Apparently MSN’s movement to “Live Search” had a deleterious effect on referring source data coming from the search engine beginning sometime over the weekend! Have a look at the thread on the Yahoo! group started Sunday by Debora Geary.

The scariest thing is this explanation by Ian Houston of what is apparently going on over at MSN. Ian is one of the brightest guys I know so when he posts I read. Ian has this to say:

[MSN has] built their application in a way that the referrer will no longer pass. It may not be intentional but it is certainly detrimental to the web community as a whole and I would think their own sales effort as it is no longer possible to accurately see how much traffic they are sending to your site. There are obviously still some ways the referrer is passing so the script needs some more thorough evaluation for what those circumstances are. What I see in it in general terms tells me most anything coming from the search results page (especially the organic listings) should not pass a referrer unless the browser has javascript disabled.

Pretty scary, huh? Now, according to a thread over at the Search Engine Roundtable this was not intentional and MSN is working on a fix for the problem. I guess that’s one way to prevent people from putting out press releases about the quality of referring traffic your site or search engine is sending along …

Watch the Yahoo! group thread for updates on this problem. If anyone from MSN is reading my weblog I’d love to hear what you know and when you expect a solution to be pushed live.

I went to Boston’s first Web Analytics Wednesday event last night and no surprise had a great time. Some highlights include:

• Meeting Jared Spool from UIE and hearing how he approaches giving presentations. Jared, in case you haven’t seen him present, is a fantastic presenter. Like the Eisenbrothers, a “must see” presenter in my book!
• Meeting Frank Faubert from Sane Solutions (recently acquired by Unica), someone who has been at this whole “web analytics” thing for about as long as any of us. His partner in crime, Akin Arikan, co-sponsored the event with me (don’t tell my wife, okay?) and had a nice post about the event today at the Yahoo! group.
• Meeting Jeff Cram from ISITE Design, a Boston and Portland, Oregon based design and analytics firm. Jeff’s company is so cool they even put out a press release about their sponsorship of the Portland, Oregon event!
• I also met Jeff’s wife, Jennifer, who is the Web Marketing Manager for Farm Aid. She asked me to mention to watch the Farm Aid Webcast on September 30th at 3:30 PM Eastern at www.farmaid.com. I asked her if she had met Willie Nelson but she just scowled at me.
• Catching up with Eric Hansen, CEO of SiteSpect, and talking about the value that controlled experimentation provides for online businesses.
• Meeting two very nice folks from the Harvard Business School who I pestered about the need for HBS to start offering coursework in web and multi-channel data analytics. They said they’d get back to me …
• Meeting Hossam Elkhodary from Technology Leaders finally in person. Hossam has been a frequent contributor to the Yahoo! group for years so it was nice to meet in person.
• Meeting Joseph Carrabis, Chairman and Founder of NextStage Analytics, who recently published a nice piece on Matching IT and Marketing Mythologies at iMedia Connection that references some background conversations we’d had.

Did I miss anyone?

All in all I am pretty excited about how this whole Web Analytics Wednesday thing is going. Someone asked me what I was thinking when I started it and it’s simply this: Web analytics can be lonely work in an organization, especially in an organization that doesn’t really value the data or ask for deeper analysis. In a world where social networking is the next really big thing, not having a social networking spot for web analytics people simply didn’t make sense! I mean, I wasn’t trying to be “Web 2.0″ about it, it just happened.

Anyway, if you went to a Web Analytics Wednsday last night, how was it? And if not, WHY NOT?!

I was just checking out Skype’s new Skypecast feature and it’s actually pretty cool. I immediately thought, “Man, what is the geekiest possible thing you could do with this technology?” and it hit me! I could host a Skypecast for people interested in talking about how “Web 2.0″ is going to be measured.

Get out the pointy hats, huh?

I’d probably host the “event” some morning at 8 AM Pacific/11 AM Eastern so West Coast could join before work and East Coast could take an early lunch (assuming your bosses don’t want you to Skypecast on the job …)

Would you be interested? If so, leave me a comment below and I’ll count comments to see if the idea has any legs.

After a summer hiatus in most cities around the globe it looks like Web Analytics Wednesday is back in action! I’m really pleased to see so many cities participating this month and especially excited for the folks in Stockholm, Sweden who have nearly 60 people signed up already.

I personally will be in Boston, Massachusetts for September’s WAW event, joining the crew from Unica and a dozen other folks. If you in Boston you should sign up to join us. If you can’t make it, you can use this handy form to let other folks who might be interested know about the event.

Hopefully by next month I’ll have worked out the details with Nancy Taffera-Santos, the Web Analytics Association’s Events Coordinator, such that these events will be co-sponsored by the WAA and Web Analytics Demystified. The idea behind working with the WAA is that local organizers will get access to the WAA’s membership, dramatically increasing the number of potentially interested folks invited to monthly get-togethers.

Anyway, keep reading this weblog for more information and if you’re already planning to attend an event this month, have a great time!

… that in a sector as relatively small as web analytics, where the number of “big thinkers” who blog can be counted on a few hands, that Gary Angel and Matt Jacobs would even find something to disagree upon. But, apparently, disagree they do … about the definition and history of functionalism.

I’m gonna stay out of this one. My only interest in the debate is that I love the idea of an actual framework for web analytics—something on which we can hang the data and use as a focusing lens. More and more my personal interest in web analytics is moving beyond the technology and the numbers to exploring how truly successful companies use the data.

Anyway, it will be interesting to see what response Matt has, if any, to Gary. These are both pretty bright guys with a lot of experience in the space. Watching them throw down would certainly be more interesting than me picking on Avinash’s methodology for ranking web analytics bloggers.