Photo Credit: Graeme Lloyd, University of Bristol

This image, a so-called “super-tree”, shows the relationship of 440 of the 600 known species in the Dinosaur family. It was created as part of a study with the goal of determining the various rates of diversification within the tree. You can read a nice summary of the research at Science Daily. But seriously all the chatter about Social Graphs that use a similarly formatted chart and I have to wonder, who has one as cool as this?
 

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?

Sure, I set up my profile, found some friends and joined some groups and for all that, the value returned to me was 0. I must be too old, but the way Facebook works with it’s walled garden and so-called ‘app-sharing’ it seemed to me nothing so much as a platform for chain letters (hey, friendX’s zombie just bit you, install the zombie app and bite more people to start your zombie army) in the form of shareable applications.

I’m sure that for avid users, this will be a slap in the face. I may even be labeled a Luddite or curmudgeon (which is fine, I am both at times), but my time is precious (to me at least) and if you’re planning on wasting it, it had better return something to me – entertainment perhaps, valuable connections, interesting discussions … something. Well, I have my valuable connections on LinkedIn and Twitter (and email of course). The interesting discussions are happening on the blogs and boards and as far as entertainment goes, Cute Overload is WAY better.

Adios Facebook, until you show me some value, I’m not spending my time with you.

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!

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.

The basic question is (paraphrasing here) "Are bounces and bounce rates for a blog home page of the same importance as they are for ‘regular’ sites?"

I have a long and poorly written response to the question on Jeremiah’s blog, but I thought I would respond here as well – hopefully a little more cogently (though no less lengthy) – to Beth Kanter’s question.

Let’s start with a definition of bounce rate just so we can all be on the same page .

Bounce Rate (for a web page) = (Single Access Visits / Visits where the web page is the entry point to the site)*100.

Single Access Visit: Any Visit where there was only 1 web page viewed

Visit: A collection of activity on a site from a single browser where there is no period of inactivity greater than 30 minutes

Entry: Where (which web page) the visit started (a visit-start or visit-entry)

For instance, in May 2007 here on this blog at my home page:

Visits with the Home Page as the Entry: 127

Single Access Visits: 110

Bounce Rate: (110/127) *100 = 86.6% (OUCH)

That means that nearly 87% of the visits that started on my blog home page ended  on that page without any other pages being looked at.

But is that really bad on a blog? Well, what are some of the proposed reason why high bounce rates are acceptable on a blog as opposed to another kind of site?

1. A blog home page (or category page) contains a lot of content in it. For instance, WordPress defaults to showing something like the 10 most recent posts on the home page so it isn’t necessary for visitors, especially loyal or repeat visitors who are just interested in my latest post to click beyond the homepage (of course, they don’t have to come to the site at all because they are probably subscribed to my feed).
2. Blogs tend to link outside of themselves (link love) where regular sites try to avoid it so on your blog, you are actually telling people to leave and read something else and those visits aren’t actually a bounce.
3. Traditionally KPIs aren’t important on a blog because they don’t measure ‘attention’ or ‘engagement’ very well. Time Spent on Page is a much more effective measure of your blog homepage’s effectiveness than Bounce Rate.

I haven’t done the segmentation yet, but looking at raw click counts I can see that there were 58 clicks from the blog home page to external resources so let’s assume that each click is equal to one visit and that those clicks/visits don’t count against the bounce rate since I directed my visitors to them. That reduces my single access count to 52 for a bounce rate of 40% – that’s still pretty darn high.

Average Time Spent on this blog’s home page in May was 3 minutes 25 seconds. Not too bad I guess. The problem is that this metric typically (and specifically in my case) excludes visits where the home page was the exit page (including single accesses) so this time spent is just for visitors who went deeper than the home page. I don’t know, and chances are you won’t know either (depending on the analytics tool you use) how much time single access visitors (e.g. ‘bouncers’) spend on that page.

I was going to put together some segments to further illustrate my discussion of point number one, but I’m feeling lazy so just let me highlight some thoughts and tactics.

