Many of you know I work at Visual Sciences as the company’s Vice President of Strategic Services. Well I don’t blog about the company all that often, Michael Wexler of Yahoo! sent me a link to a pretty complimentary piece that Phillip Howard from Bloor Research wrote about the company. The thing I liked most about Howard’s commentary was this:

However, one of the things that is interesting about Visual Sciences is that it was not designed specifically for web analytics and the company only chose to focus on that market because it offered the lowest hanging fruit. In fact, the company takes the approach that a mouse click, or any other activity on a web site, is just an event and the product is really an event querying engine. It thus has much more general applicability than just web analytics and the company is actively looking to expand out from this market.

Not a bad summary. Anyway, enough cheerleading. Give it a read if you’re interested in what we’re up to at Visual Sciences.

The Dashboard Spy has what I agree is a beautiful dashboard this morning built by a creative agency for Subaru to track brand awareness. Especially the second slide with the speedometer/tachometer images conveys the simplicity with with this type of information (at least at the top-level) should be conveyed. Nice work, Subaru!

I wonder what Clint at InstantCognition thinks?

File this under “more evidence that Web 2.0 is sadly lacking measurement” … while some enterprising young folks are putting their AJAX calendar application (Kiko) up for sale on eBay and using Google Analytics to show that people are visiting the web site, they’re apparently not able to measure the application’s actual use using the existing page view paradigm.

From their eBay listing:

Kiko traffic has been steady at around 40k visitors / month. Here is a screenshot of our Google Analytics stats over the past month (Note: the Pageviews stats are somewhat misleading, as the entire application is only a single pageview per user)

While it’s great that they have 40K visitors per month one must wonder whether those visitors are actually using the calendar application or they’re simply kicking tires. This again is the fundamental reason behind my call for Web 2.0 measurement standards; if you were considering paying $50,000 for an AJAX application, wouldn’t you want to know how much people were using it, what they were doing with it, whether they used it frequently or infrequently, etc.?

Maybe not. Maybe you’d just be so in love with the idea of owning something AJAX-y and Web 2.0-y that you’d let the whole “measurement void” thing slide.

(Thanks to Brett Crosby from Google Analytics for the head’s up!)

A totally uncharacteristic post from me just to see how images work with the Blogger platform. Pictured here is my son, Cooper, clearly enjoying his signed copies of Web Site Measurement Hacks and Web Analytics Demystified.

Cooper has been encouraging me lately to update Web Analytics Demystified. While much of what he says sounds like the inane ramblings of a toddler, I think what he’s saying is that the book is out-of-date and needs to be updated to reflect all the changes in the industry since 2004, not to mention all the exposure I’ve had to other technologies and ideas since my first tenure at WebSideStory.

Who knows … maybe Cooper’s right. What do you think? Would you like to see an updated edition of Web Analytics Demystified?

Today Matt Jacobs comments on Gary Angel’s recent white paper on functionalism in web analytics. I was impressed but immediately critical of the paper given that many of the KPIs SEMphonic proposes are fairly difficult to calculate using most of the available web analytics solutions. Gary had a great rebuttal and he and I had a nice cup of coffee (thanks Starbucks!) when I was in San Jose for Search Engine Strategies.

What I like most about functionalism is that it’s something–an approach to web analytics that is not simply ad hoc–but I share Matt’s questions at the end of his post (read his post or these questions are completely out-of-context):

1. Should this exercise be routine for site analytics or not?
2. What value do you currently place on the analysis of individual pages? Of your high volume pages?
3. What other means or methods of classification have you applied?
4. To what extent do you believe this approach will become more antiquated as technologies such as AJAX become more prevalent?
5. Do you believe these techniques will be obsolete when multivariate tools are commonplace on every website?

I guess I’ll watch Matt’s comments to see what his readers have to say. Alternatively, you could answer the questions here in my weblog and I’ll make sure that Matt sees them. Especially question four given my recent rant about measuring “Web 2.0″.

What do you think?