Beijing 2008: Virtual demonstration for human rights

The Reporters Without Borders cyber manifestation is going on now!

Human rights and freedom of speech

Please take a few seconds to support freedom of speech and human right in China. Read more about free expression in China.

Viral Campaign

From an online marketing perspective, this campaign is interesting and the concept of cyber-manifestation is very well conveyed on the campaign site. Check it out!

When I checked there was 11,400 participants. Spread out the online manifestation!

Taking position for human rights

The Olympics are at our doorsteps, but I can't resist the urge to take position.

Because I can...

The International Olympic Committee roles states, among other things:

• to cooperate with the competent public or private organizations and authorities in the endeavour to place sport at the service of humanity and thereby to promote peace;
• to act against any form of discrimination affecting the Olympic Movement;
• to encourage and support the promotion of women in sport at all levels and in all structures with a view to implementing the principle of equality of men and women; 

The IOC, governments and corporations are closing their eyes on obvious human rights abuses.

Lost a son in a earth quake: shut up!

Today, the CBC was reporting they wanted to interview a mother who lost her son in the last earth quake. Just when they were to meet her, the journalists got stopped by police and the women is now in curfew. China wants to show one face to the world, and it looks they are ready to go to any extent.

...China's government-controlled media have largely ignored the topic, and parents and volunteers who have questioned authorities have been detained and threatened...
...It's a subject local Communist leaders have seemed anxious to suppress....

You are Tibetan: no longer!

Last night I watched the movie "What remains of us", a documentary about Tibet, the ongoing cultural extermination of an entire society and countless cases of human rights violations. A Canadian citizen with Tibetan roots took great risks in smuggling a message from the Dalai Lama and secretly using a camera to film their opinions. An amazing lesson of humility.

You are Black: no party!

Even if you are a top world athlete, it looks like you might not be "good enough" to party like the others, as reported by numerous papers around the world.

Chinese police officials have forced some Beijing bar owners to sign secret pledges promising to prohibit blacks from entering their bars during the Olympics next month, a Hong Kong newspaper says.

Join the cyber demonstration: August 8th

Liberty of press is the first step toward improved human rights and liberty of opinion. On August 8th, when we will be billions watching the Olympics opening ceremony, think about what is currently going on behind the scene. More info at http://www.rsfbeijing2008.org

Celebrating immeria.net and life in general

Today, June 4th, 2008

I've been working for 21 years, actively involved in the Internet and Web development for 15 years. Been blogging for over 5 years and posted over 300 messages.

I found this morning that I now have over 500 subscribers to this blog, plus close to a hundred to the web analytics conversations. Although my roots in analytics might date back to the days when I was an Oracle database administrator, or when I was looking at CERN HTTP logs, the graph below clearly show when I started to blog more seriously about web analytics.

Retrospective

• December 2007: Officially became web analytics freelance and entrepreneur while pursuing an eBusiness MBA. Of course there are some constraints, some hard work and some stress, but I've been enjoying the past 6 months like a child in a toy store.
• October 2002: First blog post, in French, where I welcome hypothetical readers and explain what is a "blog".
  
• 
• October 1994: After explaining why it was so important to have a web presence and literally building the first site over nights and week ends, Softimage, then a subsidiary of Microsoft, launched a first website (this version comes from a snapshot in 1997, when I was part of a team dedicated to the web).
• August 1994: First proof of a website I built for an R&D project at Hydro-Quebec
• June 1993: My first archeological presence on the net (a bit scary to still find it!). A message about system administration on SunOS machines.

See my full profile on LinkedIn.

Upcoming dinner with Avinash Kaushik & Mitch Joel

A little anecdote: The first time I met Mitch Joel was at a dinner preceding the eMetrics Breakfast a couple of months ago, along with Jim Sterne and Andrea Hadley. I knew who he was: one of the greatest evangelist in the social media/web 2.0 space. He obviously didn't know who I was... But still, when we met again this week at eMetrics Toronto he perfectly remembered about the "link love" from a post I did weeks ago.

We didn't have much time to chat, but here's what I find amazingly interesting: we met face to face only once and despite having thousand of readers and followers in the online social media space, what might be the greatest reward of all is when you can meet and talk face to face with great minds such as Mitch and Avinash Kaushik.

And the opportunity to have dinner with both of them is coming up on April 16th (note: limited seating/pay your own bills). Of course, I quickly sent an email to Mitch to be there!