Even on a blog, the home page is probably the most trafficked page you have, unless you get DIGGED or Slashdotted or something like that. The blog home page (and category pages) are also probably the most search friendly ones you have so new visitors are highly likely to enter your site there than anywhere else. So, when thinking about whether or not Bounce Rate is an important measure for your blog, start by segmenting new vs. returning visitors (yes, even though a reported new visitor might not actually be one) and see how the bounce rate compares for new vs. returning vs. all – is the new visitor bounce rate higher than one or both of the others? Then you have an engagement problem – new visitors are not tuning into your content – the home page has no scent.

Segment out your visitors that were referred to your site by search, what is their home page bounce rate? They were looking for something specific and they thought your blog might have it. If search visitors have a high degree of bounce, there’s a problem. User’s who bounce, especially new ones are not engaging in your discussion.

So, even after I excluded the visits that were taking an action I asked them to (subscribing to a feed or clicking on a link outside my blog) my home page bounce rate is still 40%. Forty Percent (4 out of 10) of visits to my blog home page never look any deeper, they never engage in my conversation! That’s a lot of people who are missing out on a great discussion (IMHO)

So, does bounce rate matter for a blog? Is a blog so special that it can ignore this standard web analytics KPI?

Absolutely NOT. Visitors that bounce off my home page, especially new visitors and search visitors are not engaging with my content even though they came to the site in the first place – which means that they thought they were going to find what they were looking for but didn’t…

The one complexity I see here is the home page content. Depending on how frequently you write new posts, the bounce rate can be highly and quickly divergent (really good on some days and really bad on others) so you will want to tie the bounce rate back to the content that was available on the home page during any given period – a lower bounce rate in period 1 compared to period 2 may indicate that the content from period 1 was ‘better’ and you can learn from it.

After a few-month hiatus, the tiny-tot voice recog blogger is back!

Enjoy!

Update:

I just found this Firefox extension for Google Reader! If the GR team adds a blogroll type function, it will be all over!

Summary

I typically use two feed readers – Bloglines and Google Reader but I’m starting to feel like I need to consolidate on one, but which to choose?

Why all of the sudden am I feeling this monolithic need? Well, the other day, for the first time ever (I have tried sporadically over the last several months) I successfully exported my subscriptions from Bloglines and imported them into Google Reader. Previously, Google Reader had refused to recognize my Bloglines OPML file as valid.

So, now that I have my subscribed feeds duplicated on two services AND Google started reporting subscriber numbers last week, in all likelihood I look like two subscribers when I’m in fact one (the more things change yada, yada, yada…) – apologies to all my web analytics pals whose subscriber numbers are now deliberately inflated because of me.

what i like about bloglines

There are two main things that I find really helpful from Bloglines.

The Firefox Bloglines Toolkit Add On (not developed by Bloglines, but made possible because of their API). This add on will periodically poll Bloglines and notify me via a little red dot that I have new items to read.

The sharing feature which serves as my blogroll (yep, that one over on the right side).

what i like about google reader

Ease of use and ease of reading.

Seriously, the river of data view (all new posts) is awesome. I can quickly scan scores of posts and focus on the ones that are of interest to me. I also think that (but have no proof) that Google Reader does a better job of handling multimedia than does Bloglines. Most posts I read in GR I read there in situ because, for whatever reason, the readability is high whereas I find myself clicking through to the original post much more often when I’m in Bloglines.

In a perfect world, either Bloglines would improve their site usability (Frames, really? What year is this again?) and the readability of the posts or Google would add a similar sharing feature and a notifier add on for Firefox and then I’d have a relatively level field to choose against but until then who knows?

What do you think? Which reader do you use (if either) and which do you like better and why?

Have you heard of web analytics?

Do you know that there is a whole community of talented and driven people trying to figure this out?

Have you heard of the Web Analytics Association?

Did you know that there is a conference dedicated to measurement on the web?

I was mildly exasperated last fall when Scoble complained about this, Jeremiah Owyang picked up on it and has done some nice work trying to facilitate the discussion but now I’m in a full-on tizzy.

