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Scoble asks What Will Steve Jobs Kill Next?
It’s a good list, if not misleading (the iPhone will have a keyboard equivalent, for instance) but shows how designers should be ruthless in challenging assumptions, and cutting out what isn’t necessary.
Think about web analytics software. We’re overwhelmed by silly reports, useless visualizations, and bizarre multidimensional slice-and-dice […]

Lars Johansson, the Swedish coordinator for the WAA, has a web site and blog. One interesting thing he does is ask questions of different people who are involved in the Web Analytics field, and publish the conversation on the site.
Today, Lars posted a batch of new interviews, including Phil Kemelor regarding industry differences across […]

Two years ago, sitting in the airplane after attending Emetrics 05 Santa Barbara (and having to leave early), I penned a letter to organizer Jim Sterne, asking him if he’d bring up some issues around web data privacy at the first Web Analytics Association general meeting. Turns out he didn’t get my email until […]

*Yawn*
I’ll get excited about these “people delete cookies” stories when somebody comes up with a better method to track ANONYMOUS visitors. Heck, I’ll even get excited if WA vendors come up with “cookie deletion metrics calculators” that automatically measure and compensate the reported numbers. (Don’t get me started on panels.)
True, from an advertising perspective, […]

Once Upon A Time, I left the web analytics field for a brief respite. While I was away, a new competitor emerged, and everyone was talking about them, and I had to go figure out what made them so special.
Once Upon A Year Ago (or so), I stopped reading web analytics blogs. Now […]

I’m hearing it all over. There’s a new day on the horizon, a day when we in the web world recognize that none of this is really an exact science anyway, so why pretend?
Enough with the weighted regressions and Taguchi Methods already. It’s time to take the anal out of analysis. Instead of Web […]

Somebody asked me for my reaction to the announcement that Google has decided to make Urchin free. I already said it once:
A nice way to get even more off-network data is to supply folks with a hosted analytics service that most small and medium-sized web sites can use. Simply put a web bug / beacon […]

I’m way behind in … well, everything, it seems.
So it is that I’m just seeing JZ’s referral analysis. Jeremy makes the vivid point that while there’s strength in numbers, peeling back the surface layers provides deeper insights.

Business Week observes that perhaps Web traffic volume isn’t always a key performance indicator. Witness HotJobs, a site with (according to the media research companies) declining web traffic. Olga Kharif finds that revenues are increasing.
What really matters?

As web analytics professionals, we tend to focus on trends, distributions, segments, etc. But sometimes the best insights don’t come from numbers or fancy visualizations. They can come from the experience of a single visitor.
Check out WG Moore’s article Web Site Analysis - A Study in Damage Control for a concrete example of this, […]

EricB, currently at WebTrends, is now blogging about how technology trends impact analytics at inside analytics.
Welcome to the conversation, Eric!

Steve Krause, VP of Analytic Products at CNET, has come out of his cave and is doing some great writing. Web Analytics historians will appreciate his Personify Retrospective, but he’s got lots of Good Think on other topics too. Anyone who can wax poetic about high-definition lettuce gets my vote.
Welcome Steve!

BusinessWeek online has an article about Larry Tesler, Yahoo’s new VP of User Experience, and the design of Yahoo’s front page.
It’s a perplexing read. For example, there’s the statement:
the front page has remained stagnant
Where apparently “stagnant” means unchanged since Sept 2004.
Contrast the “stagnant” quote with this one:
Yahoo researchers endlessly try to divine which are […]

If you haven’t seen it, the Web Analytics Association has several RSS feeds, for job postings, articles, events and press releases. And a feed that consolidates them all.
Most of the entries are for job openings. I considered posting all our job openings, but that seems excessive.
Within Yahoo’s data group, we’ve got over 70 openings. […]

Eric offers the advice
Don’t expect something for nothing.
What are surfers willing to do to get personalized content?
In May, ChoiceStream did an email survey of 923 U.S. online adults, and found that consumers want personalized content, but they are wary of using methods like click tracking to inform the personalization. Not only that, but they […]