Like many others, I exchanged emails and blog comments with Avinash several times (how can he find the time to do all of that!). He is even helping me out as an "angel adviser" for WASP and providing invaluable feedback and advices. The first time I met him was at eMetrics San Francisco last year. I was chatting with him while the new version of Google Analytics was being announced on the stage. He was excited like a little child. That's the second greatest thing in our field: we love what we do, we're passionate... we're just like little boys playing Lego :)

When blogging can kill you

(Update: I incorrectly understood M.Tilley had a blog himself, but it's rather other people who used blogs to rant against his business and him personally. I have made some changes to reflect this position. However, I don't think it significantly change the outcome: someone killed himself partly because of blogging...)

Paul Tilley was an executive at an ad agency. People used the freedom of blogging to foster communication and feedback about the industry and ad agencies, from clients and employees alike. That eventually led to open criticism of M.Tilley's management style and decisions: that may have killed him. Maybe not directly, but it certainly contributed to a chain of events that led to his death.

It's a sad story, please allow me to quote Andy Beal:

...stop and consider the personal psychological harm our words might have on an individual. While it’s easy for us to post our scathing criticisms. we’re often desensitized to the harm we inflict–simply because we’re miles away, safe behind our web browser.

I didn't know M.Tilley, in fact I never heard of him before. But I'm nevertheless sadden by this story. It's at the opposite spectrum of the idea I shared several months ago in my post about "the lonely life of bloggers" where I critiqued a book called "Blogosphere":

...blogs are made by human beings, and are read by human beings... how can this be unreal?

What can the web learn from videogames?

Montreal Tech Watch is one of my favorite blogs (and I have 154 subscriptions in my Google Reader!), and its author, Heri, does really great posts, such as this one. I first met him at a Web Analytics Wednesday last year, he was just arriving in Montreal and came to me to inquire about startups and the technological market in Montreal. A year later, his blog covers technology, innovation and startups in Montreal and has become a must read!

Tonight, I read his coverage of D.I.C.E. 2008 where Ubisoft Montreal CEO Yannis Mallat presentation challenged the concept of "best, fastest, best-looking engine and technology in favor of innovation and emotion."

Technology’ main role is to serve creative talent. Quite frankly, code does not translate into emotion.

It also reminded me of my times at Softimage where its founder, Daniel Langlois, had to build the animation software to achieve his dream of creating better tools for artists.

Despite my roots in IT, I can relate to his call. Web sites are (still too) often the results of technological bells and whistles put together at the cost of finding innovative ways to engage, persuade and convert.

Bubble-burst 2.0

According to John Gartner, we are or will be witnessing pretty soon the second burst of the Dot-com bubble.

It's ridiculous over inflation of Facebook's worth has gotten even the optimistic to say that the emperor has no clothes. Social networking and widgets are cool, but they aren't going to change the dynamics of commerce and advertising.

On this point, I totally agree with M.Gartner. From a financial perspective, the over inflation of some innovations, or in fact, not so innovations than better repackaging of existing inventions, is ridiculous. Facebook is, for the most part, a fancier version of the old closed BBS's environments. While Dot-com 1.0 was all about growing the largest client-base, even if totally unqualified; Dot-com 2.0 is about gaining as more attention as possible. And it appears the concept of "attention economy" is one of my favorite. Except here, the concept is screwed toward pure capitalism based on money and market, as M.Goldhaber flamed about in his post "The Wrong Book". Here's, in short, what Goldhaber says about the attention economy:

It is an economy in the sense that it involves allocating of what is most scarce and precious in the present period, namely the attention that can come to each of us from other human beings.

Could Web 2.0 be something else than rich media, social media, network as a platform, AJAX, consumer generated content and all those fancy ways of reaching the end goal: attention?

Gartner ends his post with:

Blame the ongoing war, the lead-tainted toys, the housing and mortgage collapse, and volatile days on Wall Street. Uncertainty across the board is about to investments Web 2.0 companies hard.

Again true, just like Bubble 1.0 economics, stretched Bubble 2.0 economics will be a thing of the past. What will remain are the concepts and the tools to help businesses, and ultimately people, be more efficient.

Online identity, reputation and privacy

Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, GMail, Hotmail, Yahoo!, YouTube, Amazon, eBay, FeedBurner, del.icio.us, Flickr, Friendster, corporate identities... and a bunch of others. Thank God I have resisted the temptation of using Second Life and Twitter! And a newcomer, I'm giving a try at Naymz:

It's like managing our flesh and blood life wasn't already hard enough, now we have to manage our identity in the ether.