Ok Jeff, now that I’m done ranting, let’s take a look at your specific points, knock my head against them and see what comes out.

You Say, “Except I argue that the panel means of measurement is doomed to miserable failure in the mass of niches.”

That may be true. So what? Panel-based measurement is not about measuring the fringe. In fact, the measurement companies don’t try to hide this. They are very careful and transparent about which data they have confidence in and which data they don’t have confidence in and statistical measures based on a low sample size have low confidence. Looking at it from the other side (I used to work for a relatively large publisher), services like comScore and Nielsen and Hitwise are the common language that publishers and advertisers use to work together and it seems to me (please show me if I’m wrong) that advertising dollars, by and large, still go to where the majority of the traffic is. So, the big players like Yahoo! and MSN (and even some not so big players) are still served pretty well by panel-based measurement.

Maybe you’re not really upset over these companies’ inability to measure the fringe, which is symptomatic of the market in which they operate, but rather you are rallying for a redistribution of the advertising wealth? Dunno, just playing random association here.

You Say, “What we need, I’ve long argued, is standard metrics reported from the sites’ servers or from snoopers on page and verified by a service such as Comscore or Nielsen. Old methods will not work in this new world. The same goes for Nielsen, which is buying the rest of NetRatings.”

My basic reaction to this is, “Do you remember ‘hits’?” Hits (server requests) are a standard metric reported from the sites’ servers and they were grossly abused. Thus, the page view (yes, we’ll get to that statement in a minute). There are companies that will audit and validate (ABCi comes to mind) site-analytics implementations but I’m not aware of any large scale adoption of this methodology in the online space as an effective tool for getting publishers and advertisers together.

Anecdote: Thanks to Katherine Paine we number nerds web analysts have an amusing acronym: H.ow I.diots T.rack S.uccess

You Say, “And while we’re at it, let’s figure out the new measurements that capture the unique value of this new medium: authority, speed, connectedness… The page view is dead.”

First of all, discussions of how to measure this new medium (I’ll not argue about whether this is a new medium or not because that’s usually an article of faith and so the discussion is fruitless) are happening all over the place – please see the end of this letter for a small list of links about evolving how we measure this new stuff.

Secondly, I’m having a bit of a semantic problem, if niche markets are unique, or at least, not mass then how can we possibly have a standard set of metrics for them all? The metrics needed to measure one niche market would seem to me -by definition- to be different than those needed for another niche market. That said, this new iteration of communication is still new enough that we can’t see the forest for the trees. Evolving new metrics is at a point of solving specific cases and it’s still unclear how those specific cases may be extended to the space as a whole – it’ll take time to get there, if we can get there.

Third, a lot of the pieces for what you are asking for are in place, but as with many new markets they are fragemented. Technorati, Feedburner, Bloglines and other technology providers do give us (with some work) indications on authority and connectedness (I think). I’m not sure by exactly what you mean by speed but my inkling is that sites like digg and measurement tools like buzzmetrics give us a sense of how quickly any particular post or meme gets propagated throughout the ‘sphere. As this market matures, there will be consolidation and you’ll be able to go to one place (or maybe just a few) to get answers to those questions.

Finally, the page view is not dead. It is changing and may well lose it’s current weight/authority, but it won’t go away, it will be one point in a continuum of events that will each have their own validity, usefulness and authority.

You Say, “I think it’s time for a measurement summit: Bring together the measurement companies, the advertisers and their agencies (buyers), the sites’ reps (sellers), the media sites, and technology companies and let’s hammer out some standards and methods for measurement.”

Seriously, haven’t you heard of Emetrics? Jim Sterne could probably tell us for certain, but most, if not all, the groups you mentioned above are typically represented at an Emetrics Summit – you should come too.

