I'm reminded of a line from Brian W. Aldiss' short story, "Old Hundredth":
"...useless to deny that it is well-nigh impossible to improve anything, however faulty, that has so much tradition behind it. And the origins of your bit of metricism are indeed embedded in such a fearful antiquity that we must needs -- "
Anyway, on with the arc!
So in talking with FindMeFaster's Matt Van Wagner and going over my conversations with Coremetrics' Angie Brown, I mentioned that in the beginning and because ET was considered a disruptive technology, most of our first five years were spent waiting for our market to emerge or for our plateau to intersect with everybody else's plateaus.
This intersection started when visualization packages first started appearing in web analytics. NextStage benefitted from this because the concept of "behavioral" started becoming lingua franca. Even though NextStage's definition of "behavioral" isn't the industry standard (surprise!) at least the word is out there.
Angie and I both agree that such packages are fun to watch and don't provide a lot of actionability. Responses to Visualizing...what? indicate that most users feel the same way. It's kind of like getting a racetrack when you're a kid. You can only watch that car go around that loop so many times before you end up saying, "Yeah? Now what?"
I had been mulling over Angie's tool definitions; simple reports use all the data, more complex reports use less data.This is true at the machine level because you can isolate machine components to test them separately before putting them into the machine as a whole. It's a "Is the plane safe?" versus "How does landing gear work?" type of thing. In order to answer the former you need to know an awful lot about the whole plane, to answer the second you only need to know about one subsystem of the plane.
(just a few more entries in this arc, I promise)
Links for this arc:
- Articles on noisy data affecting analysis:
- 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:
- Posts mentioning WAA:
- Web Analytics Association Links:
- Web Analytics Vendors mentioned in this arc:
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