bobpage.net

Over at Coffee, Sun & Analytics, Xavier has a couple posts on session length. Some good thoughts there, but I was surprised at the statement
Session length = number of pages users viewed during their session on the site.
Call me old school, but I thought session length was the amount of time a user spent.
I […]

Want to play with the beta of Yahoo! 360? Email me and I’ll reply with an invite.

In other news, Google announced that they acquired Urchin, a web analytics vendor and service. This makes a lot of sense for Google, but not for some of the reasons I’ve seen speculated on.
One speculation is that it gives Google web analytics capabilities to analyze their site. Actually, no, it doesn’t. Google […]

In case you missed it, NetIQ is spinning out WebTrends. I won’t speculate why - oh hell, of course I will. I thought (and still think) that WebTrends went together with NetIQ only a small amount more than Andromedia went together with Macromedia - that is to say, not very much. The two companies […]

A bit of a buzz today around Om Malik’s How Yahoo Got Its Mojo Back with the attendant lovers and haters commenting along. As is the norm, a lot of the haters (of both Yahoo and Google) don’t know what they are talking about.
I still find it surprising how seemingly intelligent people can march up […]

Not a lot of blogging lately - not because there’s nothing to talk about, but because I’m up to my eyeballs in resumes and recruiting. (If you can code, and you understand web data, get in touch!)
Regarding Yahoo!’s purchase of Flickr - some random thoughts:

I suspect Flickr will influence Y! more than the other way […]

I guess web analytics can be considered mainstream when there are highly-targeted seminars like Issues and Opportunities in Web Site Analytics for Libraries.
On the other hand, when you are still scheduling meetings to educate people on the benefits of log file analysis, maybe not.

I’m one of those guys that runs around thinking people should use the Firefox browser. Many people inside Y! do use it, but they are generally the early adopters. A week or two ago, posters went up around campus announcing an internal test of a new service (no, it’s not Yahoo! 360°). It […]

Jupiter analyst Eric Peterson is going to think I’m avoiding him, because he’ll be in SF tomorrow and for the second week in a row, I won’t be able to see him - I’m on a plane today and won’t be back until tomorrow night.
If you’re in the SF area tomorrow, consider attending Eric’s […]

I wanted to address another observation given in the article Things That Throw Your Stats. The author makes the statement:

Web analysis is statistics, not accounting.

While I think his overall message is a disservice to the people trying hard to increase accuracy and accountability on the web, I won’t go on about that here. Instead, I […]

In a good primer on why web analytics is hard, we see this statement:

Every single person inside the Ford corporation has the same IP address.

So, some questions:

What about married people? All have the same IP address? If so, are they all the same as each other but different from the single people?
Do they have different […]

So I was IMing with a friend today. His company is doing some very cool stuff and got some good press recently. I told him he should have a “CEO’s blog” so I can find out about it:

him: i have my own pr team…
me: but if you had a ceo blog, you could link to […]

Various news outlets have pointed out that Yahoo! is 10 years old on March 2, and Y! bloggers like Michael Radwin have mentioned some of the festivities. Tonight (supposedly after everyone went home, ha!) the Yahoo! gift fairies descended and distributed, among other things, an oversized commemorative 10-year book.
Throughout the book are facing “WE WERE” […]

Gartner claims 50% of DW projects will fail due to

I.T. driven, not business driven
data quality issues

One solution? Have a data warehouse competency center.
I’d broaden it to have an analytics competency center. Fortunately, Yahoo! gets it.

Looks like Blue Martini is going private. At a nice premium, too.
Usually when a major transaction occurs, the CEO is quoted as saying why it’s great for the company, how it will make for better products or solutions, etc. In this press release, Monte is reduced to observing that shareholders will get cash.
Every year […]