The older tracking code urchin.js will still continue to work for at least another year but there will be no feature updates or compatibility with the newer features. For me , this change means revisiting lots ( and I mean lots ) of pages where I have embedded the tracking code. Lets hope it goes smoothly.

Of some of the metrics that I found interesting apart from interestingness , entry points, exits , pageviews , timespent etc I liked the bounce rate very much. Yes bounce rate is the most amazing metric when it comes to the web.

  In a nutshell bounce rate measures the percentage of people who come to your website and leave “instantly”. – Avinash Kaushik

Sites with good content have very low bounce rates, that coz users stay on the site for longer than just their immediate need. This metric is extremely important to consider as it could lead to some startling discoveries. Bounce rates directly translate to your site’s usability and design. A complicated design often confuses a user and he or she tends to leave a site if the site seems too cluttered ( which is why I hate GoDaddy’s design ). A blank design with no navigational links is also bad. Once the user finishes reading what he/she came to read, you need to coax them to stay longer. Either by giving them sneak peaks of other related articles or any abstract writeup, tags, internal links and so on. For bloggers, please do read this article to make a list of things to lookout for when picking your blogs design.

The new interface has also removed the rough edges the application had in terms of usability and have done a tremendous job on the personalization front. Its worth a look.  If you liked the older interface better, then thats on the offering too, just a link away, but the new beta homepage is worth the effort.

claim 1:  An apparatus for determining an interestingness rank for at least one media object, comprising: logic for accepting at least one metadatum concerning the at least one media object from at least one user; and logic for ranking the at least one media object based at least in part on the quantity of user-entered metadata concerning the at least one media object.

The apparatus of claim 1, wherein the user-entered metadata comprises a member of the group consisting of: tags, comments and annotations.

Well there are new web metrics being rolled out almost everyday and its only time, at least some of them, become mainstream. One of the strong contenders I feel is the interestingness metric. Based on the number of bookmarks, clicks , click throughs, views, tags, annotations, visits, visit length and many many more factors interestingness can be defined, although this may not be Flickr’s definition. Any piece of information like a music piece , a podcast, a blogpost, a video clip,  a picture  etc can be associated with interestingness – It simply gives the most popular item amongst a list of inventory. These items can also possess geographical information, time line and other information that can be used to extract essential patterns from these items.

The usage, could be a phenomenon on its own. Define a properly ranked algorithm and you could have your top selling items on your e commerce site. You could target geographically distributed audience with content of their choice and also give interesting timeline applications that let you see trends over time. Say for example you run a shopping portal, you could give a time line graph highlighting your most sold items over a period of time. This could also prove a big step in the analytics area where ROI and conversion from visitors to buyers play a significant role in everyday business and concepts like these could really boost your sales. Its still unsolved from a very broad sense, meaning there isn’t a standard set of practices to encompass such a wide variety of data and there isnt such capable systems that could mine patterns out of these collations. But its definitely interesting

All said and done, analysis of boring looking tabular reports have become passe’ , its the age of cool tools that make reports more fun. Some of my recent favorites have been Google Analytics, with its flash enabled reports and also some really neat functionality built in cleverly into deceptive looking graphics. I was also excited when i looked at Crystal’s Xcelsius and its slick new outlook. My most recent fun tool is definitely Gapminder, recently acquired by Google for its really awesome looking interface. Take a look at this report and see for yourself how reports can be fun

some screenshots :