Comments by Josh Cunningham Subscribe

On Tiponomics: Analytics for Waiters

Really enjoyed reading this. I worked briefly as a bartender and only began to understand the power of this off-the-cuff analysis. I would say that critical, analytical thinking is built-in for some people and beyond reach for others. Your friend's son clearly has this ability and I'd guess other good sales people have the same. Teaching this to someone, however, might be very difficult.

I would also venture to say that this is how most good analytics hypotheses are generated. You take an educated guess (I think making this "buy now" button bigger will increase conversions" or, more relevent, "I should spent more time and effort marketing to the 100 people that keep buying my service rather than the 10,000 who don't"), make changes or A/B test, and watch it come true. As I said before, I think some people are clued into this kind of thinking and others are not.

On

Image URL problem... everything should be fixed up now!

On

Hey Stephen... Flickr's 200 photo limit has been around since its inception, I believe, and is definitely outlined when you sign up. I'm not sure how they could offer unlimited storage forever for free and still remain a company.

From a different perspective, I like the idea of non-persistence of certain things. I don't need my photos online forever, I need them forever locally (backed up in the cloud... which I pay for). Personally, I think Twitter should do the same thing, dump tweets from the public sphere after a year. Why not?

Thanks for the post!

On

Checking out Clicktail Clicktale now, thanks Ben... always looking for ways to improve.

On Stunning Business Intelligence Visualizations… from 1830

"Chart showing the aggregate number of IDIOTS" They didn't mince words back then, did they?

Fascinating graphics, Timo, thanks for posting!

On What to store in our heads?

Good read, Stephen, thank you! Definitely a concept I've grappled with, more and more each day. The biggest aspect I have a problem with is how and what to save. I find myself wanting to save every link, blog post, and image but the value of most of it is fleeting and if I really needed it again, couldn't I Google it?

 

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Thanks for the comment Rama! KeePass is a great piece of software, might even be worth accessing it through virtualization. InstantBoss is great as well and I'd be surprised if you couldn't find something similar for the Mac.

On

Chris, I really like your thoughts on the matter but I wanted to add $0.02 about the term itself.

Barring misuse (and abuse), I think the term SEO perfectly explains what we're trying to do. You can create a basic website with no optimization and, lo and behold, you'll have a website that appears on page 20... for your exact business name... and nothing else. To get that site to perform well requires optimization. It's a critical step towards getting solid traffic but it's by no means necessary. Similar to site performance optimization. You can have a slow, un-findable site and still have a place to send people on your business card. 

With SEO comes content strategy, keyword research, and regular reviews of analytics data. This is part of a greater strategy that some people don't always make appropriate time for. You can optimize all day and night but if it's not part of a bigger effort, you're still going nowhere (while spending money/time to do so).

Optimization implies implies that it's an optional process... which it is!