Forgot to mention in the rush of Coremetrics funding last week, that WebTrends announced email alerts. Gotta love the quote from Rand. The press release might have the coolest URL I’ve seen in a while. I’d like to see that in a web analytics report.
Every week the sleepy world of web analytics has something interesting happening. I can’t wait to see what gets the buzz this week.
In case you missed it — Coremetrics announced today that they just landed another $60M in financing.
(How things have changed: when Accrue did its IPO nine years ago, we raised something like $39M. It just goes to show that there’s a lot of money available outside the public markets.)
Good for Coremetrics that their investors see enough demand to hand over such a large sum. It certainly bucks the conventional wisdom that Coremetrics was slowly withering away — it should put new life into their deals and a new swagger in their walk. Reading the press release, I can imagine the message to investors: we are not constrained by the market, the competition, or our technology: we need more feet on the street.
When Apple’s Aperture arrived, it was the first tool especially aimed at photographers with extensive photo management needs. While praised for its vision, photographers were frustrated that support for new cameras took such a long time, seemingly requiring updates to Mac OS itself. In the meantime, Adobe’s Photoshop Lightroom offered quick support for new camera models, and it was one of the reasons many photographers switched over to Lightroom.
Now with the release of Mac OS X 10.5.2, and perhaps due to updates to iPhoto and Aperture, Apple is able to push new camera support much quicker than before:
Would we be seeing this kind of turnaround on new cameras without competition from Adobe? Hard to say — but it’s clear that Apple heard the cries of its market and responded.
So I’m filling out the WAA Analytics survey, and get to the question where they want to know how many years of experience I have in the field. Shocked to write down “12” — that’s crazy. How far have we come? I’m still listening to people talk about tracking users.
Hi kids! Today the cute and cuddly Mr. Penguin from AOL will answer all your questions on behavioral targeting! Isn’t he cute! Now you know that behavioral targeting is your friend!
Have a good day! And a tip o’the cap to the Good People at AOL who keep Mr. Penguin in anchovies in return for a little education gig he does for them.
PS oh, and did you know that Google doesn’t track you around the web? Hahahahahahaha!
PPS Seriously, why doesn’t AOL focus on the benefits of BT — like that the ads you’ll get are actually relevant? I am also concerned that they are confusing BT with tracking across an ad network. They are not the same. As it is, what I see from the storyboard is I get a TRACKING COOKIE ON MY COMPUTER followed closely by somebody thinking “I should remove that cookie”… is BT the new cookie? Is the cookie the new cookie?
Today I bought my first digital-only “CD” online.
I have the iPhone, manage my music with iTunes, and all that. But until today, I never actually purchased any music in digital-only format. Maybe I’m just old-fashioned (or just old), but I like the physical medium. I’m sure the recording industry wishes there were more of me…
Today I read that Most fans paid $0 for Radiohead album, and being a Radiohead fan, remembered I hadn’t heard “In Rainbows” yet. So it’s off to the Radiohead site, and a few british pounds later, downloaded the “album”.
It’s ten songs in 160kbps MP3 format. Not archival quality, for sure. It comes with the basic ID3 tags mostly in place, except genre. But the songs themselves — the music — just fabulous.
Since there’s no cover art, I made my own, a screen snap from the In Rainbows site. Because, you know, for Cover Flow.
So I see the U.S. Government is showing off the new currency ..
Hey, they are using Yahoo! purple for the number. Coincidence? I’m just asking…
I’ve fallen off the blog trail again (when life gets too crazy, I stop posting *and* stop reading) so missed the little dust-up over who’s got the name-your-superlative web analytics blog.
When I re-energized this site, I started putting a blogroll up, but quickly decided that was not scalable. Instead, I decided to use del.ico.us with the tag wablogger … and I used a very loose definition of “web analytics”.
It seems better to have a set of social bookmarks rather than trying to maintain one’s own. If you agree, please consider contributing … I encourage you to sign up for del.icio.us (they have a great Firefox extension that makes getting started insanely easy) and start tagging web analytics blogs with ‘wablogger’.
I’ve been dorking with Twitter .. still trying to figure out if it’s a great waste of time, or a lousy waste of time. I’m sure the cool kids are using it via SMS, but something about having my phone buzz me to learn that one of my friends is now eating a cookie just doesn’t get me that excited. The web site seems to be the best place for browsing and discovery, but for plain ol’ status updating, I’m using Twitterific for a local Mac app that grabs updated tweets every so often. PC users might want to opt for TwitBox.
I dismissed Twitter when I first tried it, but later read that what I experienced was typical, and exploring a bit can lead to an appreciation for the nuances of the service. But it wasn’t until I read Jeffrey Walker’s two Twitter posts that I decided to take another look.
With a little web spelunking, there’s an interesting social web under Twitter. (e.g. Jenna Jameson is “friends” with Barack Obama and John Edwards) but from what I can tell, the definition of “friend” is pretty loose. The “six degrees” aspect isn’t being visualized yet, but that isn’t to say people aren’t trying various mashups: witness David Troy’s Twittervision and Twittermaps. For more, check out the Twitter Fan Wiki.
I can see a great use of Twitter: as a (non-human) status service. In this specific case, you can see BART service messages – useful if you need real-time status updates for the Bay Area Rapid Transit system. Another: Red Sox updates! Having Twitter as a micro multicast/social alert system (or heck, an emergency broadcast system) is a great idea – it’s faster than the typical way one uses RSS. To that end, I wonder what Bob Wyman thinks of this “publish/subscribe” system.
I know I started the post sounding skeptical, but the Twitter crew did the right thing by providing an API to the service. That means it’ll become a platform, and taken in directions the developers haven’t thought of yet. One of these may end up being a killer app.
