Measure Map Insight - Interview with Jeff Veen

If you haven't already done so, check out Brian Oberkirch's interview (mp3) with Jeff Veen (who is now with Google, formerly Adaptive Path). Jeff put together the very cool Measure Map analytics package.

About 1/3 of the way into the interview, Jeff digs into some of the history of building Measure Map. As a blogger, he essentially couldn't find a tool to help him. He notes:

"I was blogging all the time...none of us really had a sense of how well we were doing"

As is the case with many of us, he wanted to know:

"What is my connection to the rest of the community out there"..."What affect am I having"

So, unable to find a tool (or more specifically, the right tool), he set out to build one, with the assumption that with blogging tools like Blogger, MovableType, WordPress, etc.:

"You could help about 90% of the bloggers by creating a tool that integrated into just 4 or 5 products"

For sure, Measure Map is a different kind of a tool. It's specifically designed for bloggers. It doesn't even use typical jargon to describe activity on your site. Jeff notes:

"The big irony of Measure Map is that it's a web analytics tool that makes no mention of pageviews whatsoever."

And the interface is designed around blog posts, rather than URL's, etc.

"One of my first ideas when we first started talking about Measure Map was the idea that every post on your site had a corresponding page on...Measure Map"

Where the product really shines is with its visualizations. It provides simple, friendly visual representations of the data via a clean interface spiced with Flash and Ajax.

"I didn't care what we used...sometimes it made sense to use flash for a relatively complex series of animations or interactions, but the flash would then talk to the javascript, back and forth...and most people can't really tell as they're navigating through the product which parts are Flash and which parts are Ajax"

One of the things Measure Map did early on that I liked was to create feeds for the data to easily retrieve it. I use the feeds for the widget I created that pulls Feedburner and Measure Map data together.

Can you tell I'm a Measure Map fan? Thanks to Marko for point me to the interview

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