"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics" – Mark Twain
Yet again there’s an interesting post on Avinash’s blog about whether web analytics applications should be free. Avinash has been unjustly accused by a friend of his of asserting that all web analytics applications should be free, which he doesn’t believe, though he does believe that a lot of people spend too much money on … Read more
Whilst everyone else is blogging about Google buying YouTube, here’s a post about something else – IceRocket, a free web analytics service for your blog. From the demo, it looks pretty rudimentary, but its USP (which is probably not unique, but the most interesting thing about it) is that it will provide you with a … Read more
News reaches me of the launch of the first open-source web analytics tool – Breadboard BI Web Analytics, from the folks at Breadboard BI. When I was at WebAbacus, we had some quite lengthy discussions as to whether we should make the WebAbacus platform available as open source software. In fact Dan Drury even wrote … Read more
The $64,000 question (actually, $64,000 is a very low price to put on the value of this question) in online marketing response analysis is whether data from your ad server or your own site is better for understanding the effectiveness of your online (and possibly off-line) marketing. My colleague, Brendan Riordan-Butterworth, recently sent me an … Read more
There’s a great post on Ron Garrett’s blog entitled ‘Top ten geek business myths’, about the lies geeks tell themselves about their startup business. Many of the entries in Ron’s list strike a chord with me from my days getting WebAbacus off the ground. In particular I remember fretting about the amount of competition (in our … Read more
In an excellently timed follow-up to my post about Web 2.0, the BBC has signed a memorandum of understanding with Microsoft to act as a framework for joint projects between the two organizations, including Web 2.0-style stuff (the details are vague, but we can probably expect stuff like video sharing). Hopefully this will mean that … Read more
There’s been a bit of buzz around MSN’s new Soapbox video sharing site of late (currently invitation-only beta, I’m afraid). Initial reactions seem to have been reasonably positive, whilst pointing out that of course Microsoft has a lot of catching up to do if it’s going to compete with YouTube. At the same time there’s … Read more
Off-topic, this, but I have just discovered the Microsoft fontblog, which is set in the divine Candara font, which is new with Vista. I’m a total font geek, so I’ve reset the font for this blog to Candara too, though if you’re not running Vista or haven’t downloaded Candara, you’ll still see it in the … Read more
Manoj Jasra has an interesting interview with the Senior Manager for Google Analytics, Brett Crosby, on his Web Analytics World blog. Here are the highlights: He won’t say how many Google Analytics users there are (we think it’s about 250,000) They have some plans (undisclosed) to address measurement of AJAX applications using the MeasureMap technology they … Read more
One of the questions I’m asked pretty frequently is, “What exactly is Web 2.0, anyway?” I’m going to have to answer this question in some detail for an audience at McCann Erickson next month (I’m hoping to post my material here after the fact), but I thought I’d blog something brief here, which – who … Read more