While we hear more and more about so called "social network" horror stories or email bankruptcy, a "Giaant", I mean Google, is sticking to its corporate mission to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful". This week we witnessed the birth of the gPC, a simple and cheap solution that totally avoid Microsoft while being enough for most casual home users. This PC is not "built by" Google itself but obviously heavily backed up. And that's not the only battle front for the business "Goood" of the 21st century: gPhone, backing mySQL, OpenSocial (and a first security breach in 45 minutes!), Google enterprise plans and probably other stuff we don't suspect today.

At the same time, while Facebook was an unsuspected player just a few months ago, it is raising to become a data-pit of private information grown to unprecedented scales. It seems that Project Beacon will raise segmentation and one-to-one marketing capabilities to a new level... this will be done within a closed, badly developed, unusable interface... with the consent of its users. My personal experience of Facebook isn't very positive. So far, the 57 "friends" I have in Facebook and the Web Analytics Quebec group that gathered 41 fans in a week haven't proven to be very effective to ease constructive communication (other than the zombies and a bunch of other useless gadgets).

All of those have one thing in common: information concentration in the hands of a few. And these days, information is power. Sadly, history has proven that too much power in one's hand, even with the pure and honest intention of "doing no evil", inevitably ends up in chaos.

Caravanserai of modern times

Last night my wife and I traveled to a different world, that of Loreena McKennitt unique musical environment. It was literally an immersive experience that psychologists call "a state of flow". All elements were carefully orchestrated to provide the highest degree of emotional impact: a pleasing and rewarding experience that made us travel to a different time, a welcomed escape from our fast paced and crazy life.

Caravanserai

One of the song from the Ancient Muse album is entitled "Caravanserai". A caravanserai was a roadside inn where travelers could rest and recover from the day's journey. Caravanserais supported the flow of commerce, information, and people across the network of trade routes. I didn't think about it last night, but this morning I woke up still surrounded by the sound and the mood and it got me thinking about the contrasts of those times and today's age of virtual companies, remote communications, avatars and virtual worlds.

By supporting the flow of commerce, information, and people across the network of trade routes, the Web as become the Caravanserais of modern times.

Blog advertising? Act locally!

I was contacted by renowned Quebec blogger Michel Leblanc (in French) who suggested to put advertising on my blog. His idea led to the creation of a new ad network specialized for the local market and fostering links between Quebec's leading blogs. There are a couple of unique aspects to it:

• It's really targeted to local blogs and local readers, with ads about local events and local companies, what François Laroche (in French) calls "social proximity"
  
• It will creates links between leading blogs and globally increase traffic to them
  
• The ad format is unique, a 145x145 Flash pub that will be well positioned in the page layout
• The new ad network is managed by LesAffaires.com, a leading business magazine in Quebec, owned by Médias Transcontinental, largest printer in Canada and leading consumer magazine publisher
• The sponsoring of participating blogs and the revenue model is also quite unique
• Each blogger keeps his own autonomy while being part of a larger "elite" group

For the reasons above, it's much better for me than Ad Sense, which hasn't proved to be very effective. A great initiative that gives a hand to local bloggers. So we'll see how the pilot run goes starting September 20th.

Web 2.0 in the enterprise: a no and a yes

In a recent article, Gartner warned us about the security related to Web 2.0 in the enterprise. Whenever Gartner says something it's like a bird song to the ears of management, especially IT management. Although a good article, it is sure to raise a red flag to managers who don't fully understand what the heck is Web 2.0 and more importantly, the philosophy that goes with it. Frankly, I found that article to be alarmist and I expect it to be used as a "proof" that Web 2.0 is not so great for enterprises, especially from an IT perspective.

Since I wouldn't like to get caught naked by my boss (well... in both senses of the term!), I recommend the fine article from ZDNet: A checkpoint on Web 2.0 in the enterprise by Dion Hinchcliffe.

For sake of discussion, I'm including two charts from the full article. Although long, I strongly recommend it (I already said that, did I?).

"Web 2.0 is an underlying set of principles... that have reached a tipping point that’s enabling brand new business models, unleashing a wave of innovative products, influencing public behavior on a large scale, and in particular, resulting in entirely new types of online businesses."

