The Science of Communicating & Marketing Your Business

The first tools need to be simple if they're going to be used at all. Once simple tools are understood they can evolve along with the tool users to handle more complex situations and more advanced uses.

1. Angie wants metrics that have accountability.
2. Business demands that things be scalable in order for the plateau to go on far and wide.
3. The blue sky desire is to have "Simple tools backed by incredibly complex analysis."
4. Matt helped me to understand that before someone can use an adjustable spanner they need to be comfortable with a stone knife.
5. Noisy data, like what we use to call "junk" DNA, isn't junk. It has meaning, you just have to know what it means.
6. What's noisy data in one paradigm is perfectly valid data in another.
7. What traditional web analytics -- what's happening at the machine, the computer -- considers noisy data is perfectly valid data for discerning what's happening in the heart and mind of the person sitting at the computer.
8. Tools need to start simple and evolve with their users.

So the end of fugue which Angie's blue-skying sent me on and which Matt helped me understand resulted in what we're calling The NextStage Gauge, "...a simple tool that indicates the online health of your website along with 1-3 action items for improving your site's ROI." The NextStage Gauge can recommend up to six action items and will only show at most three at any point in time (for reasons that'll be in an upcoming IMedia column). The last recommendation The NextStage Gauge will give is that it's time to upgrade to more advanced reporting. In other words, The NextStage Gauge is

• a simple tool (3,4) that
• produces action items hence has accountability (1),
• is scalable (2) because it's ability to make recommendations is limited only by data storage and processing speed (the underlying algorithms have been making accurate predictions for years),
• produces a metric based on what most consider noisy data (5-7) and
• only requires the user to place a tag on their webpages (many web analytics packages require this so it isn't new), start clicking on a "Generate Report" button after a few days of data collection (based on site traffic load) and recognizes when the user is ready for a more complex tool (8, 8 and again, 8).

Right now NextStage is developing some algorithms to remove noisy data from blog metrics (I'll bet my ranking as a B-list blogger's going to go down because of this).

There you go, folks. Hope it was worth it. I know I enjoyed it.

Links for this arc:

• Articles on noisy data affecting analysis:
  • The Isomap Algorithm and Topological Stability
  • Reconstructing Past Climate from Noisy Data
  • Losing Variability in the Noise
• The Critical Difference: Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading
• Design and Purpose links:
  • Semphonics Functionalism Paper
  • IMediaConnectin Columns
  • Chapter 7, "Experience versus Expectation", Reading Virtual Minds
• FindMeFaster
• The Noisy Data Arc
• Posts on new web technologies:
  • RIA
  • Rich Media
  • Social Tools
• Posts mentioning WAA:
  • The Long Tail, Part 1
  • The Long Tail, Part 2
  • The Reluctant Blogger
  • Nothing New Under the Sun (Ajax)...
  • Nothing New Under the Sun (Privacy)...
• Web Analytics Association Links:
  • WAA
  • Web Analytics Wednesday
• Web Analytics Vendors mentioned in this arc:
  • Coremetrics
  • Unica