Month: February 2006

Can’t clear my head enough to add much of use right now, but I’m listening, reading, consuming all the same.

I hope Byrne Reese and the others at Six Apart can lift TrackBack up a level via Submitting TrackBack as an Internet Standard. Ever since November, 2004, CNET News.com has supported TrackBack. Heck, we even put out a press release about it 13 months ago.

Results are mixed. A few gems, but lots of spam (most of which we catch, fortunately). And lots of links to News.com which are not captured/recorded by our systems, probably because folks don’t know to send the ping? I use a Technorati watchlist (feed URL / web URL) as an external monitor for the flood of links actually made to CNET News.com, and TrackBack (Pingback supported, too) isn’t seeing that much usage.

Good luck, Byrne. And send those pings when you link to CNET News.com!

Now even book websites have Flash intros. This is not progress.

The Dante Club by Matthew Pearl is jumping on The Da Vinci Code bandwagon for pseudo-historical fiction, which I classify as fiction involving real people. Paperback edition even has a Dan Brown blurb almost as prominent as the title… guess it worked, because I bought it and read it on the airplane (mostly).

This tale blends the literary leading lights of Boston in the 1860s into a murder mystery. Longfellow, Holmes, Lowell, Fields, Tickner, Emerson… all but the last two are lead characters, as Pearl creates a Dante-inspired serial killer moving in lockstep with the Longfellow-led translation of Dante’s masterwork, a first in America.

I took the plunge to buy the book because several of those names were the founders of The Atlantic. I haven’t read Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy, even in English. (Cue lament for the decline of classical liberal arts education. OK, enough.) (Full text available free, courtesy of Project Gutenberg.)

Verdict on the book? It’s acceptable, but tries to hard to dress up a murder investigation in historical connections.

I often appreciate the comic strip Rhymes with Orange. The single pane forFebruary 21, 2006 is spectacular, and all parents of those under the age of 10 will understand.

Also, nice URL scheme, as documented here. http://www.rhymeswithorange.com/home.php?date=YYYYMMDD is the format.

This strip, from yesterday, actually shouldn’t be online yet (delay of two weeks to favor the paying customers, newspapers), but the structure is simple and obvious, so I was adding a link even though I thought it wouldn’t work for two weeks. Easter Egg!

My sister Mary performed at Mardi Gras this year, in the first post-Katrina festival. Not her first Mardi Gras, not her first performance… but her first appearance in the New York Times, on page B7 of the print edition of the paper for February 21, 2006.

I saw a thumbnail online, similar to what I show here, but could not find the original image at first. My mother found it in the online slideshow. You may view the full image if the thumbnail below isn’t enough. (It isn’t.)

Photo credit goes to Chang W. Lee. Caption in the paper was

Spinning Toward Mardi Gras
New Orleans has not let the Hurricane Katrina disaster keep it from celebrating the Carnival season, with Scott Heron’s art and performance space, the Sidearm Gallery, doig its part on Sunday in the form of a “Gong Show”-style event; Merrygoround, above, acted as host.

It’s Marygoround, not Merrygoround… the online slide show got that right, and there is a second picture (she’s on the right).

Congratulations to Mary.

I run Measure Map on clock to stay somewhat apprised of who’s reading what on this blog. I’m an alpha customer, so I paid attention last week when Google purchased the company from Adaptive Path. I don’t pretend to know Google’s strategy on analytics, but I am curious, personally, to know what the long-term cost will be. In alpha, I’m not paying anything, although it was always clear that there would be a paid level at some point. Will this service, like Google Analytics (nee Urchin), be free going forward?

A few broader thoughts on blog analytics coalesced when I read Mike Arrington’s note about BlogBeat, a competitor in the blog analytics space, though not free.

First, most interesting ideas which require no more than time and expertise will have several teams chasing the same market.

For example, Mint gets good reviews from those who use it, and it’s $30 for a license. The only limit (at this point) is the application model, where you must install Mint on your webserver to get the analytics. It’s not a high hurdle, but it’s higher than Measure Map or BlogBeat. I suppose Shaun Inman, the author of Mint might consider partnering with someone to offer such a hosted service. (Has he done so already? Didn’t see it.)

Google Analytics bothers some because of the idea that Google knows everything about your site, which ignores what they already know if you’re running AdSense. I’m sure there are other solutions, including free (at some level). The challenge is finding them, evaluating them, and seeing which ones will last, so your historical data has some meaing. Success breeds costs, so free always seems curious/surprising in the long run (if quite pleasant!). Note: My bias on ideas being trumped by execution is clear.

Second, analytics are a strong business opportunity for the web.

There is the ego factor, not to be discounted in the personal publishing realm. Why else would all bloggers, including myself, really care about Technorati and the other blog search engines? Show me who’s talking about what I wrote, and where traffic is coming from, and I’m fascinated… because it’s a mirror. Narcissism is another word for it, but I’m not actually that pessimistic. I think looking for evidence that you are part of a conversation, however small, is worthwhile, and a reminder that the internet is really great for two things: communication and multiple views on databases. Analytics help you measure your communication skills.

Beyond the personal gratification, for all those who make their business online (blog or otherwise), communication is marketing. Why wouldn’t you measure your investment (time or otherwise) in marketing, if you could?

