Maybe this “Web 2.0″ thing really is going mainstream.
My Mother is a dyed-in-the-wool writer. She has journaled for (at least) the last 25 years and has published poetry and she and her husband have just finished a year of teaching abroad in Italy.

With that wrapping up they are planning on walking (yeah you read it right) the Camino de Santiago from the French border down to Santiago de Compestella on the West coast of Spain - some 800 kilometers (roughly 500 miles for us Yanks). Camino de Santiago is an old pilgrims’ trail. It’s a very cool trek.

I thought “Wow, wouldn’t it be cool if she blogged the trip!”

The reason that I thought it was an exciting idea was what seemed to me to be the modernization of the travelogue a la “The Colossus of Marousi” by Henry Miller.

But the point is, that it was surprisingly easy to convince her to blog their trek as opposed to sending out e-mails along the way.

I think it must have appealed to the writer in her but certainly the faculty of being able to write and publish without having to remember 30 or 40 e-mail addresses was a big plus - they aren’t taking their laptops with them and instead will be hitting internet cafes along they way.

I guess that if Web 2.0 is for real, then the ‘real’ part is its ability to facilitate. To facilitate communication, publishing, purchase, etc. So, are your reports and analyses Web 2.0 compatible? Do they facilitate your business? (Just had to maintain a business focus here didn’t I?)

If you’re interested to see how literate and intelligent but non-technical people are using blogs, take a look: http://haystravel.blogspot.com/.

Happy Blogging Mom & Mike!

Adding a poll thanks to MajikWidget

I noticed (mea culpa) Matt Jacobs’ blog “Digital Media Analytics” this evening.

I just read through a very detailed post on Click-to-Landing Page Drop-Off. Which covers the vagaries of search engine marketing measurement from Click Fraud to Visitor Defection and Measurement. Not only does Matt offer a detailed view of the measurement pitfalls but he also offers solid recommendations on how get the most out of your web analytics package, ad vendor and site monitors to get a very wholistic view of those marketing efforts.

If you are a search marketer, or need to help search marketers figure out their campaigns, I’d encourage you to read this post.

I had been planning a series of posts on the evolution of ‘Site Overlays’ but I decided to take a different tack.

Site Overlays are those services, provided by web analytics vendors, that allow us to see page and click data while on the page.

Site Overlays are, at best, primitive.

They present web data - page views, visits, clicks, yada yada yada - while the user (you) are on the web page. Theoretically, this is cool stuff - you can ’see’ the web data as it happens in situ.

In practice, Site Overlays are slow and interfering. It takes too long to load the web data so it kind of feels like you are browsing the site on a 33.3 modem and the link overlays get in the way of your mouse - it’s difficult (if not impossible) to browse the site/page with that link overlay enabled.

So.

Let me (re) introduce you to the concept of a Heads Up Display (HUD). Pioneered in military aircraft, HUDs do what they say. That is, they take all the key indicator data from the cockpit dashboard and put it up in front of the pilot’s face so that she doesn’t have to look down for data.

HUDs take a large, confusing set of data from out of the dashboard and put it into the pilot’s primary field of view in such a fashion that the data is understandable and integrated with that all-important field of focus.

The beauty of a HUD is that it improves the pilot’s ability to fly her plane (among other things) without disimproving her forward view.

That’s why current web analytics offerings in Site Overlay services are primitive. They are an attempt to model a HUD in the web world but they fail because they disimprove the web experience.

I’m not aware of a solution, nor do I have one to offer, but I sure would like site overlays to start evolving towards the Heads Up Display concept.

[end rant]

Avinash Kaushik is blogging - FINALLY!
I doubt you will ever meet anyone as passionate about analytics as Avinash, and even better it’s worth your while to listen to him.

Avinash is at the Vanguard of the analytics space so if you want to push the envelope - he has some ideas on where to start.

When he announced his blog to me he said that he is “going to blog about Web Decision Making…” I don’t want to steal his thunder but this is where ‘What’ and ‘How’ meet up with ‘Why’ and that my friends is where the rubber meets the road.

Welcome Avinash! We expect great things from you!

Thanks to Andrea Wiggins, Data Analyst at Enlighten and University of Michigan School of Information Student, for taking (and posting) pictures of Emetrics. Here’s a link to her MSI page, but it doesn’t seem to like me very much.

Thanks Again Andrea!