"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics" – Mark Twain
By now you may have read that I’ll be appearing at OX2’s Web Analytics Day in Brussels this month (on the 14th, to be precise). I’ll be delivering the first public preview of Gatineau beta 1 and showing some stuff that so far has only been shared with “special friends of Microsoft” (i.e. people who’ve signed … Read more
Have just finished watching the video that Avinash made of the presentation he gave at SES San Jose last week. He mentions (and is very kind about) Gatineau a couple of times – thanks, Avinash – but for me the real nugget of useful information in the presentation is Avinash’s tip on how to find … Read more
So, last Monday was a big day for me, and for a few thousand of my colleagues at Microsoft and aQuantive – we closed the aQuantive acquisition that we originally announced in May. Those of you who like to track every iteration of Microsoft’s ever-changing organizational structure may already have read that we’ve created a new … Read more
Yet again I have to apologize for not posting more frequently. In lieu of a proper, substantive post about a weighty topic, here’s a collection of tidbits from the industry and blogosphere: Another civilized spat has broken out about the merits (or otherwise) of Technorati rankings for assessing a blog’s popularity, spurred by Avinash’s latest … Read more
Eric Peterson has published a report which draws on some of the data he got from his web analytics practitioner survey a couple of months back to highlight that organizations who use free tools tend generally to be: Small Less committed to web analytics Less strategic in their user of web analytics Newer to web … Read more
I know we’ve had some rocky times together, but you can’t just walk out on me like this. Was it something I said? I know that at times I disapproved of your relationship with Avinash, but with a relationship as long-standing as ours, a little jealousy’s going to set in eventually. So where will you … Read more
In another interesting post on his blog, Avinash questions the conventional wisdom about “Enterprise Class” software, specifically web analytics software. The post made me smile because of Avinash’s hyper-cautious preamble about how he doesn’t set out to be contentious, but sometimes he just has to speak his mind, yada yada yada. I had a mental … Read more
TechCrunch is carrying an (apparently authoritative) story that Google is to buy Feedburner for an amount estimated at around $100m. It’s not quite $6bn, but it’s a healthy amount. This is another smart portfolio move from Google, though few companies could justify paying so much for the opportunity to monetize RSS feeds. In Google’s case, … Read more
$6 billion is a lot to pay for any company, particularly when it’s about five times as much as you’ve ever paid for any previous acquisition; it’s even more impressive when you consider it’s a cash deal. But those are the table stakes to get into (or stay in) the online advertising business these days; and … Read more
I knew that in my haste to get a post out yesterday I’d forget to mention some things: Many congratulations and best wishes to Eric Peterson on his new venture. For reasons which may become apparent in the fullness of time, I had a little advance notice of Eric’s intentions, so I’ve been spending the … Read more