defenestrate99

London Olympic Logo

I just read Jeff Veen's piece on how jarringly sucky the recently unveiled 2012 London Olympic logo is. Admittedly, the man has a point. In the Chinese Hell of Evil Tetris, this is where I imagine all ne'er-do-well video gamers would spend eternity suffering severe migraines and the occasional stimuli-induced seizure.

While I agree with Jeff on the aesthetics of the logo (the man did, after all, help redesign Google Analytics to my great benefit), I don't know if he's being realistic when he suggests that sports logos should "[combine] the thrill and pageantry of athletic competition with the nuanced craft of graphic design." I can't think of a single sports event logo that succeeds in suggesting how impressive the sport itself is. Logos don't do that very well. In my mind, the logo is basically an empty receptacle in which an organization can build a brand image. The logo doesn't start with that brand image. It takes years to get that. Four years isn't enough (even if it weren't painful to look at) for an Olympic logo.  I personally appreciate the folks behind the Superbowl logo, who evidently gave up and decided that such events were so transient and impossible to characterize by nature, that they basically just said what it was in big letters and called it a logo. There's thrill and pageantry right there for you.

So yes, call the thing what it is (I'm going with "aggressively assy," as I'm a big fan of alliteration), but don't set yourself up by expecting that much from an Olympic logo. I think they should just use the rings (the one sports logo that, after 80+ solid years of use, maybe does have some emotion tied to it, as Seth Godin suggests) and leave it at that. It would have cost way less than $800K.

Google Street View Just Kills

Every time I think that I've just about had enough of Google and their inevitable dominion and lordship over all things informative, electronic, and webby, I see something like Google Maps Street View, which may just be the coolest thing ever. I will let people who are way less easily distracted than I am to debate the heady privacy concerns that appear whenever a great deal of information is unceremoniously plopped into the collective lap of the unwashed masses.

In the meantime, I see myself monkeying around with this for hours to come (in the Vegas, Denver, Miami , NYC, and Bay Area betas), and even more when they get Seattle plugged in and I can use this to help with house hunting. I love the idea of using this to see how a potential house looks on the street, what the neighbors houses look like, etc. This is way better than many of the craptastic Realtor sites I've been tortured by.

 

A co-worker is also looking forward to downloading this to her PDA when it becomes available. Awesome. I'd start investigating other revenue streams if I made navigation systems for a living.

Nice job, Google.

300

I'm so excited to see 300 in the theaters when it opens that I'm literally vibrating right now.

Don't judge me.

I consider myself a fairly educated guy. I have degrees. I read lots. I go to museums. I understand important issues and can create and articulate opinions on them.

But show me a movie with a sword fight and armies massing to chuck axes at each other, and I immediately turn into a 12 year old.

All preliminary reports of the movie seem to indicate that I'm not going to be disappointed. The two I would point to specifically are this review from Ain't it Cool News, and this interview in Wired with director Zack Snyder, who starts off the conversation by saying:

No one should ever take drugs, ever. I want to go on the record on that. But if someone was to slip you a mickey, I would immediately get into a taxi and go to an Imax screening of 300.

Nice.

I found very interesting the discussion of Snyder's decision to film everything in a studio so he could manipulate the sky, contrast and lighting to reflect the characters' emotional states. He described it as "a big mood ring."

That's one thing I believe is missing from the Web. We've made such great advances in taking advantage of targeting content for visitors based on their geography, the technology they use, the time of day they visit, etc. But in only the rarest of occasions do we ever manipulate content based on the visitors' moods. The only counterexamples I can think of are various blog sites that purport to give the mood of the author. But that doesn't really count, because that's changing the site for the author, not the reader, and the change is usually very minuscule (an icon on livejournal, for example). Another example is any number of Internet music sites that will feed music according to the mood you're in. The best visual of this that I've found to date is at musicovery. I don't think that the algorithm they created picks the most appropriate music to match the mood I select (maybe they need to purchase or get acquired by Pandora for that), but the mood widget is a nice example of what I want.

