The funny thing about monitoring is that there’s a ton of data to collect, but few people know where to start. A few months ago, Steve Souders, one of the co-chairs of Velocity, asked us if we’d teach a workshop to try and fix this.

It’s a reworking of many of the things we cover in the book, plus an attempt to explain the math and reporting in an accessible way. Here’s the slide deck.

We’re finishing a busy week in New York, with presentations at both Web2Expo and Interop New York. We had a great time running our first Communilytics Boot Camp, and O’Reilly’s bookstore sold out of our book.

The Communilytics stuff was really interesting; we proposed a new “long funnel” model that incorporates both community metrics (such as followers, amplification, and the like) and traditional analytics (conversion rate, checkout value, and so on.) It’s a holistic approach, and we’ll write it up here soon.

We also looked at message propagation in communities a bit. Here’s a clip from the session, which discusses how the combination of Twitter’s formalized Retweet and an understanding of relevance can create “pagerank for humans” in microblogging platforms that share Twitter’s asymmetric-follow pattern.

Completely independent of this, Alex Bowyer over on Bitcurrent wrote a thoughtful piece on how Twitter should have formalized Retweeting, and some of the issues with the current model.

Unfortunately, there’s some strangeness going on between Youtube and Keynote’s video export, so the last 30 seconds of this are clipped. Basically we make the point that this is how to monetize microblog analytics, either by selling sentiment propagation analysis, finding out who influential proponents and detractors are, or knowing where to display ads and to whom.