"... like SOA or SaaS, the ideas represented by Web 2.0 will take years for the majority of the world to embrace and make effective use of. ... Many of these will require serious soul-searching in business, not to mention overcoming the Innovator’s Dilemma, the latter which raises the interesting question of how do you adopt a new way of business that is at odds with your current way of doing business?"

In short, Web 2.0, just like the Web about 15 years ago, is challenging several aspects of the business functions, including IT. It shouldn't be dismissed by fear of the unknown or hiding behind a comfortable status quo that is bound to haunt us for the coming years. The best approach might be to pick a few quick wins, explore and learn even if its only for sake of initiating discussion and sparkling a cultural change... Which would already be something interesting for companies that have a conservative culture.

Thoughts about the Web Analytics industry

I was reading through Avinash's comments about Market Motive and started to do a parallel with an old post I did where I exposed my theory of evolution: from IBM's hardware era to Google information age. The basic questions are: What are we doing? Where are we heading?

The IT era

Logs have been available for HTTP server since day one. It was a normal thing for any network based server to have them. Gopher, FTP, email, IRC all had their logs before HTTP and HTML were popularized by Mosaic in early 1993. Log based analysis grew from the IT department and gradually and naturally propagated to marketing. Those are the golden years of WebTrends.

The Marketing era

There's always that little (sometimes bigger) tension between IT and Marketing, the Ying and the Yang of the web. One doesn't exist without the other. Yet, they speak different languages. They seek for different answers: one is about bandwidth, performance, availability, bugs while the other is about user behavior, conversion, design, usability, etc. Tagging a site and getting self-served insights was like a dream come true for Marketing. No more hard knocking with IT... at least that's what they thought! Now they had even better arguments to kick the *ss of IT 'cause "hey! How can they possibly understand it's so important to validate as close to the user as possible instead of doing round trips to the server?". Web reporting solutions sprung during the Internet Buble and the Omniture, WebSideStory, Coremetrics and a bunch of others grew from their ability to render IT dependent and time consuming reports into easily segmented, filtered and nicely shown reports and graphs.

The democratization era

Google took the world by surprise in November 2005 by bringing web analytics to everyone who wants it. Now any Joe with a blog knows what's going on and companies don't have any excuses for not looking at their numbers. It brought the tool but didn't bring the process and the resources along. The door was wide open for would-be "specialists" to jump on the new buzzword of the day: welcome to "web analytics". Companies that used web analytics with most success are those that implemented the analysis culture internally and consciously invested in resources and processes. For most, however, the tools looks all the same, "why bother and pay for something I can get for free?"... they think. Only the best will survive. ThinkMetrics threw the towel recently, and from what I'm seeing while developing WASP, there will be several other smaller players who won't be able to survive in front of the Google Behemoth.

The bubble

The web analytics industry is going trough a bubble of it's own. Innovation abound, Web 2.0 companies pops at a faster pace and acquisitions and mergers slowly but surely clean the market. Nevertheless, some of the innovative companies that revolve around web analytics, like RobotReplay, CrazyEgg, TapeFailure and others, might be lucky enough to find their niche and complement the major players.

Instead of working for a single corporation, home grown specialists seeks opportunities by becoming freelances or starting "guru" agencies. Eric Peterson's Web Analytics Demystified, Avinash Kaushik's Market Motive are two of the most visible examples. Any serious conference now has it's web analytics track and "the only conference on web analytics you should attend" abound. Be it a Basecamp, an X-Change, continuing studies, or Vendor-X University, education becomes the holly grail of any market growing at this pace. Between all of this, the Web Analytics Association tries to "unites and fosters the interests of industry practitioners, vendors, consultants and educators who use, sell, install, implement, consult, teach or train in the field of web analytics". Not an easy goal for a non-profit organization relying on volunteers who already have their hands full.

What are we doing? Where are we heading?

The tools might be commoditized, but the ability of decision makers to act rather than react will never be. "Competing on Analytics" won't be a brilliant author vision of the future, it will be a mater of survival. "Web analytics" will leave it's "web" connotation behind and become a powerful tool in the arsenal of corporate strategies. We're not talking about "ebusiness" anymore, we're talking about a mater of fact for any serious business.

Get educated, learn from the field and borrow from the experts. Don't fall for the traditional thinking, persevere and innovate with whichever tool you have, but more importantly, innovate with your mind.

What do you think of the web analytics market? Where will we be in 2, 5 or 10 years?

