MetaMuse

Behavioral Analytics?!?!

Others Online (this company I work for) announced the beta launch of our Affinity Analytics service for publishers and networks. This is not like any other Web site analytics you've seen, and I'm here to tell you you should check it out!

Traditional web site analytics tell you about visits, page views, sources, etc. but nothing about your visitors. Our free Affinity Analytics service tell you about your audience and the topics/interests they care most about, based on how they browse not only your site but our whole network.

It takes seconds to sign up. Once you're approved, we'll provide you with simple HTML (Javascript) to copy and paste within your Web pages. That's it -- we then provide you with web-based reports (we also offer a data feed and API service) which show you the topics that your audience cares most about, and for each topic your audience's level of interest (average affinity strength score of 0-100), the commercial value of that topic in the advertising world, and how much of your audience cares about that topic. Here's a screen shot, which you click for a bigger/better view ...

You can also click on any of the topics to see trending data/graphs over the past 7 or 30 days. This helps you understand total unique visitors and page views for any given audience segment, allowing you to target them by their interests and affinity strength.

Using Video for Business Communication

In my opinion, one of the most difficult things to do in a technology startup is to communicate what you do. It's so easy to communicate too much information, explain the technology aspects too deeply, or make it too complex. "Simple and effective" communication is not easy.

We knew at Others Online that we were hitting a pain point in the market, and also knew our Web site was in desperate need of an update -- to better communicate what we did. In order to (a) communicate what we do very simply and effectively, and (b) convey a warm, consumer-friendly feel (instead of a cold technologist-friendly feel) to what we did, we chose to use a video.

This has just been posted to www.othersonline.com -- what do you think?

Back to Dirt Jumping (Barely)

Three  weeks ago I bit it hard mountain biking. My bike was in the shop getting the suspension rebuilt, and I was jonesin' to go to this new spot, so I took up my buddy's offer to use his old bike. Never  considered that it would handle very differently in the air, so I hit the first jump -- probably a 12' or so gap, with an easy run-in, lip and transition -- pulled up on the lip, and the front end just kept coming up.
Ending up landing on my ass and lower back. The spinal compression made my ass and back numb for a moment,  and every muscle there spasmed. Not pleasant, but otherwise nothing broken but my ego. Except for a brief (light) ride last weekend, I haven't been out -- still dealing with a bit of pain.

But I met up with Justin and Jake at the dirt jump spot down the road, thinking I'd give dirt jumping a go again. After a few squishy starts, I made it through the whole line -- that was my only goal -- then pretty much stopped. The jumps felt good, but my back was hurting a bit and I just didn't feel like pushing it. But I was back in action ... albeit barely!

Justin and Jake had just finished digging a sweet 4th jump and they were just eating it up. Looked so tasty, but since I'd already wussed out I shot some video instead. Here's Justin on the line:

And here's Jake on the line:

A few more mountain biking videos at my YouTube page.