Today, I (Sean Power) announced that I’ll be leading Cheezburger’s data efforts as “data scientist”.  Nearly three years of consulting has given me a great overview of the state of startups today, and I’ll be sad to stop working with many of the great companies in silicon valley and beyond.  However, it’s finally time for me to join forces with a company that has found its product/market fit.  Here’s why:

“Big Data” is a term thrown around a lot these days and yet holds so many different definitions in often similar contexts.  It usually comes hand in hand with the word clouds, the word analytics, the words “statistics” and “mathematics”, and many other qualifiers.

Much has been said about the practice of data science.  I’m partial to what Mike Loukides wrote on the topic,

The truth is that there’s no definition that quite sticks when it comes to the role of a data scientist.  With Tim O’Reilly and Reid Hoffman calling this era of computing the era of data, I also believe that we live in an unprecedented era of innovation around data.  I decided that I want to be in the heart of the action, on the center stage.

I’ll be working with lots of data.  Cheezburger’s data is sizeable.  Over a month, we’ll see things like 19 million people.  400 million page views.  110 million videos.  That’s a decent amount of data exhaust to tame.  And I’ll be working to find, define and refine my identity in the ‘big data space’ as I help Cheezburger with theirs.

You’ll notice more activity from me on this site, as I blog about some of the challenges, successes and losses that we’ll encounter.  I’ll do my best to be as transparent as possible in hopes that I’ll help others save time and frustration.  Hopefully, I’ll be able to learn from those of you that have paved the way already.  With folks like Bob Page and Lauren Moores having cut the trees and made a path, and others like Hilary Mason paving the way, “big data” is poised to deliver game changing insights and products.

I’ll also be announcing some really exciting stuff that all of us will be able to benefit from in the data community.

Stay tuned.

Since we’ve got a site, there must be a reason for its existence . . right?  We bothered to put something up – there must be a point.  But often many sites don’t consciously know why they created their sites in the first place, and this may be a result of not taking the time to articulate the goals of the site – its raison d’être.

By mapping out your goals, you’ll find it much easier to translate them into things to look at to make sure that you’re achieving your goals. These “things to look at” are also called metrics.  AKA KPIs.  AKA all those other silly names that denote some sort of accountability.  At any rate, it turns out that wachingwebsites.com’s goals are pretty simple.  In no particular order:

1. Create a cool site that supports the book well.  This includes information about the book, its chapters, changes, updates and so on.
2. Inform people about our services.  Tell them about the company “Watching Websites”, and let them know what we do.
3. Blog about things related to our areas of expertise.  Anything goes: industry trends, anecdotes, lessons learned; as long as we provide content that our readers think is valuable, we’ll have a great start.
4. Encourage visitors to stick around by providing free resources (including presentations, whitepapers, notable conference lists, etc)
5. Be full of win.

Your goals are undoubtedly different.  Example might be “increase retention by 10%”, “party like its 1980″, “increase conversions next quarter by 1%”, “increase blog readership by 2%”, “wear cool shirts”, “increase bottom line by 25% over 2 quarters”, etc.

We’ll come back to these goals, over and over and over again during the course of this series of blog posts.  Knowing what your goals are can help you save you alot of time, by painting a clear vision of where you’ll likely want to end up.  Now that i’ve got these four things to work with, off I go to create sketches of what I envision! baseline the site to figure out how it’s doing first!  (woops, jumped the gun!).

This is an article in a series of blog posts that will look at the process of building the new Watching Websites website, focusing on metrics & analytics.  The posts include:

Part 1: things as is aren’t looking so good

Part 2: goals?  what goals?

Part 3: baselining the existing site

Part 4: mocking up the new site

Part 5: marketing requirements documents (MRD) made easy

Part 6: requirements definitions documents (RDD) made easy

Part 7: analytics requirements documents (ARD) made easy

Part 8: choosing the right platform

Part 9: watching websites – the back end

Part 10: watching websites – the front end

Part 11: watching websites – going live!

