There’s a critical mass (or tipping point, if you are so inclined) of people you need to follow such that a micro-community emerges. Once that happens, you get two things. One is quick notification of important/interesting events/news/blog posts. In fact since I’m following so many web analytics folks, I no longer have to rely on my RSS reader to bring me the big stories — the community points them out. Of course you need to be following the right people for your interests – people who say interesting things.

Second is ability to get feedback. I admit I don’t use this a lot, but it can be handy, depending on your community size. Of course it didn’t help me find a 13-year old copy of Windows…

(In response to Eric’s comment in one of his posts, yeah, my “lazy blogger” tweet to him, welcoming him to Twitter, was paraphrased from something June said to me at eMetrics last spring, about Twitter being the lazy man’s blog. At the time I couldn’t tell if she felt it was a compliment or a condemnation, but now I know.)

eMetrics from Jim Sterne, who probably needs no introduction, and

Welcome to the discussion, Jim and William!

(As always, when I find new blogs that seem to touch on web analytics, I tag them with the wablogger keyword on del.icio.us. Social bookmarking, baby! Sure beats keeping a blogroll up to date.)

It does look like a great weekend though. I’ll look forward to the tweets, blogs and flickr documentaries of the event…

Looks like soon there won’t be a need to supplement, as TechCrunch is reporting that Google has agreed to acquire FeedBurner. So it’s not out of the question that some kind of BlogBeat-FeedBurner-MeasureMap-GoogleAnalytics mashup is in the future.

Ads by Google ..

OK, that doesn’t make any sense, but I wanted to say something about hockey, so there you go.

Yes, I really am resurfacing the blog– upgraded the software and put in a fresh coat of paint. I intend to consolidate a few old blogs and assorted posts from the past; there’s a pile of stuff from Ye Olden Days that will eventually make its way here.

While I’m not a fan of revisionist blogging, I’ve cleaned up some of the old posts (broken links) and deleted a few posts that made no sense – e.g. they were too time-based to be of even token value now.

The New and Improved site is being watched by Google, because I’m sending web bugs beacons back to Google Analytics. I’m also publishing the feed through Feedburner, which provides its own set of (rather weak) stats.

For you RSS readers, no big changes, except that the whole feed got refreshed with the software changes. Oops.

So what’s the story? Simple. I got crazy busy, and blogging fell below the line. Not just writing — reading did too. Months ago, a colleague mentioned that he’s more interesting when he reads blogs. I’ve started reading again, but if there’s a correlation between amount of reading and interestingness, I’m still not very interesting. But since being interesting has never stopped me from blogging, I say Game On!

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.

Sheesh, blog spam is way up this past week. I moderate comments from all new commentators, so they aren’t posted until I approve them, but they do hit my mailbox. The increase is at least 10x what it used to be, although, fortunately I’m not seeing volumes like Ryan. There must be some new WordPress comment spam software in production. Like Ryan I’m not ready to introduce CAPTCHA.

Speaking of trends, I’m suddenly seeing the Three Letter Acronym “LMK” pop up in email and IM. This started about a few weeks ago. It’s not like I recently moved to a new team with their own lingo — this is from folks within my existing group, in other areas of the company, friends, and business contacts outside the company. It seems to be spreading like crazy. Wikipedia has had an entry for it since the spring. LMK if you’re only recently seeing it too, or perhaps I just haven’t been paying attention?

Finally, this Web 2.0 observation from Matt McAlister:

One [Yahoo] is facilitating community development. The other [Google] is facilitating data retrieval.

Welcome to the conversation, Eric!

Welcome Steve!

However — that’s not true for many bloggers. They invest a lot of themselves, and want to see a return on their investment, even it’s just the satisfaction that they are reaching an audience.

At the Search Engine Strategies conference a couple of weeks ago, I got a sneak peak at an early-stage project for tracking and reporting on blogs. Between then and now, a number of blog-tracking related projects have emerged, in one form or another. For example, there’s

• Mint from designer/developer Shaun Inman
• MeasureMap from the AJAX (“say ay-yax”) term-coiners at Adaptive Path
• BlogBeat from persons who apparently wish to remain nameless.

There are more, but you get the picture. In fact, Brad Feld lists all the blog metrics tools he’s been using, and fantasizes about a dashboard that could pull them all together.

They each have their own spin on tackling the problem. Nothing’s been announced about any of them, although that doesn’t stop the hyperbole.

A couple days ago, the person who showed me the demo at SES said they’ve expanded their vision and are continuing with development. Seems like we’re in for a new round of vertical analytics.