As for standards, well the IAB works on its standards (the standards for advertising on the internet) all the time and the WAA (Web Analytics Association) is working on measurement standards too. However, there is no ‘hammering out’ with these things, unless you mean ‘banging our collective heads against a large brick wall for a very long time’. I’ve participated in standards committees at the IAB and it takes a bloody long time to get the job done. Every group wants to protect their respective interests. Everyone understands things slightly differently. Nobody is willing to agree on anything. You can’t do standards in an afternoon or a day and probably not even in a year. Developing measurement standards is a hard, frustrating, time-consuming, and thankless task (regardless of its downstream value to the market) – so be prepared.

To get back on point, why am I in such a tizzy you ask? Well, posts like this indicate (to me) that, for whatever reason, most of the blogosphere is ignoring a valuable resource – the web analysts of the world – in this discussion. Jeremiah, (in my admittedly limited view) is the only person I see actively engaging the people who have the best chance of figuring this out. Heck, you’ve probably got (and know) web analysts from the university, from the newspaper, from federated media, are you working with them on this?

Short List of “Web 2.0″ Discussion Links

Eric Peterson’s Series on Engagement (starting with #4 make sure to read them all)

Jeremiah’s Social Media Measurement Category

Sign up for the Web 2.0 Measurement Working Group

The Web Analytics Yahoo! Group

Ian S. Houston on Evolving the Web Analytics Data Model

There’s plenty more discussions out there, but these are the ones at the top of my list today.

I entreat you, and anyone else in this brave new world, to involve a web analyst in your discussion. They will help.

Update: I’ve had to (temporarily) disable Snap on my site – it was giving my site search gran mal seizures when it tried to spider the site.
I finally got my invitation to Snap – among other things they have a service called Preview Anywhere ™ which, like Ask.com offers roll-over previews of the destination site.

Try it now by rolling over this link to Snap.com.

It can be configured to preview either external links only or all links.

Further customizations allow you to disallow certain links by using a special class. Conversely, you can set it to not preview any links other than those with a different special class.

There is a wordpress plugin for it, once you’ve got your invite.

I have noticed that it takes some time to get image previews for some of the more obscure links on my blog, but I imagine that will improve with time as they grow out their image database.

I wonder if I can figure out a way to track any searches initiated from the rollover? Something to think about…

Personally, I like this functionality, but let me know what you think about it on this site (or others, TechCrunch is using it) by leaving a comment…

Here’s the list:

1. Participation & Engagement
2. Influential Ideas: Memes and their intensity over time
3. Relevance
4. Sentiment/Tone/Opinion/Favorability/Emotion
5. Content
6. Relationships & Connections
7. Analytics & Activity
8. Community Activity or Call to Action
9. Reach
10. Conversational Index/Engagement Tied With Demographic/Who

Because Jeremiah did not provide definitions, I’m going to take a jump out into the blue and start playing word association…Participation & Engagement sounds like something to be measured while the Conversational Index sounds like a KPI that could be used to affect that measure – for blogs. As defined by Stowe Boyd the Conversational Index is:

[# of posts] / ([# of comments] + [# of trackbacks])

An index score that is less than one indicates an engaging blog while a score of 1 or more indicates an unengaging blog.

While I agree with the principal of this metric, it seems to me that this score is too easily gamed – and maybe not even on purpose.

In blogging, one of the best practices I’ve heard is to interlink between your posts (Jeremiah does this a lot) which is very helpful to the readers but since platforms like wordpress will treat that intralink as a trackback, the total # of trackbacks will be polluted with your own linking and therefore susceptible to gaming.

Next, when we’re looking at comments, this is a conversation where (hopefully) the author is responding to the comments from her readers. Now, this could be gamed if rather than responding to comments normally, the author starts to break her comments into smaller bits in order to drive a better CI score. On the flip side, bloggers that tend to write shorter posts more often as opposed to bloggers that write longer posts less frequently will be penalized simply because of their writing style.