Part 12: post-upgrade analytics in practice

Part 13: optimizing the site

Part 14: lessons learned & conclusions

Welcome to our site.  Like it?  Didn’t think so.  You probably came here expecting to find book content, information about us, information about our company “Watching Websites”, stuff about analytics in general or simply find cool anecdotes.

We put this site up as we were writing the book.  We found hosting (thanks Ian and Dan!), installed wordpress, installed the Atatahualpa theme and off we went.  We didn’t really have time to tend to the site too much for reasons that included hectic schedules, keeping up with the book deadlines and so on.

But now, the book Complete Web Monitoring is out!  Woot!

So, it’s time to give www.watchingwebsites.com some much needed love.  Over the upcoming weeks, we’ll be blogging about the process behind upgrading www.watchingwebsites.com, focusing on how we’re using analytics to figure out if things went well or not.  As always, we won’t be teasing you with how things could happen – instead, we chose to be transparent, name sources, show off tools, give out documents and generally try and give as much pertinent information as possible.

So, the following hyperlinks will get activated as soon as the articles go up (expect some of the titles to change!).  In the meantime, follow Alistair and I on Twitter for updates, or simply add us to your RSS reader (RSS feeds are mysteriously broken.  Still trying to figure out why!)

This is an article in a series of blog posts that will look at the process of building the new Watching Websites website, focusing on metrics & analytics.  The posts include:

Part 1: things as is aren’t looking so good

Part 2: goals?  what goals?

Part 3: baselining the existing site

Part 4: mocking up the new site

Part 5: marketing requirements documents (MRD) made easy

Part 6: requirements definitions documents (RDD) made easy

Part 7: analytics requirements documents (ARD) made easy

Part 8: choosing the right platform

Part 9: watching websites – the back end

Part 10: watching websites – the front end

Part 11: watching websites – going live!

Part 12: post-upgrade analytics in practice

Part 13: optimizing the site

Part 14: lessons learned & conclusions

Hi! We’ve had a chance to breathe since the book’s been launched. Shortly (early September), we’ll be rolling out a new site which will feature:

• A complete list of pictures and hyperlinks in the book
• Blog posts will resume
• Tips and tricks that have helped us save time
• A list of analytics tools that we often use
• More stuff!

In the meantime, I give you this to play with: http://www.youshouldhaveseenthis.com/

Enjoy :)

Sean and I go live in San Francisco in a few minutes. While the preparation has been great, and we’re expecting a decent audience, today’s breakfast was an ominous message from the kitchen.

Some success with the arts & crafts section. The presentation saved as a PDF.

We’re doing a presentation that’s excerpted from the book at DemoCamp Guelph tonight. Should be an interesting conversation; we have an “exercise” planned. Sean can’t be here (he was at Podcamp and has to get real work done after a weekend of editing the 400+ figures in the text!) but will be joining on Twitter. If you have photos from the event, or questions for Sean, we’ll be using the #CWM hashtag (for Complete Web Monitoring, the title of the book.)

One of the projects we’ve been working on is trying to create a single, comprehensive overview of the Complete Web Monitoring process. Here’s where we’re at (and an early glimpse at a poster we’re working on.)

First of all, a complete monitoring strategy includes the many questions a web analyst needs to answer:

• Web analytics (“what did they do?”)
• Web Interaction Analytics (“how did they do it?”)
• Voice of the Customer (“why did they do it?”)
• Both synthetic and real user performance monitoring (“could they do it?”)
• Community monitoring (“what are they saying?”, “who’s talking?”, and “where are they saying it?”

Any strategy also has to look at several different stages in monitoring:

• Arrival (“I visited the site”)
• Usage (“I played with it”)
• Engagement (“I’m a part of it”)
• Revenue (“I paid for it”)
• Referrals (“I spread the word”)

If these look somewhat like Dave McClure’s Pirate Metrics, it’s because he’s awesome and we borrow heavily from his thinking on startup metrics. Anyway, this PDF is a work in progress of trying to align the big questions analysts need to answer with the various stages of visitor engagement. Once we sex it up a bit, we’ll make some posters.

I’ll put the DemoCamp slides up here shortly.