That’s Barney’s (Neil Patrick Harris) infamous one-liner from CBS’s "How I Met Your Mother". It’s a favorite show of ours (the wife and I).

Now, Neil was recently nominated for an Emmy for his work as Barney on the show - he is the gooey, sticky center that holds it all together. So, after seeing the nom nod, my wife points me to "Barney’s Blog" thinking that I should have some fun with Barney’s statisticovisual (I love making up words) approach to dating.

WELL…

Not to be a downer or anything but my amusement was ruined by several factors.

Take for instance, the first bar chart which is labeled "BARNEY STINSON’S HOOK UP PERCENTAGES"

So, the chart purports that Barney’s hookup percentage ranges from 200 to 500 percent, depending on the condition of not having or having Ted with him. Hmm, so when the big B is flying solo he hooks up 200% of the time? And when he has Ted with him the percentage goes up to 500%? Um, part of the Barney character is a near-pathological need to be right and this ain’t right. Also on this chart are Ted’s hook up percentages which range from 0% (without Barney) to what looks to be somewhere between 10 and 20 percent (with Barney). So, half of the chart is wrong and half is correct?

This chart is SO not awesome (as Barney might say).

Also, what’s with the lazy reliance on Excel 2003’s default chart settings? Barney is an over-the-top kind of guy and if he’s going to go the trouble of creating these charts and putting them up on foam cores then he is certainly going to send them to a graphic designer (at the least, hopefully he’d send them to a data visualist to really make them sing) to dress them up - I imagine Barney sitting there, screaming "Suit UP!" at his laptop.

Finally, in the last line chart, the y-axis is labeled "Level of Hotness", I’m pretty sure that Barney, if he existed, would have labeled that axis "Level of Awesomeness"

Sheesh, CBS marketers, make sure to get into character before writing these posts.

Ad Age reports that AOL is acquiring behaviorial targeting firm Tacoda.

Is this a Google challange or just being caught up in the current acquisition frenzy?

Several months ago, I wrote a comparison of Google Reader and Bloglines trying to figure out which one I would use. Well, almost 6 months have gone by and I am still using both.

And up until a couple of days ago I was still double-subscribed to most of my feeds. But then, a solution finally occured to me.

An epiphany of grand proportions!

Ok, no - not really. However, I did figure out what I liked the most of all about Google Reader beyond those features already mentioned - the Shared Feeds!

So as of Monday, I use Google Reader for shared feeds published by the likes of Robert Scoble and Eric Peterson and Bloglines for individual site feeds. There is still some overlap - how could there not be? But its far less, and so, far less annoying.

I’m going to get a recommended river of information on Google Reader and detail, detail, detail from bloglines - WIN WIN!

So a few days (weeks? the days blur together) FeedBurner announced that StatsPro and MyBrand were now free for the masses - let them eat cake!

Of course, I, like many of you I would guess, immediately sent the folks at FeedBurner an email requesting to be hooked up. It took a few days for them to respond but when they did, set up was a snap, a breeze, I don’t know what.

It’s really very simple, once you get in all you have to do is set up a subdomain of your domain with a CNAME record. - A word to the wise here, don’t set up your subdomain in anticipate of being let in. I made that mistake and then I had to go delete the record and wait a while to set it up again correctly.

But HEY, now my feed is available via my domain (http://feeds.instantcognition.com/InstantCognition). AND because it’s a CNAME, the original FeedBurner URL still works (http://feeds.feedburner.com/InstantCognition).

SO, if you have your own host go switch your FeedBurner feed to your own domain. Or, if you aren’t currently using FeedBurner because you wanted the brand equity - now you don’t have an excuse. Go get FeedBurner MyBrand and get some great feed statistics.

So, I was cruising My Netscape and saw this interesting link title from BBC News: "Google cookies will auto delete"

Auto delete? Since when is this a special feature that only Google can bring to market? All cookies have an expiration date - last time I checked. It’s just that often, they are set with an expiration date so far in the future as to be effectively perpetual. 

The article quotes Peter Fleischer, Google’s global privacy council, as saying (in a statement)

"listening to feedback from our users and from privacy advocates, we’ve concluded that it would be a good thing for privacy to significantly shorten the lifetime of our cookies."

Oh, and there’s this interesting bit from the article, "They will be deleted unless the user returns to a Google site within the two-year period, prompting a re-setting of the file’s lifespan."

Interesting, it’s not a fixed two years, it’s relative to your last visit to Google so every time you visit Google the cookies expiration date will be reset to a new date. When was the last time you went 2 years without visiting a website that you found extremely useful (as most people would say about Google)?

I actually like the idea, from a certain point of view, users who have not visited the site in some amount of time (2 years in this case) could be deemed to have abandoned the site (in a much more considered way than we in web analytics tend to look at it) and therefore Google doesn’t need to keep track of that user’s preferences anymore.

The thing that I find weird is that the BBC - via the title of the article - seems to think that Google is doing something that no one else could or might do.

I wonder what the implications to web analytics would be if the providers implemented a similar function? Would it wreak havoc on the data? Probably not unless the cookie expiration date was set absurdly low (less than 4 weeks or so). What about a new metric - "Lost Visitors" or "Qualified Abandons"?