So, Eric P. announced tonight that Judah Phillips is joining him as a blogger "under the Web Analytics Demystified brand" - emphasis from Eric (I find this choice of words and emphasis particularly intriguing).
Judah, an all-around sharp guy and director of web analytics at a "large media company", gets a hardy "Here, Here!" from me, I look forward to his commentary and insights.

But I have to wonder…
Is Eric opening a content mall for web analytics?

Well, it’s not particularly scientific, but the results are in. The poll was quite simple: Ask my readers how many of Eric’s books they currently own - zero, one, two, or all three. I ran the poll from Feb 11 to Feb 16, 2007 (well 17 if you count this morning) and had 23 respondents. Here’s the breakdown of responses:

• 39.13% of respondents own all 3 of Eric’s books
• 39.13% of respondents own two of Eric’s books

Channeling a marketing director I used to work with, I could say, my site has a top two box score of 78.3%. That’s pretty darn good although not the nirvana of 80+%.

• 13.04% of respondents own just one of Eric’s books
• 8.7% of respondents did not own a single book (maybe they do now :))

- Respondents are 4.5 times more likely to own two or three books than they are to own none

- Respondents are 3 times more likely to own two or more books than they are to own just one

So when Eric complains that none of my referrals are purchasing books, I can say, “Fine, write a new one, most of my readers already own the others already.”

If we combine respondents that own one, two, or three of the books we’re talking about 91.3% of all respondents. In other words, you dear readers are not the target for Eric’s book selling any more unless he writes a new one.

A big thanks to everyone who took the poll!

First I hoodwinked Mom into blogging - she now has two blogs and a Flickr Stream (she’s even using Twitter).

Now my sister Ali has started her own blog!

Here’s the list of links for family, friends and anyone else who is interested:

• Hays Travelogue
• The Date Book (It’s not what you think)
• Mom’s Flickr Stream
• Ali Marie’s S.I.N. (Service Industry Network)

I am totally looking forward to Ali’s anecdotes and insights from the front lines of the service industry!

Now if I can just get Nate (and Family), Dad (and Dee) and Grammie (and John) to join the game…

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

So, the new Google reader is pretty cool, although I have to say that I liked the old look better.

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.