I'd love for Firefox to have an extension that allows the visitor to set a mood along any of a variety of continuums. I'd take positive (happy) to negative (sad), energetic to tired, and formal to irreverent as my first three. Then I'd want the extension to tag the visitor for that day with a quantifiable emotional state. And I'd want an open API for websites to be able to read those moods and adapt their content using whatever CMS or MVT tools they have. Would a visitor mind if a website knew his or her mood? I don't think so. To a perceptive stranger, one's mood is already publicly accessible. Plus, I think visitors might appreciate content that wasn't all bubbly if they've been having a bear of a day.

Alternatively, I wonder if one could extrapolate a visitor's mood from a playlist and present content based on that. I'd pay for it without blinking (at least for a test). That would be a unique business model for Internet radio players.

And if you could somehow inject the occasional sword fight, I'd be yours forever.

Blog Accountability

I saw this story about a blogger who is really angry at Lycos for deleting her emails and then treating her like a total jackass. The read is compelling and Lycos comes out looking, to put it mildly, like a group of not very nice people.

Of course, the various outraged commentors worked through the clues in the post and actually end up finding the guy they think wrote the nasty emails on behalf of Lycos to the wronged blogger. There are all sorts of links to his now-slash-dotted personal sites. This guy will forever be tied to one of the worst customer service experiences in recent memory. If customer service is his true calling, and he ever expects to work for a company that knows enough to Google his name, he's screwed and will never be able to go on a power trip like that again. Justice is served.

Now what if everybody's wrong?

There are two possible sources for error here:

1. The original post - I don't know the person who wrote the original post. He/She seems like a personable, trustworthy person and one certainly empathizes with him or her. But the About Us page on the blog doesn't exactly inspire trustworthiness. And I don't want to be accused of going all Oliver Stone here, but how do we know this person is telling the truth? What evidence is there, other than excerpts from an alleged email thread? Was there a taped phone conversation like we heard in an analogous Verizon customer relations fiasco? How hard would it be to make this up out of whole cloth? Or (perhaps more likely) to take some poetic license and make the Lycos rep seem ever-so-slightly more of a jerk than he actually was? You know, just to make sure the point gets made.
2. Angry Mob Web Forensics - So on the assumption that the original post is absolutely true as stated, we have 200+ commentors who are livid at the absolute assiness of this Lycos guy. They want to make the world a better place and/or avenge themselves and others for all the times they were treated rudely. So hundreds of angry, righteously indignant, Web-savvy Hardy Boys go hunting for the alleged perpetrator, and manage to find some guy associated with Lycos whose name is Mike and who appears to work in customers service. Now there is an actual person to hold accountable! And so the torrent of backlash against this guy commences. Good, we say. Clearly he had it coming, we say. But what if there was another guy at Lycos whose name was Mike? How objectively and thoroughly does an angry mob do its homework? When you say the word "Angry Mob" does it make you think of Gil Grissom from CSI or peasants with torches and pitchforks?

If either or both of the above injected some degree of inaccuracy into the situation, then it is conceivable that some guy will be forever tainted by something that didn't happen or wasn't done by him.

I want to be clear here: I have no real, actual information that this thing is a hoax and that some guy is getting dragged through the mud for no good reason. But I have no real, actual information that proves this guy is getting his just desserts either.

It would be so easy to let this sort of thing get out of control.

AquaStupid

Being the firm believer in good dental hygiene that I am, I decided that it was time to invest in a new toothbrush after the last one I purchased quite literally disintegrated into a fine mist from overuse. I read somewhere that a new toothbrush removes something like 40% more plaque than a toothbrush that has seen only 3 months of use. I was clearly scheduled for an upgrade.

I went to the supermarket and was faced with 250 types of toothbrushes, each of which claimed that your decision to purchase a different brand toothbrush would result in your teeth veritably launching themselves from your mouth spontaneously and condemning you to a long penance of that liquid-only diet you've always meant to get around to until you realized how much it would make you want to throw yourself in front of a bus.

