Hey, did anyone notice that the Web Analytics Association Research Committee recently published the first two in a series of podcasts on Best Practices? In these two podcasts, Wendi Malley interviews Avinash Kaushik from Intuit on the topics of measuring Blogs and RIAs (Rich Internet Applications such as Ajax).

These are in-depth interviews (running over a half hour each) with lots of great gems from Avinash on topics from simple ‘how-tos’ to strategic approaches for measuring these new platforms.

(I’d better go look at my search analytics to see what I should be blogging about)

Here are the links to each podcast - ENJOY!

Web Analytics Association: Best Practices - Avinash Kaushik on Blogs & RSS

Web Analytics Association: Best Practices - Avinash Kaushik on Rich Internet Applications

Disclaimer: I am on the Web Analytics Association Board of Directors

Tech Crunch is reporting a rumor that the founders of iRows have signed with Google and iRows will be shut down. (source is here - in hebrew)

If true, it’s a big bummer. iRows along with Edit Grid are my favorite online spreadsheet tools with the best breadth of tools. Certainly, they are currently a lot better than Google Spreadsheets, which still has no graphing capabilities, unless you count the repeat function hack.
There’s no word from the guys at iRows
Hopefully it is all smoke, but if true, I’ll miss iRows - it was my favorite

Edit: It’s True, read the announcement at the irows blog.

It’s been 43 days since my last post.

I’ve been busy getting/starting a new job.

New jobs are great, but unlike some, a new job and its associated learning curve drive every little thought from my head.

I’m still in information overload but I’m trying to dry-shift the brain in blogging-gear.

I have been paying attention though. Jeremiah, who has been traversing the far east, has left Hitachi for PodTech.net. Jeremiah, through no fault of his own, was one of the bloggers I studied before I launched mine back in March ’06.

There’s been a bit of a kerfuffle stirred up by privacy advocates over behavioral targeting. There is a discussion about it going on over at the Web Analytics Yahoo! Group.

Scoble asked for some new KPIs around engagement, which just drives me nuts because engagement is not a new topic and not limited to “Web 2.0” – we’ve all (probably) been working on engagement a long time and there are KPIs available – I guess either they’re not special enough or “Web 2.0ers” don’t pay attention to web analytics *sigh*.

On a related note, Eric Peterson has kicked off his Web 2.0 Measurement Working Group to start ferreting out if there are any special measures for new media and what technical requirements need to be met in order to support them.

Scoble and Jeremiah talk about “Content Malls”, maybe I’m old school but isn’t that a suburban way of saying ‘Web Ring’?

Finally, the guys over at Juice Analytics report that marketing guru Seth Godin challenges visualization master Edward Tufte on Minard’s chart. That’s just silly.

I just watched Seth’s Preso on Google Video and he definitely doesn’t think that the Minard chart is a good chart – for the ‘lay’ person. I still disagree, the fundamental points of the chart are easily grasped, but since he pays Tufte a back-handed compliment I guess I’ll let it slide. (By the way, it’s an entertaining presentation, no surprise there, but the Tufte bit is in the last section at around minute 17 or so.

Hopefully I’ll have something useful to write about soon – any thoughts or questions that I might address? Let me know.