The Holistic Web

I’ve been keeping very busy on my new site: www.ecommercespot.com. It’s a new venture which offers information, training and consulting to ecommerce site owners, helping ecommerce site owners take their business to the next level. I find many ecommerce sites get to a certain level, generally slightly but not terribly profitable, and get stuck there. I’m offering information and services to help them break through that level.

For those techies amongst you (and I know I have a few reading this blog), the site is built using the wonderful Sub-Sonic framework for asp.net, which I’m loving so far. It’s actually the complete starter kit that comes with the framework. I’ve made a few tweaks to it (which was insanely easy to do), and will make more, but it’s about 90% out of the box at the moment.

Anyway, still working on the site and a lot of the background stuff behind the scenes (it’s a bit like an iceberg - the website is only 20% of what I’ve done), and looking forward to moving forward!

I was just reading a five page abstract (via getabstract.com) of a new book, “Black Swan” about the impact of unusual events. That quote jumped out at me. How true that is! We call people experts who can look at the past and explain why it happened - narration. Yet the vast majority of “experts” are completely unable to predict the future with an accuracy. This applies in any area of expertise - investment is the most obvious one, but far from the only one.

Maybe a real expert is someone who says “I don’t know what will happen, but these are the sort of things that can help us prepare for just about an eventuality, be they good or bad”.

We all know about the trend of increased transparency. Blogging, product reviews, comparison sites, etc. Here’s a great new trend which is sure to grow: recordings of customer service calls. A customer having problems with their credit card, and recording the call and publishing it on the net. We’ll be seeing a lot more of this in the future.

via Trendwatching

My mate Nick kindly invited me along to the launch of his new site last night. It’s called iTrainer, it’s basically an online personal trainer. It was a great party, and some truly sensational caprioscas were had by (almost) all.

It’s exciting to see a new online start up in Australia. There is so much interesting stuff happening in the online space at the moment. It’s like the dot com boom, but people have their blind folds off now, the emperor’s new clothes don’t look so good. I look forward to many new Aussie startups in the near future. And, well done Nick and Co on a great site, I hope it succeeds.

As regular readers would know, this blog deals almost exclusively with what I would call “business” related stuff. I love the internet and the online experience, and so to call it business is doing it a bit of an injustice.

However, I do have other interests besides things online, and I keep those off this blog. So, I just started another blog. It will be far less focussed than this one. Expect to read a lot about:

• The forthcoming Scott Walker CD, “The Drift”
• Other relatively esoteric music stuff
• Scott Walker
• Random gratuitous musings on life
• The new Scott Walker CD
• My forthcoming radio show??
• Whatever else I feel like

May I introduce to you the one and only Getting the Drift. I expect it to be not especially interesting to most of the readers of this blog, and I will plug it either very, very rarely or most likely not at all, so don’t expect lots of cross posting, this will probably be the first and last time I mention it.

Ok, so I’ve been using Google Analytics for a week or two now. First of all, it is the full version of Urchin. I never actually used Urchin, although read a fair bit about it. From what I’ve heard from reliable sources, it’s not only the full version but been improved somewhat.

My first impressions: it’s good. It’s very good. And for the price, it’s absolutely amazing.

Things I like about it:

• It’s free.
• It’s geographic targetting features are nice (although I question their accuracy)
• The filters are very powerful. Took me 30 seconds to exclude my IP address from reports so my own usage of the site (which probably makes 5 - 10% of all traffic) doesn’t skew the results.
• Goal tracking with funnel analysis. Who doesn’t love this feature. Having said that, in practice I’m seeing problems with it under reporting data (I *know* we got the sale, but google doesn’t seem to), but I haven’t investigated thoroughly - maybe the problem is mine. It might be getting confused by the session ID in our URLs (yes, yes, I know, I hate session IDs as well,it’s on the to do list)
• The focus on originating traffic. Distinguishing between referrals, organise keywords and PPC keywords. I love it!
• I could keep going, it has great content analysis features, webmaster stats, ad testing (not played with this but looks awesome) etc

Bad things:

• Maybe not a “problem” as such, but for people used to a simplistic log analysis software such as AWStats, they’ll probably find it confusing
• The lag. Google has been overwhelmed and so the stats are very late to show up. This will no doubt improve with time.
• The filter tables which allow extensive search and replace rules (eg. product 11439 is actually a Small Blue Widget, making the reports more readable) can only be uploaded by google staff, no opportunity for self upload, or even better, a data feed (XML file or whatever). Makes this feature useless for me with rapidly changing data, but I *really* want to use it.
• Without that feature in the point above, it copes badly with query string driven sites

My conclusion: if you have a smallish site, it’s worth putting on, but don’t expect to use or understand all the features.

