – citing such seminal works as the “Cluetrain Manifesto” and “The Tipping Point”. The content is really great, really concise, and is a very smooth introduction to Social Web Analytics (SWA). I’m going to dive into some detail about the bits I thought were really brilliant, and the bits that I’ll contest. I really enjoyed Philip’s polemic on page 15 where he goes into some good detail about algorithms and the problem with semantics and the tone of content. There’s an entire[…]
Philip Sheldrake authored a neat little FREE! eBook on Social Web Analytics. Did I mention that it’s FREE! ? Feedback forthcoming.
Roh-oh. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/26/avg_disguises_fake_traffic_as_ie6/ Exclusive AVG has rejiggered the fake traffic it’s spewing across the internet, causing new headaches for the world’s webmasters. AVG’s chief of research Roger Thompson says the for-pay LinkScanner is only using the IE6 user agent. Presumably, the company believes this is more likely to fool malware exploits. “There are still ways for concerned web masters to filter LinkScanner requests out of their statistics,” he told us over email. But he did not divulge these methods and did not say whether they might clip legitimate traffic as well. And if that causes problems for webmasters, Thompson says, so be it. “I don’t want to sound flip about this, but if you want to make omelets, you have to[…]
This is a continuation of a response to: Joseph Carrabis, A Vexing Problem, Part 4, Post 2 My previous entry dealt with language issues and why an analytics argument won’t work with any audience. Surely, it must work with pure marketing scientists? Or no dice? My previous entry dealt with language issues and why an analytics argument won’t work with any audience. Here I’ll mix in cultural learning and how working memory affects how we interact with clients. It turns out that most people are not only prisoners to language, most people are also prisoners to what they’ve learned, how they learned it and the last time they used it. (And at some point (tha mi duil na dhia) I[…]
It’s similar to when I was 4, learning how to read numbers, with all the numbers sprawled out in front me on my great-grandmothers kitchen floor – and being intensely frustrated that I’d never remember how to say and write ALL 30 numbers (I had gaps in my knowledge too, I knew of 33, somebody’s age, and 23, a bus number, but 24, for some reason, which wasn’t represented on a piece of paper.) Numbers were just like letters and phonetics — I didn’t see 12 as being 10 plus 2, no more than one recognized five (5) as being 3 plus 2. The numbers were actually memorized as symbols or in clumps, similar to how an accent aigu (e[…]
Not really an interesting discussion, but it’s one I’ve been having way too often as of late: pageview paradigm or event paradigm? Most web analytics software will only capture ‘pageviews’ unless you torture it. That is- the script will fire only when the page as a whole is loaded, with no additional information forked over about all the cool functionality that might exist once that page is loaded. For most large websites, we go along with the old pageview paradigm out of pure monetary necessity. Any flash functionality, when tracked properly, is done through a separate account/ID tag so that we preserve the understandability of the main pageview account. And then you get into the confusion with the second account,[…]
Joseph Carrabis replied with a really detailed and thought provoking point of view on his blog: I’m going to zero in on the bits that energized me the most: I also offer that it’s not a losing battle, nor do we need to sensationalize or exaggerate, or resort to fear tactics. Definitely not fear. Not with a pioneering mentality and not as is suggested (the competition is doing it). The response to that would be “Really? Good, let’s see what happens and if they really absolutely positively get an advantage that we can’t duplicate or approximate without going through everything they went through, we’ll do it. But only then. Maybe.” I’m also quite sure logic (at least as we’re using[…]
Joseph Carrabis, on his blog replied to June Li’s and our vexing problem. Here’s the main body of the quote: Howdy, Thanks to June Li for calling me and asking me to take part in this discussion (for those who don’t know, you can reach me far quicker and more easily by phone or Skype than email). Okay. First question: “Why are Canadians so reluctant to embrace data driven strategy?” … I’ll offer an opinion based on lots of research (from others as well as NextStage’s). Canada is still a pioneering society, the US isn’t. Nor is much of the EU…I’m sitting here wondering where else pioneering…probab…Oh, Australia. Duh! I don’t have any direct data and I’m willing to bet[…]