People who know me or read my columns and such know that I'm a big believer in serendipity, caprice and the like. I'm forever amazed at how many things in my life will overlap and come together at the correct time. Case in point, I'm now co-authoring a blog with WebAnalyticsDemystified's Eric Peterson. The blog is The Future of Web Analytics, Demystified and my starting topic is Starting the discussion: Attention, Engagement, Authority, Influence, ... We're going to be discussing lots of interesting cross-disciplinary things there, I hope.
The reason serendipity is in play is because I just read Do Web Metrics Adequately Measure Awareness?. My immediate response is "No" and I'm willing to learn otherwise.
My real challenge is written as a comment to that post.
Forgive me if I’m mistaken and I didn’t see a definition of “awareness” in the above. It would help me greatly to know how the word “awareness” is being defined in this discussion. How can we know that awareness is shifting if we don’t have a definition of it such that we recognize a variance from the norm of the definition, hence it has “shifted”?
Again, please forgive me for my lack of understanding. - Joseph
I can provide working definitions of awareness from the disciplines I study. For example, awareness occurs when selective attention is active. Selective attention?
You're walking down a country road, enjoying the bright sunshine, clear sky, forest on your right and fields on your left. You're listening to the birds, hearing the snow crackle beneath your boots (I'm in NH as I write this). Your attention is divided amongst all these things. Probably you don't even know how many things you're attention is casting on.
Suddenly a pack of large, snarling wolves leaps from the forest, stops in the road about twenty feet in front of you, blood flowing from their jaws, steaming down their flues, their eyes focused on you and nothing else.
Ah, they have your attention. Probably all of it. What about the birds, the crackling snow, the bright sunshine?
To heck with that, all of your attention is on those wolves.
That's selective attention. You've lost awareness of everything else in your environment, all you're aware of is those wolves.
How do you measure selective attention, ie awareness, via a web interface?
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