Reid Dossinger

With the launch and demo of Google's Chrome OS, where the OS is the browser and all your information lives online, my head was in the cloud (HA! No? Oh, alright). As much as I love the move towards an online life--where information stays in one place and the only thing that changes is the devices we use to access it--it's hard not to take in the arguments that we're throwing our privacy away. Playing the part of the skeptic (not too much of a stretch for me), it's not hard to see the concerns. Sure, at the moment there's nothing in my Google Docs or on my blogs that will put me in jail or get me blackmailed, but it's pretty easy to see a 9/11-type event or massive change in government that means more scrutiny on what we say and do. Our world can change in a big way, and what formerly seemed innocuous is now a crime, with all the evidence needed to convict available in the formerly-friendly-sounding cloud. Meanwhile, the conspiracy theorists are sweeping the ashe...

You know, headlines like that one really put me on the fence, balancing between "Ooh! Metrics!" and "Wow, no wonder people think it's boring and geeky." ANYWAY...today I'm definitely in the former camp, in the sense that it's exciting because it's a philosophical puzzle: how can you solve a problem that can never really be solved? Yesterday, I commented on Avinash Kaushik's post where he asked, "If you were to measure the success of a company’s social media efforts how would you do it?" My answer: For social media, the obvious metrics still hold: referrals and conversions from referrals. But being from a nonprofit background, where the higher-ups are often skeptical of social media, the real metrics are the words. There’s nothing more valuable than the tweet that says "I love that {your org} is on Twitter" or the time you respond to a comment on Facebook addressing a wide concern about your organization or when you comment ...

In years of working with web analytics, I've had to try and explain the difference between page views, visitors and visits, and why people looking at basic stats should focus on visits. I can usually get the point across with the simple explanation and be pretty sure that people get it, but I once told a more involved (and more fun) story, and it seems that this story was the difference between a still-slightly-confused "Oh, okay" and what I got after this story, which was "Ohhh! Okay, now I understand it." With smiles. The story: Tom just moved into a new 4-room apartment and is exhausted. He just wants to spend the day sitting on the couch and watching the full season three of Mad Men that he has squirreled away on his DVR. About fifteen minutes into the show, Tom's doorbell rings, so he has to stop the DVR and get up off the couch. It's his friend Kate, stopping by to pick up a DVD she's loaned Tom, so she only see's the front room as Tom pic...

I know it's about as boring as anything to complain about Facebook homepage redesign, but, well, here are: complaining. This isn't a crank about how it looks different, though. We all know that there are plenty of people that will bust a gasket at any change, but my perspective is on web statistics. And if your experience is anything like mine, Facebook's new design will slice your referrals by about a quarter. Every Friday, I post my favorite song of the week on my music blog Naive Harmonies , and I used to promote it by feeding the site's RSS into Facebook. I got almost no referrals from Facebook, so a few weeks ago, I stopped the automatic posting, and instead manually posted a link. I could include a short writeup about what exactly I was posting, and I could often include a picture. The effect was dramatic. I went from one or two Facebook referrals each time to about twelve to fifteen, plus would get between four or five comments and a few likes, none of which I ...