Microsoft CTO Ray Ozzie is blogging again. And it seems he's living right in my neighborhood, near Safeco Field. Cool! (I'm assuming this means Pioneer Square, 'cause there isn't an abundance of residential space in the area. Take a look at the map Ray pointed to!)
The nice folks over at Adaptive Path have made the Flash date slider/bar graph thingy available to other developers. Nice! I have a couple of ideas about how I could use this... (I wrote about Measure Map before, if you're not sure what it is.)
Well, I sure am glad I'm not in the web analytics business on a day like today. Why? Because 800-pound gorilla Google just announced Google Analytics, a free, hosted product. Google Analytics used to be Urchin, a product we're currently using in an older form (the UI is pretty marginal; I hope Google improved it!).
There have been, to be sure, plenty of open source log analysis programs out there, so a free option in this space is nothing new. But, the open source options have historically been fairly limiting. It'll be interesting to see how Google's move affects the pricing or direction of other analytics products.
John Battelle recently posted his response to a question from the MacArthur Foundation ("genius grants"). He said, in part:
In an age where the knowledge of mankind is increasingly at our fingertips through the services of Internet search, we must teach our children critical thinking. One can never have all the answers, but if prepared, one can always ask the right question, and from that creative act, learn to find his or her own answer.
...
Developing a framework in our schools for "search literacy" - how to use and think about using a search engine - might be just the kind of thing you could do with a modest investment....
On one hand, John is right. Teaching information literacy (a better term than "search literacy") to students is vital. But, I'm not sure I agree with his assessment that the next step is developing a framework. I think the frameworks are already there. First of all, the teaching of information literacy is the traditional role of the school librarian. Granted, not all school librarians understand this or are able to actually be effective in this approach. But, there are plenty of good ones out there who, as their school's CIO, make it a priority to teach these skills. Next, established frameworks like the Big 6 are available to help students and teachers navigate the information landscape. From the Big 6 website:
The Big6 is an information literacy model. Some people call it a metacognitive scaffold, or an information problem solving strategy. Developed by Mike Eisenberg and Bob Berkowitz, the Big6 is the most widely-known and widely-used approach to teaching information and technology skills in the world. When you apply the Big6 steps, you have an essential framework to approach any information-based question.
So, if the roles are in place, and the frameworks are there, what's the problem? Implementation is hard. It requires librarians and teachers to be properly trained, both at the college (and grad school) levels and in professional development activities. This doesn't always happen, despite some good schools (including my alma matter, the UW iSchool, where the aforementioned Mike Eisenberg is at). And information literacy needs to be a priority with educational leaders (as John points out, priorities are elsewhere oftentimes).
The good news is that more and more librarians do understand how to do information literacy well. I've seen many passionate librarians who know how to work with teachers to get these concepts across to students. I'm doing my best to provide them with good resources...
I'm glad John is bringing up these good points. I'm not entirely sure what the Macarthur folks can do about it. But it is worth further thought.
Good post from Scott Berkun: "The worst bugs in history (and how to learn from them)":
The difference between these stories and 90% of software developers is the context of the work. Few of us work on medical equipment, anti-lock brakes or nuclear weapon arming devices. We don’t work on things with the potential to kill or cost $100 of millions. For most of us, if we employed the same development practices we do on a daily basis on a mission critical project, we’d make this list in no time. The difference between us and them isn’t skill: it’s domain.
Scott's right. I know I've created a few fun bugs in my lifetime, but no deaths yet. Granted, I'd probably be using different techniques and processes if I was working on life-threatening stuff...
I've been playing around with the Measure Map "preview", a new weblog stats package from Adaptive Path. They're calling it an "alpha," but it is way more polished than you'd expect an alpha to be.
First off, I've never really tracked the stats for this blog. Every couple of months I'd check the numbers, but it was never a huge deal. I'm *much* more interested in the stats at my day job, as I've mentioned a few times before (see a bunch of the posts from last May, for example). As I'm still quite interested in web analytics, I thought I'd check out Measure Map.
Right off the bat, I've noticed myself checking my stats a couple of times a day. Heh. They've made it easy and fun to quickly take a look at the numbers. The interface is nice and clean, and some of the flashier elements, like a world map, are fun to play with (hits from Sweden! Cool!).
They've really pared down the "standard" analytics reports to just the core features needed for weblogs: visitors, links (incoming and outgoing), comments, and posts. Unfortunately, I don't have comments on my site, so roughly a quarter of their functionality is useless to me. It might be nice to be able to hide this section (bonus points if their javascript autodetected this; it seems to grab quite a lot of data from the blog, so figuring out the comment on/off thing would seem to be possible). It isn't a huge deal, but it also isn't fun to keep seeing that big "0" under the comments section.
One place the alpha nature of the interface falls down a bit is in dealing with "initial" stats. When you first set the system up, it'll take awhile to start generating stats. Therefore, it might be nice to replace empty (or mostly empty) reports with "no data yet" messages. Also, they might want to consider alternative text for some of statements about "averages." On day 2 (as I write this), the averages aren't that meaningful. But, with a few weeks of data in there, this measurement becomes more useful. In fact, I really like the concept of comparing daily numbers to averages. I'm thinking of writing this feature into a stats system I've developed at work.
One of the "coming soon" features is RSS feed tracking. I'm looking forward to this (although it'll be interesting to see how they pull it off), given that I think the lion's share of my traffic comes via the RSS feed. At least, that's what the others stats tell me.
It'll be interesting to see if enough folks want a blog-specific stats package. To be sure, the more general stats systems really aren't that useful in a blogging context, so this product fills that niche nicely. But, I'm also not sure the targeted features are worth paying for. I wonder if there aren't some OEM possibilities here, too. If I was running a blogging installation (in, say, a corporate environment), I'd be *very* interested in a stats package like this.
In case you weren't tired of the backup topic, I thought I'd mention a few things that passed by screen lately.
Merlin, from 43Folders, mentions his backup strategy, which mostly seems to involve external hard drives. I wonder how much of this process he's automated. For me, anything overly manual is likely to just not get done at all, so my holy grail is a totally automated solution. Also, it is probably worth noting that he's backing up a heck of a lot more data than I am. I'm focused just on backing up data, not apps (apps I can reinstall). And, he probably has a few more MP3s, photos, and videos than I do.
Michael Müller wrote in to tell me he's had good luck with iMsafe on his mac. If Apple's backup isn't doing it for ya, and rsync is too geeky, this might be a good option.