Working at a company which delivers over 100 million pageviews/day (see the Q4 2005 earnings release, I have a sense of the investment required in analytics for serious scale. I’d love to understand more of the tools available to those running Amazon.com, Google, Yahoo, eBay, and About.com, to name the first five which come to mind as companies with enough scale and value in their data to make this problem both really challenging and really interesting. Below the scale of the web behemoths, though, there is a huge marketplace for companies like Omniture and others. Note: CNET News.com is using Omniture, as anyone who views source can see, so I’m most familiar with some of its offerings. I’m aware of some of the competition, too, but it’s not a focus on a daily basis.

(Side note: I also think FeedBurner‘s business has a strong basis in analytics for RSS, even if the advertising network is the long-term fuel for their growth.)

Third, I expect the blog analytics companies to disrupt the analytics marketplace as WordPress or Drupal are doing in the content management space. The low-end is open-source, and the very high-end is custom… leaving a lot in the middle. In the analytics space, analog is a battle-tested Unix program for analyzing web server log files that several have put better front-ends on.

There is a market even at the high-end for better tools to understand the flood of data which flows from web usage patterns, but how big is the market? This December 2005 CNET News.com article on Omniture and the analytics space has some information, but it’s still an open question.

My take is that many businesses are still adapting and adopting the web as a lead business channel. It’s still early, which means there are still plenty of companies (big and small) which need help in interpreting their online businesses. I’m guessing that the initial experience with Google or Yahoo’s keyword buying and analytical reporting tools will whet the appetite for more of the same.

So, the growth of the overall web analytics market will mask the disruption from the low-end for a few years, and we’ll see more analytics players rather than fewer in the next three years. Thereafter, the low-end will keep moving up the food chain, and I think the total marketplace (dollars spent) on analytics will plateau in about five years, even as our incessant thirst for meaningful data continues to rise.

As a potential note of interest, Measure Map tells me that clock averages 30 daily visitors, while FeedBurner tells me that clock‘s full-text feeds have a daily circulation of 199. So consider yourself a real blogaholic if you read this far, whether in a browser or a reader. And thanks.

Jeremy Zawody provies a useful annotation of Tom Coates’s Future of Web Apps presentation. Jeremy writes that his version is “translated for Product Managers.” I’d have to argue that the translation is less important than two other benefits.

1. Pulling information from the data island that is PDF.
2. Shorter is better. The answer to Media-induced ADD… the new MADD.

Thanks.

The only amused quibble I would have is with calling out del.icio.us as a readable URLs. Yes, the paths after the domain itself are beautiful and hackable. But let’s all move over to delicious.com, shall we? Of course, at this point the URL with its own geek cred is part of the brand, really, just like the dropped vowl is for Flickr.

Note: I pay attention to these things because jealous of these URLs. CNET’s CMS has painful URLs, no doubt about it. Adding legible text to the paths didn’t help much, as they are still not hackable or guessable. I would love quantifiable evidence about why making a transition to new URLs would be worth the massive redirects and more… because I’ve been tempted to make this plunge for years, but the unknown cost-benefit makes it a pipe dream for now.

Just a quick rant: will United Airlines please hurry up and go out of business, and free up the air routes from San Francisco to someone hungrier?

Maybe I should be careful what I wish for, but I’m ready to pursue the unknown over the known… and for a relatively cautious person like myself, that speaks volumes about how painful the United experience has become.

My family’s flight was cancelled last night because United couldn’t get pilots for the plane at SFO, a significant hub in their system.

(At least, that is what was announced. If it was something else, shame on them for lying to customers, too.)

For mileage reasons, I have two more round-trip flights on United in the next five weeks, but at that point, my mileage will be zeroed out, and my waning loyalty will have no further grounding.

Would more entrepreneurs please read James Fallows’ Free Flight and attack this ripe market segment? Please? Maybe some of the VC cash overhang could be redirected? If Vinod Khosla is taking on energy, then the daunting infrastructure and regulatory concerns which probably dampen investment in aviation can be overcome, too.

I’d like to see an “aviation bubble,” even, so competition really shakes things up. It’s less than two years since I read the book. I know Cirrus and Eclipse are out there… other options which will actually be flying in the next two years?

Michael Jecks’s The Last Templar is the first of a series of mysteries set in medieval England. I picked it up because I wanted a mystery, and there were a score of titles on the shelf with the same author and theme. Worth an airplane read, which is what it was… but this introduction to the characters doesn’t give me a sense they are the basis of a whole career. I suppose I’ll wait until my next flight before I return to the 1300s.

It was only six months ago that Gabe Rivera asked Is blog search big?, partially in response to my wondering whether we’re swimming in the mainstream yet.

Today, Scott Karp riffed on the Gallup poll which points out that the audience for blogs is relatively flat.
Blogging and the Elusive Mass Audience, which really should have been titled from this sentence in his post: “Is it possible that bloggers are the only people who read blogs?”

If there are more people blogging, but no increase in the number of people reading blogs, maybe blog readership has actually been siphoned off by blog writing. I know that the time I spend writing this post is time I might otherwise spend reading other blogs.

Yes, it’s either create or consume. The best at the former either limit their time spent doing the latter or just have more time than I can imagine!

Returning to the original metric about the mainstream, though, the top searches on Technorati this hour are more in the mainstream right now (just before 10pm PT on February 12, 2006). Only three technology topics in there by my count (#9, #12, and #15).

1. “Mohammed Cartoon”
2. Cheney
3. “Dick Cheney”
4. Krugle
5. Cartoon
6. Olympic
7. “Michelle Kwan”
8. Alicia Machado
9. Fon
10. Blizzard
11. Snow
12. Iran
13. Gmail
14. “Du Bist Deutschl…”
15. Zillow

I know I’m not in the mainstream. The blogs I read probably are not, either.