The Challenge

Rambles and Riff Raff about all this and that

Getting inspired by Stack and Swarm.

Published by Esteban Glas on December 9th, 2006 | This post lacks all category except for: Marketing, Metrics, Web, Web Marketing

Up to this moment I was very happy and satisfied with del.icio.us, particularly it’s plugin with Firefox (my weapon of choice in terms of Browsers). It quite helped me for my impulsive bookmarking. Today, I decided to see what digg is all about. At first glance nothing much more impressive than del.icio.us, but then I went to digg labs and made a Neo style “whoa” when I loaded both stack and swarm.

Both tools are better worth seeing than talking about, which is why I highly recommend you to visit them in case you haven’t yet.

The only thing I didn’t like about digg (in a more general sense) and the reason I’ll stick to del.icio.us for the time being is the inflexible tags you can assign to bookmarks. The bad thing about rigid categories is that, in most cases, things don’t quite fit into any well established category. For a musical analogy: both Yes and Pink Floyd are considered “symphonic rock” bands, but they have little to do with each other (besides song’s lengths).

So, where is the inspirational part of this post? while watching both tools evolve in time and pile up results as they happen I was hit by a thought. Wouldn’t it be nice to have something similar (real time or not) to see paths, campaigns and e-commerce evolve in time? I mean, part of the analysis that has to be done when reviewing metrics is picturing the evolution in time of such things, as well as possible ramifications. This usually takes some time, work and math to figure out. Besides part of a metric’s and analysis work is to provide data with visual clues for other people to understand what all those figures actually mean. And I believe the general direction of statistics programs is to make themselves more “human readable” in that sense. (I was shocked while transitioning from Surfaid to Omniture, both by the visual richness and speed of the latest).

I think the two big challenges metrics software vendors face this days is to find relevant metrics for an ever-increasing web 2.0 trend on the web and nice, understandable and hard to fake visual clues to present the data.

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