The Science of Communicating & Marketing Your Business

This entry borrows heavily from discussion I had with Angie Brown, Strategic Services Consultant for Coremetrics.

The reason for categorization is to determine what's important and what isn't. At the simplest reporting level all analytics packages use all the data. It's when you get into very complex reports that each analytics vendor gets to demonstrate their unique strengths because, at this level, you're winnowing out details to report on very specific items which don't require that all details necessarily be present.

The change that noisy data brings is that a new question needs to be answered, "What is this page's purpose?" The question use to be (and in many cases still is) "What happened on this page?" Interestingly enough, that latter question, when the psycho- and neuro-linguistic concept of chunking is applied, becomes "What event happened on this page?" which, in the world of RIA, Rich Media and Web 2.0, becomes "What events were triggered on this page?" Semphonics has published an interesting paper on page purpose and I've written about understanding the intersection of visitor and page purpose in several places. Where Semphonics and NextStage might disagree is in how the concept of purpose is best achieved.

Next up, answering the real question of analysis.

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
• Design and Purpose links:
  • Semphonics Functionalism Paper
  • IMediaConnectin Columns
  • Chapter 7, "Experience versus Expectation", Reading Virtual Minds
• 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
  • Not So Social Networks
  • Standards and Noisy Data, Part 3
• Web Analytics Vendors mentioned in this arc:
  • Coremetrics
  • Unica