If you have a medium site, this is awesome. Invest some serious time into getting into it, maybe even get in someone to help (such as me!) and really squeeze the most of it. You could get a really deep, actionable plan on how to improve your site with this set up & analysed properly.

If you have a large site, I’m not sure this would deal with the complexity most large sites have - you’d have so many filters it would become unmanageable. But then you probably have a budget to do something better than this anyway!

You may remember a little while ago Google bought an analytics company called Urchin. I had a bit of a look at Urchin and was very impressed with the statistics. It went way beyond analysing traffic patterns, etc, to look at goals and profitable traffic patterns. Eg. 100 people clicked on this link on the home page and 50 clicked on that link, but out of those 50 twice as many actually ended up buying something. That sort of super-useful stuff that really helps optimise.

Anyway, Google have just released a free version of Google Analytics. I’m not sure if this is a cut down version of Urchin or the full blown thing, but either way, I’m extremely jaded with most analytics packages out there, and so have just signed up for it on my wife’s e-commerce site (which amongst other things, makes a wonderful test bed for looking at such things).

I’ll let you know how I get on. Initial impressions are good though.

Oh, and for those saying “don’t let Google know too much”, well, frankly, I don’t care how much Google knows. If they can offer me value, then they can have my data.

Ok, so it’s a tease title I sure don’t understand women. But my wife does, frighteningly well. Fortunately she’s just launched an Online Discount Cosmetics outlet ecommerce store. Yeah, we are a totally wired household. Sorry to my international readers, at this point it’s Australia only (although if you are in NZ we can probably work out something).

So, blatant plug: guys, tell your girls to shop. The stuff is brand name, and it really is very cheap. Girls, get shopping! Tell your friends!

And a special “for my blog only offer” my wife has done, guys, if you want to impress your girls with a sensitive present (Christmas soon!), but have no idea what to buy her, send a photo of her to my wife, nicola AT smartpoppy.com.au, and she’ll advise on colours and all that girly stuff and will recommend some stuff that will look good on her - and we will even be offering gift wrapping soon! Remember this stuff is roughly half the price you’ll get in the shops, but you don’t need to tell her that

Blatant plug over, we will now resume to our normal rambling.

(you are more than welcome to google bomb http://www.smartpoppy.com.au with the term “discount cosmetics”, hint hint)

You’ve probably heard the stories of the mechanical turk, a “mechanical” chess machine in the 1700’s that beat many quality players at chess. The secret was of course that there was a chess master hidden inside.

Amazon have come up with an ingenious mechanical turk for the 21st century. Say you have a problem which is hard for computers to solve but easy for humans. An example currently live on their site is a collection of photos of a shop. You need to choose which photo best represents the shop front (including the “none of the above” option). Easy for a human, effectively impossible for a computer. For doing that, you get paid a few cents. Amazon take a 10% cut of that.

But the interesting bit is that anyone can tap into this and take advantage of it. For example, I run a site where people post reviews. Reviews are moderated before going live. I don’t want to editorialise the reviews, I just want to eliminate rubbish, abusive, or very poor english reviews. At the moment the volume is low enough that I just do it. But what if I was getting a few 100 a day? Rather than spending an hour or two a day, I could pass them to the mechanical turk site (via a web service), pay people a few cents to check them out, and then respond that way.

I love this - such an ingenious solution to solve an otherwise difficult problem very cheaply.

The site is http://www.mturk.com, but it’s getting hammered at time of writing and running slow. Nice to see the good people at Amazon innovating.

Update: just saw slashdot beat me to it…

MSNBC has this interesting article. I’d like to hear more about how they are using this infrastructure to create new ways of working. Class wikis, teacher (and student) blogs, collaborative working, etc. The sky is the limit.