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inside analytics

How awesome is this. A great article in Forbes magazine on Jive

Upstart Jive Software aims to change the way people work by bringing social networking to the office. It's up against some firm called Microsoft.

Jive Software chief executive David Hersh has a lofty goal: a world where office work is so fulfilling, inspiring and free of trivialities that parodies like Dilbert and The Office cease to exist.

There are loftier goals--ending genocide, famine, cancer--but Hersh's is a good fight, and you can make a lot of money helping companies get themselves out of those endless e-mail chains and pointless meetings of office work. Jive's software uses the Web to do that.

"People live in e-mail and documents no one else can see. We're changing the way companies work," says Hersh.

Jive's newest product, called Clearspace, uses Web collaboration and communication tools such as forums, wikis and blogs to allow people in different offices to work on a short-term project using a single Web calendar, to-do list and discussion rooms. A manager can scroll over names of subalterns and see what they're working on and whether they're in the office, traveling or at home.

Very cool indeed.

Tracking Search Terms in Jive's ClearspaceMay 9

Jive's Clearspace application is a very powerful tool for building active, engaged communities. Whether you are using it for collaboration, blogging/publishing content, for discussions, or documentation, you'll want to know what your visitors are searching for on the site so you can make sure the right content is available at the right time.

There are a couple of ways to get a handle on the on-site search traffic. For one, you can simply query the database (if you're running Clearspace on-premise) for search terms used by your visitors (among other things, the search table also includes which userID made the request, along with how many results were returned).

Even easier though is to make sure your analytics tool is setup to correctly interpret a Clearspace search query. A Clearspace query makes a request like this:

Example: http://www.jivesoftware.com/community/search.jspa?

Parameters include:

q = the search term
resultTypes = the types of items inside Clearspace to search
peopleEnabled = true/false - whether to include searches on profiles
dateRa

WebTrends WidgetAugust 28 2007

I've updated my WebTrends widget to use the latest WebTrends ML2 web services, and give it a more ML2'ish look and feel. It's a very simple widget, which is another way of saying, I'm looking forward to other folks copying it and making it much more powerful (I have a long list of to-do's, so if you're interested in collaborating with me on improving it...please drop me a line!).

Any WebTrends On Demand customer can use this widget to view data for their account.

The basics:

Install Yahoo! Widgets if you haven't already
Download the widget
Run the widget, entering in various widget preferences: your username, password, account name (WebTrends On Demand account name), profile ID and which time frame you want.
That's it!

The new ML2 web services utilize SOAP to allow customers and partners to upload or download data. The upload

One View Of Widget StatsJune 27 2007

Interesting "widget" stats from the smart folks over at Lijit. Their approach is to crawl blogs and look for "any regularly-occurring functionality on a blog powered by an external service, voluntarily installed by the blog owner, and powered by Flash or Javascript". Most of those widgets are analytics tools, along with ad providers, and other social networking tools.

The information is a great commentary on our industry...look at the list of analytics providers. Does anyone else see our industry as a page torn from The Innovators Delimma? Where are the usual suspects you think of when you think of web analytics? Instead what you see are small, scrappy, smart solutions that are moving core analytics to a commodity service.

Filed in: analytics, web+analytics

Technorati Tags: analytics, web+analytics

Behind Screen #3June 17 2007

The NYTimes has an article today discussing how content providers are plowing ahead with big plans for mobile devices.  The very smart folks at ESPN are at the forefront of this industry, as they've figured out how to deliver the right content, at the right time, to their customers.  They see the mobile "screen" as a critical delivery tool:

“People talk about it being the third screen,” says John Zehr, senior vice president for digital video and mobile products at ESPN. “I talk about it being the first screen because it’s the closest to you.”

The article notes that they are leveraging data derived from one screen (computer) to better understand what types of content to push to another screen (mobile):

"For its part, ESPN is not holding back. It already tracks what computer users read on its Web site to determine what like-minded sports fans want to view on their phones, and is pursuing a patent to protect the technologies underlying its multiscreen effort."

And reading on, it's clear that they aren't just looking to match up the right content to the right group of viewers.  They are also working hard to deliver highly relevant, visitor-specific content to their visitors: