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.

I recently posted a laundry list of potential blog analytics tools and decided to implement a few solutions on our blog to see how they were in action. While this process is still going on I ran into an interesting thread on Robert Scoble's blog. The discussion is similar but it's looking at Alexa, compete.com and several other general stats providers and asking why they're so horrible. After reading through a lot of comments I realized that there are three issues here that are being lumped together, and in so doing, it's creating more confusion.

1. General Stats - The Alexas of the web will always be off based on their methodologies using panel or toolbar data. the only way to shore it up is to create a better system that can prevent cheating...but this isn't going to happen soon.

2. Web Analytics - Obviously in this case there are a host of competitors ranging from free to really expensive and also varying wildly in their offering. This category is the definitive source to track everything going on at your local server...but it's not going to solve the bloggers dilemma. And it's hard to get two systems to say the same number...but at the end of the day it doesn't matter since you're looking for trending and directional information for the most part.

3. Blog Analytics - I recently did a post on my blog about the complete void within the blog analytics space...since that post I've heard that Google will be releasing Measure Map, a blog specific tool that seems quite powerful and takes a step beyond the current web analytics tools out there. The measure map UI was lifted for the new version of Google Analytics and is quite slick.

More to come next week on a comparison of pMetrics (terrible name) and StandardStats which have both been implemented on our blog.

For quite a while now I've been of the opinion that many "Web Analytics" focused analysts are well...too focused on web analytics. Looking at web analytics alone without the greater context of the marketing environment is not only myopic and shortsighted, but it can be very dangerous. Don't get me wrong....web analytics play an integral role in measuring the impact of marketing, however utilizing ad-server data on its own as well as SEM data on its own and all of the other traffic drivers are equally important. Too often it appears that web analysts are so focused on using their web analytics tool that they omit other useful and often better tools for specific tactics.

The other major flaw (in my opinion) is the search for a holy KPI. It seems that people spend days or weeks just trying to define the one killer KPI that they miss out on the big picture. I was reading a post on the benry blog where they were searching for the killer KPI that would measure engagement or "content effectiveness" as they put it, and they ended up up with a formula of "bounce rate / time on page." At first glance it sounds interesting, but they go on to prove the uselessness of this additional metric. They lay out the four combinations of high and low for each component and explain the scenarios and allude to what actions would evolve from the results. However, they land on a net effect of where bounce rate is high you have a problem, therefore why use a mashup KPI? Now I don't disagree with the search for better KPIs, but it seems that the search for the holy grail metric can cloud the analysts' judgment into missing the fact that they had the metric they needed in the first place.