I picked an Aquafresh Extreme Clean Medium (side marketing rant: Why must everything be "extreme"? In the history of the dental profession, I don't think the adjective "extreme" was ever used to describe anything. It's one of those idiotic code words considered by marketing people as a secret means to hypnotize young, hip, tattooed individuals into buying their crap. It doesn't work. I know three young, hip, tattooed individuals, and I asked each of them). The Extreme Clean is a very modern looking toothbrush- the kind you envision Austrian scientists suspending in wind-tunnels to test for maximum aerodynamic throughput, or something. That being said, I had no reason to pick it over the other comparable, maximally aerodynamic toothbrushes. The price didn't really factor in, and presumably as a result of the manufacturers' never-ending quest to be different, they all looked exactly alike.

The reason I went with the Extreme Clean was the promise of 3 free music downloads. That's it. All things being equal, I might as well add a few good tracks to the old ipod. I get most of my tunes from eMusic, but I figured I could actually pick 3 major label tunes, and the thought of adding Neil Diamond's Brother Love's Traveling Salvation Show to my Holiday Playlist was too much to resist.

Toothbrush in hand, I raced to my computer to get my free tracks. The following represents a partial list of hoops you have to jump through in order to get your tunes:

1. You have to register for an account at Aquafresh - Why? I opted out of letting them send me email, so what possible reason is there for this?
2. Their website plays incredibly assy techno music on a loop - If there's a way to turn it off, I didn't see it. Perhaps they are doing a cross marketing thing with Excedrin.
3. You have to bring the packaging with you to plug in a 16 digit alphanumeric key - Ok, I get that fraud could be a problem here, but geez.
4. Once you register, you are given a NEW 12 digit alphanumeric key for a New site -  Here's a challenge: Go watch any spy movie where there is a bomb or missile with launch and/or deactivation codes. Millions of people's lives are at stake in these circumstances, and I defy you to find an example where you need to enter two separate codes, totally 26 alphanumeric characters.
5. Aquafresh warns you in no uncertain terms of all the sinister-sounding things you will have to do and agree to at the new site - I don't have the copy (you can't get to it again via the back button - nice), but they must have hired the same people who wrote the disclaimer text for Xenical (starts with "o" and rhymes with "doily spotting")
6. You go to the site (connect.com) and they tell you that they will not play with Firefox - It must be nice to be doing so well that you can afford to cheese off 12% of your potential customers. Oh, and you have to go to the new site by way of an interim "softcoin.com" site which sounds creepy. By this point, I have about 4 new windows open for this transaction.
7. DRM - The connect.com's terms and conditions are representative of the stupidity of the entire record industry. I can only keep my music on one machine. I can only download my music to a predetermined number of registered devices. I can only burn my music 7 times. Blah, blah, blah. None of these restrictions makes sense, and they more often than not make me want to run screaming from the page.
8. Software - Oh, yeah, and you have to download software to your computer in order to get the tracks. No way. One can only endure so much.
   

All I wanted was the music Aquafresh promised me. To be fair, I'm sure that if I did everything they required, eventually I would have had 3 additional songs on my computer. But at what cost to me? Can you imagine if you had to do all of this to get the prize at the bottom of a Cracker Jack box?

So Aquafresh can get bent, as far as I'm concerned. They've taken my 3 dollars and turned a customer loyalty program around 180 degrees to the point where I'm actually angry at them. I'll buy another aquafresh toothbrush when I get a $3 check in the mail from them so I can get the songs they owe me on itunes. At least Apple is upfront about what you do and don't get.

WishRadar is bending my mind

So WishRadar is up and running now, in case I haven't told you about it in person. It's a free service that lets you track the price and availability of items on your wishlists (CDs, books, DVDs, etc.) in one place. You set your target price and we watch your targets on Amazon and Half.com for the cheapest available purchase. When we see a target at the price you want it, we alert you (via email, RSS and/or SMS). What with all of the "tracking" and "targeting" and "acquiring" we're doing for you, the concept of Radar seemed apt. God, I'm an awesome marketer.

It's fundamentally weird to work for a bigger company during the day and to have a side gig with friends going on for the evenings and weekends. The roles and responsibilities for WishRadar are far more varied and interesting- I do everything from writing copy, to setting up Google Analytics, to yes, even monkeying around with small snippets of code. Contrast that to my day job, where I have a more managerial and strategic focus, I am supported by experts in analytics to do much of the heavy lifting for me, and I would probably be beaten to death with keyboards in the parking lot by a roving band of JAVA developers if I ever tried to change code myself.

