Alex Pooley's Blog

You can track what people are saying about your brand, or your competition’s brand from your feed reader. Simply go to Technorati, type in what you want to track, and then subscribe to the results.

After finding blog articles, you can interact with the blog community through comments. I’m quite sure this is how Mike Levin of HitTail was able to leave his monkey comment on my article about website analytics software shortly after I published the article.

You can also do the same thing from Google Blog Search.

.. the process which allows us to accomplish the most extraordinary and unique human activities are the same processes which block our further growth if we commit the error of mistaking the model for the reality.

The Structure of Magic, Richard Bandler & John Grinder.

We all have models of reality that we construct over time from our experiences. We use our model as the basis for every single decision we make for our entire life! Yet, our experiences are inherently biased! Therefore we look at life from a skewed perspective. What does this mean? I’m not “qualified” in this area, but I have spent most of my life thinking about this sort of stuff. Here’s some things you may like to keep in mind, and why I think it’s worth doing so.

1. We see reality through a filter. Therefore always remain weary of what you see.
2. You can’t remove the filter, but you can reduce the effects of the filter by experiencing more.
3. Our model forms part of an organic feedback loop. Accept that your model is inherently flawed to improve the feedback process.
4. A biased model is an incorrect model, and an incorrect model means you will make mistakes. Mistakes are a natural means of correcting your model, so don’t get down over it.

There’s plenty more that could be said about this but I’ll leave it as thought fodder for the next time you brush your teeth :)

I think web analytics suffers from a lack of sophistication. Right now most analytics packages are pretty raw. They show you traffic from the perspective of time, source, geography, and a few other things and then leave you to draw your own conclusions. But, many conclusions can be drawn without human intervention yet they are not.

For example, does it really matter that 5 people viewed my blog at 800×600 resolution? Or, that 10 readers were from Canada? What really matters is what these numbers can tell me. Say I had 11 readers, and 10 were from Canada, now that would tell me something! Or, what if I was receiving hits from search users that I had not been targeting in my writing?

I’m not sure why packages aren’t doing this. My guess is that a lot of the people creating these packages don’t actually know what people want to see. I’ve only experienced free packages though, so maybe the “pay for” packages are better? There’s a couple of free analytics systems I’ve been trying out that I recommend you look in to instead of the usual Google Analytics (by the way, what happened to Google’s acquisition of MeasureMap?).

• 103bees - Much cleaner interface than Google’s Analytics. Emphasizes what people are searching to get to your site. Read more here and here.
• HitTail - They try to help you decide what to write about next by processing what people are searching to get to your site. It’s a cool idea, but the algorithms are closed with little hint of what’s going on, so I’m left not knowing how to interpret my “suggestions”. For all I know it could just be a trained monkey picking stuff for me to write. Read more here.
• Clicky - This is a neat little package that has more emphasis on following your readers around your blog. It provides details on sessions, and what sort of things were clicked. Definitely worth checking out.
• FeedBurner - I’m sure you know about FeedBurner. They recently increased the free services to include more metrics. FeedBurner has great detail on how people are reading your feeds. FeedBurner also tracks outgoing links which is handy to have. But I usually use the next package on the list for that information.
• MyBlogLog - You can see part of this service running on the right of my blog with the pictures of people passing through the blog. MyBlogLog is not really an analytics package, yet it forms part of my primary analytics tooling. This is probably saying something about the existing analytics packages! The thing I like about MyBlogLog’s statistics is that you can very quickly see how people are finding your pages, what they are landing on, and how they are leaving. I would like to see other “real” analytics packages take this viewport and allow me to drill down.

There may be some magically brilliant analytics package out there that I don’t know of, and if there is, please tell me! Unfortunately, right now I am dissatisfied with my analytics systems as they leave way too much of the decision making in my hands. I would like to see an analytics package that does not suffer from a lack of sophistication, but instead acts a bit like an employee that makes useful suggestions based on an automated digestion of the data.