I just upgraded this blog to v2.3 and I’m very happy about it. I’ve had RC1 running on a blog in development for a couple of weeks and I couldn’t wait to see if what I was seeing there was true.

IT IS.

Wordpress 2.3 appears to make significant improvements in speed. I’d say the load time has improved between 30-40% (although I have no data to back that up), just seems that way to me.

So, thank you Automattic and all you wordpress developers for the new version. I’ve barely peeked under the hood and I’m very, very pleased.

Now, the one, um, oddity that I noticed is that the inbound link module on the Admin dashboard now uses Google Blog Search instead of Technorati. Since Wordpress is quite the juggernaut in the blog platform space, I have to ask…

Is Technorati doomed?

What do you think?

In his keynote at the inaugural SEMPhonic XChange Conference, Eric T. Peterson said he was going to be controversial, that he wanted to stimulate the discussion. That he was tired of the ‘me too’ and ‘that’s exactly what I think’ commentary. Fast-forward a bit and Eric goes ahead and lobs a controversial bomb my way…

"Reporting Is Evil"

You might as well say Seeing is evil.

Seeing, after all, is just your eyes reporting received electromagnetic stimuli to your brain.

I can understand the sentiment behind it - I really can. It comes from a frustration with organizations and people who think web analytics is nothing more than regurgitation of data. A frustration with people and organizations that don’t "get it" and can’t "grok it". The frustration comes from web analysts within those organizations (I’ve felt it, believe me), from consultants trying to help companies get to the next level and vendors trying to sell their wares.

The problem is that reporting is NOT evil. It is vital to the web analytics process.

Analysis, web analysis, is a process - or at least it should be.

Analyses, like any process, have outcomes. The outcomes might be changes to the website, changes to advertising creative, changes in SEM strategies, changes to the web analytics implementation itself and many more that I’m not thinking of at the moment. One of the over-arching deliverables of a process is communicating its results. If the results of the web analytics process are not communicated, then no outcomes are possible. How can recommended changes to the website be made if they aren’t communicated and substantiated with an analysis of the data?

Yep, that’s my way of saying that reporting is an expected outcome of the analytic process. A process that doesn’t communicate its results is a failed process. Thus, if we excise reporting from web analytics because it is evil, we are left with a process that can give us no insight because there is no way to extract information from it. What is the point of going through the process at that point? We might as well use ‘Pin the Tail on the Donkey’ in all its blindfolded glory to make a decisions.

There are many definitions of reporting, but in this context I think that there are two that are most important:

1. Reporting is a required outcome of the analytics process
2. Reporting is a communication tool

The frustration that leads people, Eric included, into thinking and saying that reporting is evil derives from organizations treating reporting as the whole analytics process.

So, if you are spending time, money and resources on web analytics and all you are doing is reporting the data, then you probably feel like you’re not getting nearly enough value out of your investment.

Heck, without reporting there is no feedback loop in analytics and then your just running one blind test after another - throwing spaghetti at the wall as it were - until something sticks.

Reporting without analysis is just a regurgitation of facts. Analysis without reporting is impossible because then there is no mechanism for creating the feedback loop within the process.

Hut! Hut! … HIKE!

photo credit: bigeoino, creative commons license

Hey, I’ll be at XChange next week, leading a huddle on developing reports. The focus will be Excel because

• it’s what I’m most familiar with
• all things considered, it’s pretty easy to use - even for a n00b
• it’s widely deployed in most organizations so it doesn’t require an IT project to deploy and most business users are familiar with it

The huddle will hopefully be a discussion of best practices for developing sustainable web analytics reports - I really don’t want to talk at people for 2 hours, I want opinions, experiences, tips and tricks and discussions that will make us all better at report development. As the huddle leader I will come armed with questions and opinions that will serve to facilitate the discussion. It will be my job to get the huddle going, keep it on task and make sure we have a positive environment for discussion. It will be your job to bring your brains and experience. If we do our job well we should be able to come up with some substantive wisdom that everyone can use - not just us.

Interested? Today is your last day to get your huddle preferences into the folks at SEMPhonic.

Other huddles that I am interested in? (I know I won’t be able to attend them all - alas)

• Understanding Consumer Attitudes on the Web by Joseph Carrabis
• Deploying measurement systems across the globally distributed enterprise by Judah Phillips
• Advanced Visitor Segmentation by Matt Belkin
• Customer and Web Behavioral Integration by Matt Jacobs
• Measuring Return on Engagement by Terry Cohen
• Optimizing Main and Secondary Navigation by my colleague Olivier Sylvestre
• Persuasion Architecture & Functionalism by John Q (FutureNow!) and Gary Angel (SEMPhonic)
• And, of course, I am looking forward to Eric’s Keynote.

The full agenda is here.