I like the mind-shift that the side gig forces me to confront. For one, it forces me to use bits of my brain that might otherwise atrophy. Digging in dirt and details is an important safeguard against locking oneself in an ivory tower, and my utility as an effective manager evaporates when I cease to understand the blood and guts of how things work. Also, I get a fantastic dose of perspective on how generally lost I am without good, smart people around me. I don't want to come off sounding like I can't tie my own shoes (I have my good days), but sometimes recognizing how bad I am at something renews my appreciation for how gifted my colleagues are at it.

So Anyway.

If you haven't checked out the site, please do sign up and give it a whirl. I'd be grateful for your feedback.

This is targeted marketing

I rarely learn solid marketing practices from big companies. That's a brutal generalization, but it's far more true than not (thus rendering it, by definition, a "generalization." See how that works?). Larger companies mean more risk-aversion which translates to less cutting edge stuff which translates (again, generally) to yawn. Given that, you can imagine my surprise when I read about Unisys targeting 20 potential customers specifically with magazine covers and billboards.

This is every marketer's dream: to know that an individual is a key decision maker who could stand to make massive purchases from your company iand to provide him or her with precisely the right information and motivation. Sadly, for many of us who live and die on the Internet, the sum total of our targeted potential customer knowledge is "an English speaker somewhere in California who visited us at 10 am using Firefox and left after three minutes." Not exactly enough information to build a campaign around, admittedly. But the gap is closing.

I know this has a creepy "Minority Report" feel to it if you look at it a certain way, but I'm willing to withhold judgment as long as the information is publicly available anyway.  Congrats to Unisys for giving us a brief glimpse into the way things should be once enough information is out there.

eMetrics gets a B-

So I just got back from the eMetrics conference in Washington DC, and I give it a B-.

I should qualify at the beginning of the post (before the entire Web Analytics community proclaims a fatwa against me) that I loathe conferences. With few exceptions, the conferences I have attended have keynotes that are over-broad to the point of being useless, the networking makes me feel like a miserable social failure, and the selling is hard, constant, and from vendors who are totally irrelevant to my needs. The average grade for a conference has historically been a D.

eMetrics rose modestly above its peers in part because it is so specialized and, for better or for worse, is such a close knit and woefully small community of hyper-knowledgeable people. Inevitably, things will be relevant to you here, regardless of where you land in the web analytics continuum of experience.

Because I have no imagination whatsoever, I will split my comments into the well worn buckets of "good" and "bad".

Good

• Everyone I met was jazzed about analytics. The rate of information exchange on a one-to-one or one-to-few level was fantastic.
• The presentations were a mixed bag, but highlights included (perhaps unsurprisingly) Eric Peterson's and Bryan Eisenberg's. I missed Avinash's session because I am a moron.
• The keynote presentations were universally solid and engaging. Jim Sterne kicked everything off, followed by a VP from Xerox on the second day, and then the head of Interactive Marketing for Coca-Cola on the third. The take-aways from the latter two were not very specific or applicable outside of their particular environments, but I was thrilled to learn how relatively green Fortune 500 companies are (as well) to web analytics. The fact that I am exactly as lost as they are on some things, and actually ahead of them on a few others, gives me hope.
• The conference speakers all did an great job of driving home the idea that "accuracy" depends on what you are measuring and how you measure it. Part of me secretly suspects that we, as web analysts, believe this because it makes it impossible for us to be proved wrong. I recognize the statement as being throughly self-serving but inherently believe it as gospel.
• I got to meet Joseph Carrabis who is a fascinating guy to converse with. I had no idea who he was within the web analytics community (I tend to drink from the same wells when it comes to web articles) until I googled him, and was amazed at the breadth and depth of this man's writing on the subject.