The NextStage of web analytics

I'm often asked about my blogging activities and the time I spend working on WASP. Most people don't understand why I'm taking so much of my free time on "this" even if I'm not getting paid to do it.

The answer is simple: I'm not doing it for money.

My reward is otherwise and goes back to the history of humanity: recognition as in "the state or quality of being recognized or acknowledged". It might sound selfish, but I think it's not: recognition is not something you decide, it's something people give you, just like leadership is determined by your peers. You have to nurture it, to be profesional and ethical in your approach while remaining true to yourself and to others.

What is rewarding to me?

• Knowing I can help others with the things I know, and learn from them for those I don't. A simple comment on my blog, an email with feedback and sugestions, meeting someone in person, etc.
  
• Meeting someone in person who I would have never met if I was not blogging. Be it fellow web analytics practitioners or world renowned web analytics gurus and authors.
• Speaking at conferences like eMetrics, doing research on topics of interest such as the attention economy or having the chance to meet and work with people I recognize as masters in their field of expertise.

One thing leads to another greater one

As Jeremiah Owyang said recently "remember that even the smallest thing will lead to something bigger, and it will snowball" which is akin to Malcolm Gladwell's "How little things can make a big difference".

I had some interesting email exchanges about web analytics and the attention economy with Joseph Carrabis. His extensive profile is impressive, meeting the man is even more! If you haven't met him in person, think of Professor Henry Jones Sr. from the Indiana Jones movie: quite a fascinating character! :)

Think of it, if Jim Sterne is the Godfather of web analytics, Joseph must be Indiana Jones father!

The NextStage of web analytics

One thing leading to another, I met Joseph in San Francisco. Then he helped me out with my article on "The human metric of web analytics" and we continued to exchange on various topics. Now Joseph suggested we work together on a training or a presentation that would convey the NextStage of web analytics. Joseph Carrabis is the chairman, CRO and founder of NextStage Evolution LLC, a company dedicated to predictive analytics, persuasion engineering and interactive analytics with strong roots in the social sciences and behavioral analysis.

Joseph, I'll be honored to help and I'm sure it will be a rewarding experience!

What should eBusiness Architect do?

Whenever I think of something interesting, I create a draft entry in my blog and get back to it later. I started writing this entry about a week ago, and this morning while swifting trough 100+ Google Reader entries, I noticed the post from Holly Buchanan: "If Architects Had to Work Like Web Designers".

There was also that interesting discussion thread on the Web Analytics group about "Does a web analyst have to know how an I.P. address is constructed?". Although useful, I don't think it's essential and you can read my opinion and those of others in the discussion thread.

A thing leading to another, I got an email that sparkled some interesting discussion about the role of an ebusiness architect. I also realized some of my co-workers don't know/understand what is my role as a "senior ebusiness architect".

So? What's an architect?

Let's borrow from Wikipedia: "an architect is a person who translates the user's needs into physical, built solution. An architect must thoroughly understand the building and operational codes under which his or her design must conform. That degree of knowledge is necessary so that he or she is not apt to omit any necessary requirements, or produce improper, conflicting, ambiguous, or confusing requirements. Architects must understand the various methods available to the builder for building the client's structure, so that he or she can negotiate with the client to produce a best possible compromise of the results desired within explicit cost and time boundaries."

As we read this definition, it's obvious it perfectly applies to Information Systems/Information Technology and more specifically, to ebusiness and Web initiatives.

Some caveats (and a legal disclaimer)

In some countries, like Canada, job titles such as "engineer" or "architect" are regulated professions. So officially, I'm not a "senior ebusiness architect", I'm a "senior ebusiness advisor". Just like a few years ago, I tried to explain that I was not a "software engineer" simply because I couldn't use that title.

An architect for every soup

There's often confusion around the job titles. Put any of those words in front of "architect" and you've got a new field of expertise and a new career: software, technical, organic, functional... ebusiness, enterprise...

What should an ebusiness architect do?

Simply put, my role is exactly that of an architect: take the business requirements and plan for the solution. A bit too simplistic, let's look more closely at that phrase:

• take: this implies a lot of listening, communicating and explaining the process that will lead to the solution
  
• business: have the right interlocutor and that he/she is empowered to take decision/action
  
• requirements: one of the biggest challenge is the fact that "requirements" are often (almost always!) expressed in terms of "solution". From the requirements, we must strive to understand the initial objective. To take the home analogy, the client knows he/she wants a "3-section with side-panels triple-glass wooden-frame 6 feet by 4 feet window" on that wall, but probably doesn't know how the wall will need to be reinforced to support the 2nd floor. The objective would be something like "The dining room as a view on our garden and we can see really beautiful sunsets. I want the largest window possible as long as it doesn't increase the overall cost of the house more than X$". It's the architect responsibility to read between the lines and translate those requirements into realistic objectives.
  
