I love stats (also know to serious people as “analytics.”) In the past, I’ve written about the variety of stats packages I use and track regularly (e.g. at least daily.) Today, FeedBurner came out with an upgrade to its stats that add a number of new things, including uncommon uses, the concept of “reach”, and item popularity. Mike Arrington at Techcrunch has a comprehensive post up with screen shots – rather than repeat this here, I’ll simply point you there to take a look.
In other stats news, I thought I’d refresh the list of things I was using. I’ve added a few (such as BlogBeat – which I love) and removed a few (such as MessageMap, which was intolerably slow, getting increasingly “wrong”, and – now that it’s owned by Google, will likely be integrated with Google Analytics, which I still use, sort of.) Here’s the old list as of 8/16/05.
Here’s the new list as of today:
I’ve dumped the others for the following reasons:
Yes – less is more in this case (since I’m getting a lot more data from the services I’m using as they evolve.)
If you are in Boulder on February 21st and interested in blogging and RSS, the Boulder Software Club is putting on an event at Cooley Godward’s offices at 380 Interlocken Crescent, Suite 900 in Broomfield. The panelists are Howard Kaushansky (Umbria CEO), Greg Reinacker (NewsGator CTO), and Seth Levine (Mobius Venture Capital). Paul Gross from Cooley Godward is moderating.
They’ll be covering the following topics:
If you are interested, RSVP to sms@dimensional.com or call 303–642–7168.
NPR had a priceless piece on blogging and marriage last night by Julie Zickefoose. “I’m trying to figure out when these slim white machines took over our lives.” Julie covers heroin, reader comments, and daily postings. “This is weird, scary, and strangely satisfying at the same time. Where did they find me? Why do they care?” Lots of good advice about marital blogging and topic swiping.
Jeff Jarvis took some shots (well deserved) at VC bloggers and Ben Casnocha followed up with his own commentary. It motivated me to clean up my blogroll (sorry – no top 10 blogger list today) and dump bloggers that hadn’t posted anything in at least a month. Kind of like “ring out the old, ring in the new.”
I regularly get asked the question “why do you bother writing things like the Term Sheet series or the Letter of Intent series.” (yeah – I also get the “why do you bother blogging” question.)
While writing things like the Term Sheet series is fun, gives Jason and I chance to collaborate on something different, gets us connected to lots of new and interesting people, and occasionally forces us to think about something and/or express an opinion on something where we previously would hedge about, we don’t learn that much.
However, as I was responding to yet another board email for one of my companies on 409A issues (and going back and forth with Jason on it), he suggested that – in the case of the 409A series – we were forced to really learn about 409A issues, do our research, form opinions, and put them into (semi-articulate) words. As a result, this is now helping us and our companies quickly deal with 409A – effectively the tail (the blog) is now wagging the dog (us).
Why Bother? Because we just got a lot smarter about something that suddenly is important to us and our companies, helped us get critical feedback from people we wouldn’t have otherwise been exposed to, and ultimately will help us do a better job for our portfolio companies. It’s satisfying to be able to say “blogging helps me learn”, since continually learning new things is high up in my hierarchy of needs.
My friends at Rally Software have started a corporate blog called On Be(come)ing Agile. Ryan Martens – the founder of Rally – introduces the blog and explains the zen-like journey to Agile that inspired the name for the blog.
Rally’s On Demand Agile Software Lifecycle Management solution is being enthusiastically embraced by a wide variety of ISVs and corporate IT shops that are either using or considering Agile software development methods. If you want to be known by your friends as a Scrum Master, have run out of white papers about Agile Software Development to read in the bathroom, or just want to build better software systems, wander over and take a look.
The meme of “Corporate Web Site As A Blog” is going around – and I like it. While this has been popular for individuals for a while (e.g. www.feld.com) – it’s starting to happen with companies. Fred Wilson and Brad Burnham did this recently with their site at Union Square Ventures and Matt Blumberg just launched a new Return Path web site organized around a blog – launched with a post on Matt’s blog about why Return Path did this.
A friend of mine emailed me suggesting that a blog was a lousy basis for a web site – that instead I should be using traditional CMS tools because it’d be easier to control and tune the formatting. I vociferously disagreed with him – I think the brilliance of organizing a corporate web site around a blog is that you can transform what has turned into largely static brochureware into a vibrant and ever changing articulation of a company. As I sit in a hotel room in Boston, all I need to do is type my new content (into Blogjet in my case) and hit post when I’m done – my blog deals with the rest. In addition – if one is bold enough to leave comments on, you can even turn it into a conversation with your constituency. Now, you can configure CMS systems to behave this way, but why bother.
I’ve noticed recently that the only page that regularly changes on a typical corporate web site is the news / press release page (and – btw – where are the RSS feeds for these pages – if I want to know about what is going on at your company, make it easy for me.) As Matt and Fred have artfully said, they want to incorporate the dynamic nature of their businesses and the markets in which they participate into their web site in order to communicate more effectively what they are doing and engage in a conversation with anyone who is interested in them.
While there is a self-referential characteristic to this (USV invests in companies in this ecosystem, Return Path provides services to email marketers), this is a noble experiment that – as far as I’m concerned – has so far been extremely well executed by all involved.
One of my all time favorite New Yorker cartoons is the one with two dogs sitting in front of a computer where one says to the other “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” Seth just posted a new one that’s right up there – “I had my own blog for while, but I decided to go back to just pointless, incessant barking.”
I’ve always loved numbers (especially primes and multiples of 3) – that partially explains my interest in web analytics and my fascination with looking at data trends. Over the past year, I’ve created my own little data laboratory – my blog. When I started blogging on 5/4/04, I obviously had 0 subscribers via RSS (by 5/8/04 I had 4, by 5/31/04 I had 60, today I have 3500 according to FeedBurner). Thanks for contributing to my laboratory (hopefully you are getting some benefits from it also!)
Since the beginning of this year, I’ve been paying a lot more attention to and experimenting with the various things you can measure on a blog. While the absolute numbers are occasionally useful, the trends are really what I’m after, so the law of large numbers works in my favor over time to improve the validity of the trends. I’m also trying to understand what impacts the trends – the deeper post specific data really helps with this.
I stepped back from it all yesterday and did an inventory of the various data I’m measuring on a daily basis. Following is the list of the services I’m using:
I’m also using a number of these services to enhance my blog, all which collect (or generate) other stats.
While FeedBurner and AWStats form the core of my analysis, I’ve been spending more time in the other tools recently looking at the data. It dawned on me that I’m missing a classic “CIO dashboard” view across all my data. Much of this data is “open” and freely available via APIs and web services although some isn’t easy to get. Now that I’ve got a suitably large set of data, it’s time to step back and see if there’s a better way to consolidate / represent it.