AGOG

I guess in times of financial distress it’s quite fashionable to decry the excesses of the early years of the millennium and come up with a new way to market austerity. Lean startups, and now lean analytics seem to be all en vogue. Some of what the new thinkers are stating is just old common sense, but after years of startups that had no identifiable business model besides giving away their wares for free, I can see their point. I just giggle when I see the zeal with which the new prophets seem to be spreading the message, as if it were some type revelation. That perhaps is a uniquely American thing, the need to evangelize.

Admittedly, the time is right for starting small and moving quickly to rapidly prototype and deploy web sites and applications. The newly evolving infrastructure in the cloud combined with open source software enables a few people to achieve things that took an order of magnitude more effort just a decade ago. The notion of evolutionary software development isn’t particularly new. What is new is the attempt to institutionalize the paradigm.

I applaud that effort to change the paradigm of how we develop new software and people like Eric Ries with his last article about Vanity Metrics are making a good point. Naturally anyone can use numbers to fool themselves. But what’s new about that?

The same way the lean startup phenomenon is a reaction to the years of easy venture capital, lean analytics are a reaction to the mounds of data we’re drowning in. I understand the need to focus. The guys over at Watching Websites have done a great job pointing that out in one of their latest articles about Lean Analytics: Questions VCs Should Ask (and you’d better answer).

But do we need another buzzword? I say: Just Crush It!

I dream a lot. And they’re not always good dreams. Recently it’s been about those little buckets that we use to summarize data in our web analytics app. A few years ago they used to be big buckets, one for each day. Recently they’ve gotten a bit smaller, but we have more of them (24 to be exact). Now in my dream I suddenly see more and more, and I’m struggling to figure out exactly how many there are. I start counting, over and over again, but can’t quite grasp things. They keep coming at me, smaller and smaller ones still. They’re not buckets anymore either. Now they look more like little plastic pails, others are like glass jars, some with a lid, some without. And they’re in lots of different colors, too.

Every time I wake up from this dream, I go back to work and start wondering where all this talk about real-time analytics is going to take us. Google Analytics recently started presenting hourly data, so does that mean that independent analytics vendors now will start reporting by the minute. How about 5 minute slots? It’s the same magnitude as going from hours to days, sort-of? 12 slots for every hour. Or should we go right to 60 single minute slots. That way we could compare traffic on a minute by minute basis. One competitor is already doing 20 minute slots so we better hurry and catch up.

Not sure yet. I’ll have to dream about it some more.

I’ve been wanting to put together a new blog for awhile. I tend to want to make things perfect but can’t always find the time to invest. So both the Basic Math theme by Khoi Vinh and  Allan Cole as well as the open source font Titillium were just what I needed to get this site started. I prefer floating layouts, so I adjusted the theme accordingly.

I’m rather excited about the support for typography in the current set of browsers. @font-face really allows you to use any open source font on your website. I used the  kit you can dowload at Fontsquirrel to get started integrating the font into my CSS. Titillium still lacks some of the hinting and kerning that commercial fonts have, but I hope someone will invest the energy to make this a full fledged alternative to the current tired set of standard fonts we have to consume on the web.