• plan: It's also the architect responsibility to work within the constraints of time, budget and quality. This implies a vast understanding of the subject and the collaboration of field experts to gather the elements of the solution and mutually challenge the solution to come up with something as efficient and as realistic as possible.
  
• solution: Solutions are mutually accepted compromises. That last point is critical: sometimes it's the role of the architect to go back to the client and explain why the requirement can't be met, or why another approach might be better or at least, satisfy a fair percentage of the goal without necessarily constraining future enhancements.
  

Key skills of an ebusiness architect

Just like the construction architect, the ebusiness architect doesn't actually "build" the solution, but he/she has to take responsibility for it's conception and overlook the work so the job is done according to plans. Strong knowledge of the various work expertise, supporting technologies and best practices, trends and evolution of the ebusiness field, strong analytical skills and be solution driven, as well as acute communication skills are all essential ingredients of a good architect.

The feet strongly grounded in IT, the brain on the business side

One of the most interesting challenge of the ebusiness architect is to "translate" the business lingua into more technical terms, and vice-versa. We often see this latent tension between "IT" and "business", "us" and "them". Sometimes, the ebusiness architect is merely a communication gear between two quite different worlds. Being strongly grounded in IT while at the same time being able to walk the talk of the business is probably the most important role of the ebusiness architect.

Aren't we all founders at work?

For the past few days, I've been reading the book "Founders at work" by Jessica Livingston. An interesting read for would-be entrepreneur or anyone curious about the early days of some of the most successful internet companies. This got me thinking that all of us, in our own way, might be founders at work.

Book review

There's an interesting path from the early stories of Steve Wozniak working on the Apple or up to recent success stories like Flickr. Each short story makes only a couple of pages of interview with the founder: initial idea, funding, good and bad turns and advices to would-be entrepreneurs. That makes up a good and easy summer read.

What I would have loved to see is a short summary of each story key takeaways and a final chapter that could have provided an expert view and some advices to would-be entrepreneurs. "The Art of the Start" from Guy Kawasaki would probably be more appropriate for that.

Idea, guts, luck and connections

Although each story is different, there are some common traits:

• Everybody has ideas, few have the guts to take the risk of turning them into something more tangible.
• Luck is often a factor, although I believe one can create favorable conditions to increase the chances of being lucky.
• The initial idea often derive into something else, more interesting and more viable.
  
• Having the right connections is also an element of success.
• Diploma and experience doesn't seem to correlate very strongly with successful entrepreneurs, although entrepreneurs get more successful with each startup experience.
  

Missed opportunities?

Trough the years, I had some ideas that, given the right timing, the right contacts and a little more guts, could have (maybe) turned out into something big:

• While working at Softimage as a webmaster, I thought of a web site that would feature commercials, short movies, game animations and movie special effects that were done with the products. People would get a synopsis, watch the video, and rate it or send critics. Animators and students were eager to show off their work, so they would have submitted their own videos. I shared the idea with the founder and it was dismissed as impossible... a few months later adCritic was born... That was in 1998.
• While working as a project lead for the redesign of a dozen web sites, we worked with an interactive agency that sent us links to an online prototype. Business owners (marketing & communication people) would print the page in black & white, handwrite annotations for corrections, and fax it back to the agency... with cut-off margins, unreadable comments and bad handwriting! I thought of an online collaboration tool that would allow someone to put virtual Post-It notes on a page and share them with other people. That was around 2000. Check out Fleck.com

A new opportunity?

Now I've got this crazy idea about WASP, the Web Analytics Solution profile, that would ease the implementation of web analytics solutions. The early version, more a proof of concept than anything else, was received with great interest and I got very interesting feedback.

Could there be some business opportunity behind it? Maybe, not sure, but it's a hell of a fun to do it!

What's your own missed opportunity?

Code of ethics

I was reading René Deschamps excellent post about OX2 code of ethics and I thought I should state my own position toward the Web Analytics community, my blog and my employer.