So what to do? How can this excellent kernel of an idea be taken to something that might be acceptable industry-wide as a standard? I don’t have the perfect answer but here are some thoughts:

1. Intra-blog links need to be excluded from the trackback count, shouldn’t be that hard to do from a technology POV
2. Normalization: Because the CI is at the mercy of the writing style used, a way would have to be found to normalize the score across a spectrum of writing styles from very short/very frequent to very long/very infrequent
3. Author comments – I really don’t have any sort of clue on this one which either makes me incredibly daft or makes it very dangerous to the integrity of the CI score. My WAG is that some sort of algorithm would be needed to determine if the author’s commenting style is a deliberate attempt to positively impact the index.

I hope I don’t sound like I am beating up on the Conversation Index because I really like the idea, so let’s move on…

Memes and their ‘intensity’ over time seems to me to be very much like Reach or at least a special kind of reach. Lacking a definition of intensity, I guess that it means something like how quickly it spreads and how far it spreads and then the question is; how does it pace over time? Isn’t this like Reach?

Relevance: Relevant to What? To Whom? Either this is very atomic in nature (in which case measurement is going to be meaningless) or it means measuring to how many people something is relevant to – wait isn’t that Reach?

Sentiment/Tone/Opinion/Favorability/Emotion – Looks Like A Duck, Sounds Like A Duck so it must be Voice of Customer data. The one difference here being that it doesn’t necessarily require a survey or contact us, rather it can be directly scored (although somewhat subjectively) from blog comments, trackbacked-posts, etc.

Content – Umm… not enough to go on here

Relationships & Connections: Again I ask ‘isn’t this Reach?’ Maybe it’s reach in the context of a LinkedIn but it still looks like Reach.

Reach: ‘Nuff Said

Conversation Index/Engagement – See Engagement/Participation

Demographic/Who: Who is always important whether its from a demographic, technographic or behavioral standpoint. The CMO or advertiser or product manager will always want/need to know who is viewing/engaging with content.

Of course, that’s just a critique of the list that the round table came up with and not necessarily what Jeremiah would want to know from some one in the business of measurement.

But that will have to wait, this post is already making me twitchy from it’s length so I’ll have to do a follow up post on what I think should be measured in the social web – don’t let me forget.

Update

We’ve been having a pretty lively discussion about engagement over at Eric T. Peterson’s Blog, his posts on the topic are:

How Do You Calculate Engagement? Part 1

Frank Faubert Writes In

How Do You Calculate Engagement? Part 2

How Do You Calculate Engagement? Part 3 

Additionally, Eric has started a Web 2.0 Working Group over on Google Groups discussing methods, etc. for measuring Web 2.0

Here’s his list of activities, grouped into moderate engagement and high engagement sets (as defined by Eric):

Moderate-Value Activities

• Read my weblog
• Read about the Web Analytics Business Process
• Research web analytics jobs
• Add a link to my link database
• Read comments about my books
• Give me an email address
• Host a Web Analytics Wednesday
• Join the Web 2.0 Measurement Working Group

High-Value Activities

• Consider buying one or more of my books
• Buy one or more of my books
• Read about any of my books
• Read about my Key Performance Indicator Worksheets
• Download a sample copy of one of my books
• Email me directly
• Submit a comment to my weblog
• Go to Amazon.com to check out my books

Now, score one for Eric for actually thinking through a framework for measuring engagement, and putting it into practice, but it’s late and I’m feeling nit-picky.
Because Engagement has been talked about so much lately in terms of Web 2.0 and ‘Social Media‘ I’m putting Eric’s listed activities through that lense. Of the 16 activities, only 5 measure social media engagement:

• Read my weblog
• Add a link to my link database
• Host a Web Analytics Wednesday
• Join the Web 2.0 Measurement Working Group
• Submit a comment to my weblog

7 seem to be about commerce – dealing with buying Eric’s books

• Consider buying one or more of my books
• Buy one or more of my books
• Read about any of my books
• Read about my Key Performance Indicator Worksheets
• Download a sample copy of one of my books
• Go to Amazon.com to check out my books
• Read comments about my books

Two of them I would equate to traditional CRM efforts

• Give me an email address
• Email me directly

The last two I’m having a hard time categorizing, but my guess is they relate directly to the Eric T. Peterson brand

• Research Web Analytics Jobs
• Read about the Web Analytics Business Process

So, here’s the breakdown:

• Social Media Activities: 31.25%
• Commerce Activities: 43.75%
• CRM Activities: 12.5%
• Other (Brand) Activities: 12.5%

Ok, so Eric’s in a bit of a hybrid situation, which ‘traditional’ (web 1.0?) companies will also find themselves in where social media is just one of many things going on.

