She: did you ever see the music man? it’s funny
Me: i think so
She: they are singing a song about the wells fargo wagon coming to town with the packages
She: basically the ups truck
She: the whole town is singing
Me: what a wonderful time that must have been!
She: the entire town is chasing it
She: all excited over a trumpet and a box of brown sugar
Web Analytics is so 2006
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 Analytics, I propose Web Casualytics. Or Fuzzylytics maybe. Or Estimytics.
Now excuse me while I go register some domain names.
Obla-di, Obla-da, Obliterati
What could POSSIBLY make me whip out the ol’ blog software and post something?
New Mission of Burma arrived today. Eight (8) CD singles, from their upcoming Matador album The Obliterati (out May 23, 2006).
Heaven.
Google Analytics
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 in your page, and we’ll track your visitors for you. And for us.
Inside the numbers
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.
Zod 2008
The Yahoo! CTO? No. Zod2008.com
Backgrounder, etc on generalzod.net
Easy Exits … Again?
The problem with some of the “new Web” applications isn’t the application itself but the business model. Build an incremental feature, create some buzz in the echo chamber, and then sit back and wait for GAMEY (Google / AOL / Microsoft / eBay / Yahoo) to buy your company.
I suspect we all have some ideas about features that could fall into this category. But what if instead of buying your company, the big web portals built the feature themselves? Where’s your sustainable business model?
Specifically, all these N-person shops trying to grab a share of the podcasting world who were at first competing with Apple’s iTunes and now with Yahoo Podcasts …
(Thanks to Brad Feld for the GAMEY reference. Brilliant.)
Saturday Randomness
Spent a good hour this morning reading Mini-Microsoft, a recent phenom that’s actually been around a while. The comments are the interesting stuff. I don’t really care about the innards of Microsoft, but it’s making me think about how Yahoo works, including SDS and my own group.
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.
It’s About Traffic! (Isn’t It?)
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?
On Web 2.0 and Punk Rock
I can’t escape the observation that a simple idea, executed well, can not only change the world (or a part of it), but can also be satisfying in so many ways (like financially). Witness Yahoo!’s acquisition of Flickr, Konfabulator, and upcoming.org. How long until somebody snaps up Ning? How about the rock stars at 37signals?
The ideas at work here are around sharing, either via “Web 2.0” kinds of ideas, or communication/community (ala Y 360, but more focused). Having all these cool Web apps is great. Having them all share information among themselves is another.
Great article from Chad Dickerson on the similarities between Web 2.0 and punk rock.
Like any social movement, it starts with a small band of rebels/visionaries. By the time it hits the mainstream, it’s been transformed into something the initiators no longer recognize and don’t particularly want to be a part of. We’re probably not at that point yet with Web 2.0. Wait until there are truly compelling reasons to have web application interoperability, and watch malware writers look for weaknesses, while the hucksters build robots to use these interconnected apps for personal gain…
Many observers of the punk rock scene said the death of punk was the 1980 movie Times Square. If that’s true, is the death of Web 2.0 the O’Reilly conference this week? Or perhaps it’s the Business 2.0 article that lists AJAX as its number 1 “technology that changes everything”? Fortunately Jason @ 37signals weighs in with The top 10 things that aren’t Web 2.0“.