The Web Analytics community

My involvement in the Web Analytics Association and various committees, as an organizer of the local Web Analytics Wednesdays and a speaker, and my relation with several practitioners, vendors, consultants and fellow bloggers. I will respect...

1. Vendors: not do product demos or provide product information to competitors;
2. Clients: any information about someone's actual or intentional use of a solution will be solemnly respected;
3. Practitioners: empower the users with their actual solution without influencing them to change unless it’s in their best interest.
4. Consultants: try not to interfere between a vendor-consultant-practitioner relationship. If it happens, the practitioner's best interest will always be favored.

Blogging

I'm borrowing from O'Reilly's proposed code of conduct:

1. Take responsibility for my own words and for the comments I allow on my blog.
2. Won't say anything online that I wouldn't say in person.
3. In case of conflict, I will connect privately before I respond publicly.
4. Will filter comments that are against my personal values, but will gladly accept constructive comments.
5. Will post constructive comments to other's blogs.
6. Will link & reference others contributions in my posts.

My employer

As a web analytics practitioner and a Senior eBusiness Architect at Desjardins General Insurance Group, I will abide the following code of ethics, as described in the Desjardins Group Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct:

• I will disclose all the details of the situation to my immediate superior if I think a conflict of interest might occur.
• I will never accept or solicit gifts, tokens of appreciation or benefits, financial
  or otherwise, for myself, an associate or a third party, if accepting such gratuities impairs my objectivity or my judgment in the performance of my duties.
• Will not engage into any contract without abiding by the prescriptive conditions of my employer.
• Will not perform an activity or hold a position or a job with a competitor if doing so places me in a position that may prejudice the interests of my employer.
• Will ensure that the activities I perform outside the scope of my job do not prejudice the interests, image or reputation of my employer.
• When expressing opinions, I will not give the impression that I'm expressing the official position of my employer unless I receive prior authorization to do so.
• Will never disclose confidential information or use confidential information for my own benefit.
  

Full disclaimer

• I'm currently using Omniture SiteCatalyst on the job
• I'm using Google Analytics on this blog
• My previous employer was a reseller of WebSideStory and I did several implementations
  
• I contributed to a large Coremetrics implementation
• I used WebTrends for several years
• I used LiveStats for several years
• Please see my full profile on LinkedIn for the employers I worked for over the last 20 years.
  

eMetrics, web analysts and social behavior

While every other web analytics blogger seems to be talking about Eric Peterson's move or Google Analytics V2, I will post about something really different.

I already said how extraordinary my experience at eMetrics has been so far and all the great people I met. Then I started wondering what made this conference different from the others I attended in the past.

The Web Analytics Association

eMetrics is, in a way, the happy gathering of Web Analytics Association members, a not-for-profit organization. Of course the event organizers must cover their fees, and hopefully, make some money out of it. Great care is taken to have vendor-neutral speakers for the sessions, and except rare exceptions, the keynotes are genuinly informative rather than turning into sales pitches. The personality of Jim Sterne, the event organizer who happen to be the co-founder of the Web Analytics Association, certainly plays a big role in the "culture of eMetrics".

Infancy of the web analytics field

Ever since the first version of Mosaic was launched, parsing server logs and trying to understand what was going on has always been of interest. It was treated just like any other system log by IT until marketing really got interested. Other than the few gurus in the field, everyone is quite new to it. New comers and "old timers" have to rely on their peers to learn, evolve and innovate in a fast paced and mostly untamed world of opportunities.

Human side of web analytics

Web analytics is about understanding how human interact with an intangible thing called a website. Of course there are all those metrics, graphs and technicalities, but I think web analysts are naturally inclined to reach to their peers.

Social networking

Blogs, RSS feeds and the like creates social links long before people meet face to face. It makes it a lot easier to come up to renowned authors, practitioners and bloggers alike and talk to them. Going back just two to five years ago, this pre-event networking was barely possible, even impossible.

What do you think?

From the floor of eMetrics

What an amazing week!

In my 20 years of experience I've been to a lot of conferences, even early Internet World conferences when there was just a few hundred people, but never did I see such a truly open and sincere networking event. eMetrics is simply an amazing opportunity to learn and share about what is web analytics, how to get it right, and where it's heading.

The first time I met Jim Sterne was at Spring Internet World'96 where he was already pitching about marketing on the Web. I went to him and asked, with my very bad english, "how can I become a speaker and a consultant like you?". "Write a book!" he said.

