Converted

Nothing to do with analytics...I bought a Mac (MacBook) this weekend. I've never used a Mac before. What a great experience. I turned it on, answered a couple of questions and I was connected and on my way. The kids love it...and I do as well.

I'm trying to figure out if I should get a .mac account, or just use Yahoo or Google for everything. Anyone have any preferences?

Filed in: mac

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Attention Metric from Compete

Compete has just launched a new Attention metric, defined as "The total time spent on a site as a percentage of the total time spent online by all U.S. internet users". They now have daily updates, measuring the "velocity" of change in attention as well. It's an interesting view of overall traffic, and the tools provided by Compete are pretty cool.

The WAA has a research committee focused on measuring "new media", providing useful methodology and best practices that is also worth checking out if you're interested in more specifics on this topic.

Filed in: analytics, web+analytics

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Video Advertising

Picked up this info from MarketingVOX. This is pretty cool advertising built into a video. Check out this Kohl's ad, and look for the rectangle overlays on the video. Clicking on one of them pulls up the product you're viewing on the Kohl's site.

Think of all of the placement advertising possibilities!

The analytics behind the scenes are interesting as well. MSN looks to be tracking whether you mouseover the product (the rectangle). Nothing is sent to Kohl's, so they must be relying on MSN for in-video analytics for now. When you click on an item and visit Kohl's directly, the referrer is the MSN video site, but they don't look to be sending the specifics about the ad placement (for example, the same item shows up in different scenes...I'm sure the folks at Kohl's want to know which scene had the highest conversion).

Cool stuff. Congrats to Kohl's and MSN for putting this together.

Filed in: advertising, analytics, web+analytics

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More Thoughts On Page Views

Steve Rubel continued the discussion of the replacement of the Page View as the metric of choice in our industry. He suggests that Events, Unique Visitors and Time Spent are likely candidates for replacement metrics (with Events and Time Spent as the two likely leaders).

The article is worth a read...as are the comments.

Filed in: analytics, web+analytics

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RSS for Salesforce.com

I've been following Charlie's development of the Spanning Salesforce tool for awhile now. He visited Portland last year and a few of us got together with him to talk RSS geek talk. Charlie has a very compelling story. Using RSS to follow salesforce data more closely. Check it out if you haven't already.

Today, NewsGator and Spanning Salesforce announced a partnership. Great news...congrats to both teams. Wider consistent adoption of RSS across the enterprise is an important concept, and this is a good example of an important marriage to help that adoption.

And in unrelated, but very interesting news, last week NewsGator announced their On Demand service for RSS. Very smart.

Filed in: rss, salesforce.com

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Engagement and Machine Tags

Note the 8th item on Fred's list of things learned from Flickr:

8) Engagement metrics like comments, favorites, views, can and should be used to drive discovery (the most interesting algorithm)

I'd love to hear more about "discovery" as an engagement metric. Perhaps EricP can mull this one over a bit.

The other item on his list that is very intriguing to me is #10:

10) Machine tagging (autotagging) is the next big thing in web 2.0

Machine tags sound like a very interesting next step in tagging, and a smart extension to the tagging process. More good consumer generated content that seems quite ripe for analytics tools to leverage to better understand visitors. Great stuff.

Filed in: analytics, web+analytics

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Tagged - 5 Things

EricP tagged me over the holidays to share 5 things about me that you may not know. Although I hate chain letters, I appreciate Eric very much, so here goes...

1) I have 4 amazing children who are already way smarter than me. I've kept a journal of funny things they have said over their short lives which has turned out to be a wonderful collection of endearing moments.
2) I'm an alum of UCSC (Economics), the home of the mighty Banana Slugs (tshirt anyone?).
3) I started out as a computer science major. One night (or rather, early morning), I looked around the dark, fuggy computer lab where I was working on a program (to automate a traffic light I believe), and realized that I definitely did not want to spend the rest of my life around computer geeks. So, here I am...a computer geek.
4) I've written, recorded and performed songs live...not well mind you...but I enjoy it! (no modesty there...I'm really not very good...but I do enjoy watching live music a great deal and am still to this day a fan-club-card-carrying Plimsouls fan).
5) I've written a children's story for my kids that I'd like to make into a book someday.