But the blogger in me says ‘Come On! Only five of the activities are related to the social aspect of the site AND only one of those five is of high engagement value?’

Eric you gotta get out of your traditional corporate shell! (Disclaimer: I’m a traditional corporate dog too)

Where are the subscriptions to your RSS feed and the associated click-backs?
Where are the track backs?
Where are the buzz-rankings (e.g. post/discussions picked up in other places)?
Let me put this another way, is engagement a practical measure for non-social web activities?

At the time, Eric told me he was measuring engagement on his site and that he planned a blog post on the subject. So I held off because Eric had some real-world experience, and better tools for testing it out. So here we are, more than a month afterwards and that very busy man finally had a chance to get out his thoughts on his experimenting – yeah! Something to look at and noodle over.

Anyway, it’s time to get to work, so more thought on this will have to wait until later. In the meantime, go read Eric’s post and see what you think.

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

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.

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.

But here’s what’s most intriguing to me…

…Did you notice that as you scroll through the lists of posts that the number of unread items goes down? Now, I’m totally daunted at the thought of trying to deconstruct Google’s JavaScript so I haven’t even attempted to ‘peek under the hood’. However, from a purely presentation point-of-view, it would seem that they might be using ‘onFocus’ to mark each item scrolled/scanned/read as read.

Why is that intriguing? Well it takes me back to a discussion I took part in back at Emetrics in April. The point of the conversation, to put it melodramatically, is that ‘the page view is dead’. One of the discussion participants declaimed that he wasn’t interested in page views because a single page might include multiple news items that he wanted to measure.

So if Google is using something of the sort I describe, couldn’t they easily hook that interaction into Google Analytics with a whole new metric? Something called ‘Post View’ or something less prosaic? Isn’t that we harp about when complaining about measuring Web 2.0/AJAX/RIA?

Here are some questions that pop up in my head while thinking about this:

1. Does onFocus equate to a person actually reading the post? When Eric Peterson launched his new vendor discovery RSS feed over the weekend, I quickly scrolled through about 50 posts in Google Reader but only actually read about 5 because I wasn’t really interested in which random site was using which random analytics tool
2. Are there any studies that show what the average time to read 50, 100, 200, 500, etc. words online is?
3. If such data as the above exists or could be executed with some rigor, could a combination of onFocus and time spent on that focus more accurately measure ‘engagement’ with an individual post?
4. What kind of KPIs might we drive out of the above scenario?

I guess if Peterson ever gets the “Virtual Web 2.0 Measurement Working Group” organized I can ask these questions there, but until then I leave them for you to ponder.

• Manoj Jasra over at Web Analytics World had four guest posters this week, Avinash Kaushik, Jennifer Laycock, Gord Hotchkiss and Rand Fishkin. They all cover different topics and each one is worth the read.
• Robbin Steif has an excellent post on what web analysts do all day at her Lunametrics blog, so if your bosses, peers, family, or friends have a difficult time understanding what you do – point them to Robbin.
• Both Stephen Few and the guys over at Juice Analytics pointed out this new tool for creating sparklines and bullet charts (among other things) in Excel, so I’ve been playing with it. By the way, it’s called Microcharts by BonaVista Systems
• Of course, the Hewlett Packard BoD fiasco has been absolutely fascinating (and horrifying) – Scoble is keeping tabs on it: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4
• Mom’s back to blogging, this time from Egypt where they’re on a 2 year teaching stint – check out the new masthead for the blog which is the view from her classroom!

In the mean time, enjoy this funny little video mash I picked up from the Webanalytics.be blog

Update: I almost forgot, Scoble pointed out this amusing comic several days back.