Exciting Ideas
I’ve started working and having success with AJAX and Rails. It’s freakin’ so cool. I’m almost sad I didn’t keep working at Solution Wave — but, nevertheless, working for da man has taught me many great things that I’ll be using down the road.
Rick Segal has a cool post about Mashup Camp. I won’t be able to attend, however, I hope to be able to take advantage of such cool gatherings in the next year or two. There are a lot of really great things going on right now on the Web, and I just feel this unexplainable urge to start taking part, and just coding things.
I’ve got lots of ideas, and am working to flesh them out now. The only problem I have at the moment is, I need to get a damn code repository setup and going. The redundancy and missed code between my Mac and Thinkpad is killing me.
Web Analytics and E-Commerce
Web analytics tools have been around for quite some time. As I usually do nowadays, let me start off by turning to Google for a definition:
Web analytics is the study of online experience, in order to improve it. A few examples of web analytics follow.
I’d also like to point out the main providers that exist in the industry today:
There are many others, but these are the ones that I’ve become familiar with over the last few months. Omniture and Google Analytics more so than the others.
I wanted to use the space in this post to say how amazing this software is. Back in the day (like, mid-late 90’s), an online presence would use analytics to track the ever popular "hits" and "bandwidth" usage. Holy crap, have they come quite a long way from that. As they increase in importance to a Website’s success, and even an e-commerce site’s revenue and marketing programs, I think there will be more and more expansion into actually relying on them to replace an enterprise-level reporting package like Crystal Reports or Cognos.
Omniture, for example, allows customers to import data into them such as the cost of a SKU. Now, what’s easier? Tracking online order revenue in one system, offline order revenue in another, or having it all integrated together? The consolidation is key, which is what these shops are focusing their products on moving forward.
The, there is the online advertising play. This is also a component to building an online presence that has come a long way. Tracking how successful, from click to buy, your online programs are is becoming more important every single day for an online retailer. Omniture has an actual product (that integrated with its Web Analytics software) to do this, which is killer. You can track how much your Google AdWords campaign makes, in comparison to people finding you through natural search.
Establishing and acting on KPI’s is key — it’s a part of the "traditional" business world that has yet to really take hold in the "online" business world. I believe this is going to become more and more important as time moves on — especially when the lines between reporting offline and online revenue continue to blur.
This is so exciting! I love watching all of this unfold and taking part in it. Start hiring your Web Analytics Analysts now — they are going to few and far between in the years to come.
I Love This (Redux)
I drove down to Buffalo today with a friend of mine to pickup a Sirius satellite radio. After four stops at the tech stores on the local strip, we finally found one. We were on our way out and decided to make a pit stop for some food. Been a long, tough day searching for a Howard Stern listening device.
All kidding aside, Sirius is a great service, and I can’t wait to get mine up and running.
Anyway, I made a post the other day about the copious amounts of technology making a life so much easier based on an example given by Rick Segal. I realized two things (thx for the key comment, "that gurl") when we stopped for food:
- Many folks would not shell out the dough in order to get all the really cool stuff going and maintained
- Many folks, although possibly interested, would not want to invest the time it would take for them to be able to learn to use it all
So I suppose moving forward, vendors need to think about a couple for parameters, which would have done them good to be thinking about all along: 1) Does it converge existing technologies (solving pain) and 2) Does it allow you to be more connected in an effective way.
It’s been a really long day, and it’s now just slowly winding down. Hope everyone is having a good weekend thus far.
I Love This
This post is so damn exciting — I love every word of it. This is an example of how "always being connected" totally works for the common person’s advantage. Complete and utter coolness.
I am drooling with anticipation to get an Edge card. I’m checking out my options now, and want to be one of the first on the Go Train in the morning with full Internet access at high speed.
SQL - Re-Loaded
I’ve been using MySQL for quite some time now, and have been anxiously awaiting the release of MySQL 5.0. Well, it happened a while ago, and I am not playing around with it.
I am a big fan of the things that MySQL did not have up until this point - triggers, stored procedures, etc… I am not going to pretend like I have a handle on using them within the framwork yet. PHP MyAdmin does not yet support their creation / management through their time-saving UI, so it’s back to command line for me. Yikes — I’m pretty rusty. Being all holed up in a nice cushy office job has taken some of the shine I once had on my coding abilities when I was doing it everyday.
Ah, no matter. That’s what Christmas day is for, right? That, and going to see newly opened movies.
Happy Holidays!
