The Science of Communicating & Marketing Your Business

We pick up with where metrics are now and how we might extend them.

One of the challenges I've always had with analytics is that they deal with what's happening at the machine, the computer, and not in the heart and mind of the person sitting at the computer. I'm not discrediting any web analytics provider or any web analytics package. In fact, NextStage and our technology suite is web analytics provider agnostic. We work with them all equally well, and I've repeatedly written and said that NextStage doesn't do web analytics.

That offered, figuring out what's going on with the person sitting at the computer is one of the reasons NextStage exists; just as there's more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio, there's more that happens between the user and the computer than ever happens between the browser and the server, and when you take the user's psyche into account? The numbers become truly astronomical.

This returns us to differentiating behaviors from actions or "the reason I'm typing is definitely different from the reason you're typing" and how noisy data is going to be shaping things. (more to follow...)

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
• Eric Peterson's Web Analytics Demystified
• 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)...
• Posts on new web technologies:
  • RIA
  • Rich Media
  • Social Tools
• The Noisy Data Arc:
  • Standards and Noisy Data, Part 1
  • Standards and Noisy Data, Part 2
• Web Analytics Association Links:
  • WAA
  • Web Analytics Wednesdays