Bad

• Tyson's Corner is NOT Washington DC. Stop fibbing on the brochures. Also, for the love of all that's holy, why on earth would you pick a hotel for an eMetrics conference that doesn't have free wireless? Isn't that like holding an island travel conference in Pittsburgh? All of the conference rooms were dead zones, so even my cell phone wireless antenna was useless. If the hotel doesn't provide it, then it should be incumbent upon eMetrics to pony up and pay for it.
• Many of the sessions were repetitive. I think it's fine for there to be global themes that pervade everyone's presentation. In a community as focused as web analytics, that's to be expected. But too many of the sessions were folks giving their "Top X mistakes/requirements to avoid/succeed." There are diminishing returns after the third presentation informs me that I "need good people" to succeed with web analytics. Wow. Thanks for that gem.
• eMetrics needs sponsors, and I get that. That being said, too many of the sessions themselves were glorified infomercials. Even the ones that weren't billed as coming from sponsors had the stink (or, enchanting musk, if you prefer) of a sales pitch all over them. At least three sessions I attended were of no value to me unless I was using a specific product or service.

Bonus Category - Suggestions

Aside from doing more of the "good" stuff and less of the "bad" stuff, I have compiled a list of some suggestions for upcoming eMetrics conferences. I feel compelled to do this, since I lost my feedback forms.

• Career mingler - Everybody was hiring. I was hiring. Google was hiring. Coca Cola was hiring. Everybody. Was. Hiring. Somebody needs to set up a cocktail hour whose sole function is to have job seekers and job posters interact. I would have attended the conference just for that, alone. It could be set up like speed dating, only less creepy.
• Birds of a Feather Sessions - I first heard about these from an engineer who attended the Java One conference in SF. Basically, these are smaller, informal session discussions, usually moderated by a participant, about a very, very specific application or idea. I really think this has legs within the eMetrics group. We could have BOFs according to vendor allegiance (Omniture, HBX, Coremetrics, etc.), according to industry (web analytics issues for telecom, etailers, portals, etc), by company or team size, by development environment or technology (issues specific to flash, AJAX, etc.), and on and on and on. This would put a lot of like-minded people in the same room (or bar), would make networking a lot less like an 8th grade dance, and might even provide some insight into topics that would merit a full session at later conferences.
• Rate sessions according to level of difficulty - Just like gymnasts do. Many of the sessions were too basic for me and a few were too advanced. I'm not exactly sure how this would play out. Maybe rate according to how much math is involved, how much experience with web analytics the session is geared towards, etc. There were lots of experience levels at this conference, and eMetrics, by shooting for an average, was specifically targeting none of them. That being said, I applaud their efforts to educate beginners with the WAA training day prior to the conference, and hope they continue that.

A B- from me is not a bad thing, but at $2000+ per ticket (not including travel), there can be no room for grade inflation. I congratulate Jim on a fine event and look forward to upcoming conferences.

Paul Graham on Patents

This is my favorite excerpt from one of the best-crafted and even handed essays on the difficult topic of software patents, offered by Paul Graham:

When you read of big companies filing patent suits against smaller ones, it's usually a big company on the way down, grasping at straws.  For example, Unisys's attempts to enforce their patent on LZW compression.  When you see a big company threatening patent suits, sell.  When a company starts fighting over IP, it's a sign they've lost the real battle, for users.

So true. The funny thing is, when I read this paragraph, the first thing that popped into my head wasn't Unisys or Amazon, or even patent abuse in general. It was the RIAA. The only thing more demonstrative of a business or industry going down the toilet than random suits against your competitors is random suits against your customers.

I can't wait to teach my class on Business Management and Operations again. When the IP class comes up, I have a great reading assignment for them.

ajaxwrite

I played around with ajaxwrite this morning. It's the new whiz-bangy web-hosted word processor, that's getting all the blog press. I really don't need a new word processor. I already have one that works which was installed on my computer before it was handed to me at work. But philosophically, I love the fact that this is doing the exact same thing huge providers do, but for free. The commoditization of software will mean the end to Microsoft as we know it (sorry, I know it's cliche to pick on our friends in Redmond, but everyone knows that when the revolution comes, MSFT will be first against the wall).

That being said, I would like to post an...

Open Letter to the Guys who Made Ajaxwrite

Hi Guys,

Nice job. Keep it up.

I will never, ever, ever be able to use ajaxwrite in real life without a spell-check native to the program. If that's not in version 1.01, it should be.

That is all.

Best,

-Jason