Here I am, more than a decade later, blogging about web analytics and presenting a workshop on Website optimization in San Francisco. But it doesn't stop there, I also got to meet really intelligent and interesting people that I had only met in the virtual world. Who said blogging was only for the lonely associal freaks?

First, Kite flying with Joseph Carrabis and Jim Sterne was a genuinly fun and exciting experience, especially the part when cars and people were being chased down by the kite...

I also got to meet with he most brilliant minds in the field of web analytics. Robbin Steiff from LunaMetrics, June Li from ClickInsight, Craig Danuloff, Jim Novo, Aurélie and René from OX2, Ian Thomas from Microsoft, Jeremiah, Clint Ivy, Ian Houston, and many others, as well as practitionners from all around the world. I still have to chat with Avinash (I still want my autographed Google business card!), Bryan Eisenberg, and the newly self-apointed CEO of WebAnalyticsDemystified, Eric Peterson.

In the coming days I will post about my best "take home" elements of the conference.

Cool stuff for February

Last month, I posted about cool stuff for January. As I surf, I discover new services, sometimes nuggets of interest on someone else's blog, sometimes stumbling upon something while doing research.

AniBoom

My 15 year old daughter is really into visuals arts and she does fantastics portraits. She also likes animation and she's thinking of pursuing her education in this field. We found AniBOOM to be a fantastic place to discover very cool animations done by professionals and students. Think of it like something akin to YouTube for animated short stories. Some pieces worth looking:

• The way of hope
• End of summer
• Dragon slayer
• and dozens more!
  

Everything Web 2.0

I sometimes feel like we're back in the pre-bubble era. Check out how an exciting era we're living by scooting over 900 Web 2.0 applications classified and tagged for your greatest pleasure and hours of discovery at Go2Web20.net. And if you want to see who's cool and who's loosing ground, head to Movers 2.0.

Data visualization

You might have heard about Swivel, a place where you can explore, share, compare and upload your own data sets and use visualization tools. A similar tool, Many Eyes offers some amazing visualization tools that are more dynamic than Swivel. If you are into data visualization, both are worth a look.

Web geek tool

Web analytics should always be correlated with information about the health of the systems supporting the site itself. Internal monitoring and reporting is important, but sometimes you want to get a better feel of the user experience: just how painfully slow the site can be. Octagate SiteTimer offers a free tool that comes very handy to get a detailed breakdown of each components of a Web page and the time spent waiting and downloading. Other tools offer this kind of breakdown but are part of larger service packages (Gomez, Keynote, etc.). SiteTimer works, it's simple, and it's free.

RSS Feeds + news + social network = myFeedz

I discovered myFeedz, from Adobe Labs, just a few days ago, but I think I will like it. It merges concepts from Google Reader, Feedburner and Technorati into what promise to be a very powerful tool. Ratings, tags, bookmarking are all there, and unlike other feed readers, myFeeds tries to learn from what you read regularly and accordingly displays news items / blog posts that might be of interest to you.

The lonely life of bloggers

One of my interest about the Internet, beyond technology, is the impact the Web and the Internet have on human behavior and it's social impact. I started blogging in October 2002, so I guess it makes me an early adopter of this medium.

"Bloggers are living in a world where emotions may be real but everything else is make-believe, says a University of Calgary professor in a new book." Globe and Mail

I read with interest a post on One Degree about an article of the Globe and Mail... This article depict bloggers as asocial and lone souls. Although I haven't read professor Keren of the University of Calgary new books, just looking at the cover gives you a pretty good idea of the author's opinion...

I think there is something fundamentally wrong with this article, and probably with the authors mindset:

"they are not real", "who cares if they're not real people?"

I digress... blogs are made by human beings, and are read by human beings... how can this be unreal? Only the medium and reach have evolved.

Then it goes on to talk about the fact that few people achieve fame, and most people remain in the dark. Blogging to get fame is akin to funding a company to get rich... That's the wrong way to do it. You blog or you start a company because you believe you can offer something unique, something of interest to others, or simply because you are "rich" enough to do what you like. And "rich" doesn't necessarily means money, it's the leisure of having the time to blog.

I blog and I read other's blog by interest, to share and discover new ideas, open my mind and learn about people without being constrained by the limits of my physical surrounding.

And trough mine and others blogs, I'm able to meet people, real human beings, and in some case, meet them in person. That's how I got to organize the monthly Web Analytics Wednesday and got to know new people: this is real.