More and more it seems making silly claims about one thing or another being dead or gone and then leaving it at that has become the common practice. There were three separate occurrences that made me cringe...

1 - I was reading the comments on a posting at engadget about parallel processing and one commenter said, "why would u need a personnel computer 100 faster than the fastest one out now". He was immediately thrashed and comparisons of 20 year old computers which are 10,000 times slower than today's palm pilots were used to show the poster's ignorance.

2 - I checked my feeds and saw a great post from Anil Batra discussing how it's in fashion to say things are dead in blogs and he referenced the posting from Nick Sharp at WebTrends who wrote about Web Analytics being dead. Anil went on to rightly say that web analytics is maturing and growing into a more well defined piece of the overall analytics toolbox, a much better and more accurate way of stating the obvious as opposed to Nick's shlocky salesspeak about how WebTrends is the first company to notice this and they're creating a new thing for people to buy to take advantage of it. Rubbish!

3 - One of our search specialists returned from the PPC Summit in NY last week and spoke about one of the presenters; he basically said that Web 2.0 was dead, or bullshit... As soon as I heard this I thought of a humerous parody about Microsoft's new Surface product, which is a top rated video on YouTube as well as already showing up 7th on natural search results when you google "Microsoft Surface", and it's only been posted for a week. As a "search guru" , marketing strategy expert or whatever his title is, you would expect him to be a bit more forward thinking since one of the core tennet's of web 2.0(UGC - User Generated Content) directly affects the field he's supposed to be an expert in. Web 2.0 involves users doing things on there own, immersive content and many other things, most of which are indexed and grow on the rankings based on people's opinions, which directly affects paid search, web analytics, banner advertising, negative keyword campaigns and everything else. Read Josh Ross's blog for an interesting perspective on Web 2.0.

These three examples are deeply intertwined, if we had stopped developing computer processors or hard discs because all of our current needs were being met then we would never have evolved into the internet overloaded society we have now...which happens to be a processing speed and disc space Goliath. And had the internet never evolved, we wouldn't have the newest iterations of usage and content sharing to measure and try to understand. The fact that these things continue to mutate and grow is main point, processor speed will never go out of style, growing and adapting the ways we measure online activity will never cease to change, because the way people use the internet and it's future incarnations will never cease to change.

The short version is that sticking your head in the sand can calling something dead, doesn't make it so...

I just noticed on the pMetrics blog that they are releasing an update soon that will fix the issue of only being able to select a single day as well as adding an API and logging of custom data.  This is great news and will constitute a HUGE improvement.  next on the list is adding export functionality and a more robust reporting interface in my opinion...but I'm excited to get the dynamic date range selector and API access!

I wrote a blog several weeks ago about some of the measurement tools available for measuring blog activity, and at the same time installed several tags from some of the providers in order to compare there relative performance. Now I will not try to compare the actual numbers since it's not only an exercise in futility since all tools use slightly different algorithms and business rules...but also because I don't care about that. I want to know which is the best tool currently available for measuring blog usage and for looking into the harder to find details such as inbound and outbound links, cross promotion, etc... So here are some brief results and opinions.

Measure Map - It's still not available, while I have been given assurances from a trusted and well informed source that it is not dead...but that's the only thing I've heard and their site is still unchanged. It's especially interesting since Jeff Veen who came over from Adaptive Path with the Measure Map purchase doesn't seem to be working on it either...at least the fourth paragraph of his blog post says he's not...

StandardStats - StandardStats and TotalStats are pretty much worthless in my opinion unless you post minimally to your blog and don't really want to look at web analytics. It seems to have problems if the "www" is omitted from the URL(thus creating two entries, one for www.myblog.com/content and one for myblog.com/content), so you have to do the math of combining them, which not only is complex since you can't export the data to excel, but it also muddies your topten list...which is the only display you get with the free version. Basically you should avoid this tool and use one of the other free versions.

pMetrics - While it has some great features as far as looking into the inbound and outbound links, intelligent content viewing unlike standard stats, and a host of other interesting tid-bits...it suffers greatly from poor usability and data manipulation. You can only view data one day at a time, and not only was that a terrible TV series...but it's a huge hindrance when you're trying to look at the activity on a certain blog post... One really cool option is looking at visitors on a Google map with full ajax integration, but google analytics has that too and it allows you to customize your date range.

Google Analytics - While it is decidely NOT a blog analytics tool, the new UI borrowed from Measure Map (did I mention that I want Measure Map?) is quite brilliant and easy to use. It provides a wealth of data but it still lacks the true blog measurability since it's orientation is more focused on standard websites.

So the end result is that we're still stuck using tools that don't fit the problem and no clear time line of when tools like Measure Map will be available.

Ask.com recently released their updated interface, and I have to say it's quite amazing. The initial screen is nice esthetically but it seems like any other search engine, however once you submit things begin to change rapidly from google and yahoo. A three paned page emerges with search modification options/suggestions on the left margin, and then paid and natural search results emerge in the body pane. Then, depending on what your searching for the right pane will either not appear for obscure searches, or will present a depth of content for broader searches. If you search for a band you will see images first, followed by music (with samples built in) powered by iLike.com, then it will show videos (which begin playing in place when you hover over them), or encyclopedia listings from wiki. The new interface is pushing google to launch a similar change in the near future where search results will be a mix of videos, images etc. since google users have been avoiding using the tabs/categories...even after google recently made the menu bar like approach common through most of their applications.

But the most impressive thing is that the new ask.com turned me onto iLike.com. For a while I've heard music geeks like myself complaining about missing one of their favorite bands when they were in town, or being out of touch with new music since they only listen to their iTunes... iLike uses the facebook platform with a plugin for iTunes and contact importing from the major web email providers to make one of the most holistic social music sites out there. Right away you send invites to your friends, then you install the iTunes plugin and populate what kind of music you like and your favorite artists. From there the fun begins, all of those artists you imported from iTunes are now displayed when you want to find out who is going to be on tour in your area...and it's directly connected with ticketmaster. The other really interesting feature is that it's tied into garageband.com so when you're listening to some of your old standby artists it will recommend similar new artists and let you download their mp3s for free. Compared to the other social music options out there...I like iLike.

How all of this will come together and who may or may not buy iLike and whether the new ask.com interface will grow their 5% search share are TBD...but I know the data implications are amazing for whomever may snatch up iLike considering the advertising opportunities...and the search behavior on Ask.com as well as video advertising opportunities could be quite revolutionary.