Who puts raisins in coffee cake?
Seriously. Raisins suck. Ruining my nice breakfast.
Dear Leader Rocks Me ... Again
Pretty much everytime I go to a Dear Leader show, I leave happy. Last night at the Paradise was no different. The guys just put on a good show. It's the right mix of new stuff, old stuff, and "famous" stuff (since DL really only have one hit, and it's just a local one). They're just a fun band to watch, and they've got their stuff so tight now that you just notice how much they're in sync and play off each other. Definitely worth checking out whenever you get the chance. And, as always, they brought the house down with the live, full version of "A Nation Once Again", a song that really needs to get the full studio treatment.
Opening bands The Douglas Fir and Taxpayer were both quite good as well. The Douglas Fir I had never heard before, and they're a nifty little pop band that sounds vaguely Cure-ish or Smiths-ish. Taxpayer is a band I have seen before, and last time I liked them, but wasn't enamored. This time they blew me away. They sound like a poppier Interpol. Damn good stuff; I'll probably pick it up at Newbury Comics in the next couple of days.
Why Google Analytics is Free
A couple of days back, I wrote about my first impression of Google Analytics and how it was a typical Google clusterf*** launch. Obviously, I was just one of a billion voices talking about the launch of GA and the troubles getting it to work, but having used it for a couple of days, it's pretty darn good (as expected, since it's just Urchin). Of course, for some reason, it doesn't seem to like me putting it on the blog. I'll figure that out later.
So, after a couple of days of thinking and arguing with people about why it's free (I'll explain), if it'll stay free (yes), and if it's going to make life hard for other web analytics businesses (yes, especially those that are priced ridiculously, like WebTrends), I think I've hit on why Google did Google Analytics. It's not groundbreaking, but it's logical: it's to serve the Google advertising market.
Google's been working on the ability to advertise on specific sites. Is there a better, more accurate way to judge a site's popularity, and what search terms actually lead to some sort of transaction/acquisition than via direct logging of it? Think of it this way: previously, Google could tell that you searched for something and went to a site, but couldn't tell anything beyond that, unless the client had installed the AdSense code to phone home to Google. But if it was a normal search term, and not search advertising? Google's blind to what the web visitor does after clicking the search link.
But ... what if that site has Google Analytics installed? Now Google knows what search term got you there (regardless of what engine you came from), and then where you went on the site. Did you go to a product page? Did you buy something? Did you abandon the site on the next page? Sure, it's a bit scary, but it's all data that's freely available to the website/web host. It's not like you had complete anonymity before (unless you were browsing with cookies off, and through a proxy, etc.)
Besides, it's not about you. It's about your clicks. In the long run, Google doesn't care who you are (though, eventually, the demographics might matter). Right now, they just want to tell a big advertiser "hey, looking to advertise your product, well, these five sites have the largest stickyness for people doing that search query across all engines, with 10% of them going on to purchase a product. We'll put your ad on those sites for a nominal fee, and we'll both get rich."
That's why it's free. Google Analytics is the Neilsen ratings of the web. Even moreso than the real Neilsen ratings. It'll be more accurate, more reliable, and, for Google, a huge competitive advantage over Microsoft and Yahoo! Google's going to give you a valuable service in exchange for your data. MS and Y! will have to figure out a way to capture similar data and give the published a bigger chunk of the revenue.
The rest of us get a handly web analytics tool to muck around with until Google goes out of business.
Dear Leader - Tomorrow Night
Woo hoo. I'm quite excited.
Once again, I'll be checking out Dear Leader, this time live from the Paradise. Aaron Perrino's new band is quite good. You should come see them too.
Google Analytics -- How to Blow a First Impression
Over the weekend, word leaked out that Google was launching a free web analytics package. This was pretty cool news. If you've ever messed around with a web analytics product (WebTrends, ClickTracks, even Site Meter), you know you can get some handy information beyond just "5 people visited my site yesterday." At my last job, I spent a whole lot of my time using ClickTracks to do log analysis to try to determine how effective search campaigns were, if landing pages for marketing materials were working well, where people were falling out of the site when trying to sign up for one of the products they sold.
Now that I've moved on to my new job, I'm looking at web analytics from a different perspective -- trying to figure out how to deliver it to our customers. We've been looking at a couple of alternatives, to move beyond the standard "here are your logs, we'll run Webalizer for you, or you can do something yourself." When I heard about Google Analytics, I made a note to check it on Monday.
Monday rolls around and Google puts out the official announcement of Google Analytics. I get there early Monday morning and the site is swamped and barely responsive. Hmm. How can you underestimate demand for a free web product aimed at web users? I was able to get through and sign up to track some sites, and I threw the little bit of Javascript onto a couple of pages (not here, however; I want to give Google some time to settle down before I try tracking anything more substantive than a single page). It said to expect results in 12 hours.
12 hours later? Nada.
24 hours later? Nada.
36 hours later? Nada.
48 hours later? Holy crap, it works.
2 days to start returning statistics for something that launched on Monday. All the while, not a peep from Google, who have this bizarre affinity for not commenting when things aren't going well. You'd think they'd follow up on the GoogleBlog with a "Hey, we really underestimated demand, so we're adding servers as fast as we can. Expect it to be ready on Wednesday." Then I wouldn't have kept checking in and wondering why I should even consider using it.
Now, of course, why complain about something that's free? Well, because it's not free. Google is giving me a product in exchange for my data, which they use to grow their massive revenue. Gmail is free, and in exchange, they put ads next to my mail. The search engine is free, and in exchange, they put ads next to my search results. My former blog home of Blogger is free, and in exchange, they get a place to put more ads. See where I'm going? None of it is free. Google is making billions from people's data. So it is not too much to expect them to get something right the first time. And why does blowing the first impression matter? Because right now, I'm helping to decide if we're going to point thousands of customers to Google for advanced analytics. Thousands of customers = lots of data for Google to gain more revenue from. Just because they launch these "free" web apps doesn't mean that they don't lose potential revenue when they have such awful launches (see Google Groups, Google Reader, Google Mail).
In the end, it looks like it's a pretty damn solid product. It's got all your normal metrics, in a handy interface (a good use of Flash, for a change). It seems to track everything you'd normally want to track, and the only downside is that you're sending your data out to Google. That could be a bit scary for companies who are doing eCommerce and what not (though they wouldn't have
to put the Javascript snippet on that page). For me, it's a minor haggle to get good web metrics, something I'll probably pay more attention to when I've finally built out the site a bit more.
ALIVE!!!!!
Finally.
I'm finally back up and running. Got around to getting my domain setup, setting up Wordpress, mucking with some themes (currently running Almost Spring, which I'm soon to tweak. Got the Netflix queue up and loaded on the right. Links coming soon too.
Now that I'm on my own platform, I can do a lot more stuff. Whether I will or not .. that remains to be seen. But I think I will.
Jobby Job
Things have been hectic since I actually got me employment. 1 week down: so far, so good. Still getting the hang of things, learning, but I think it'll work out.
Working on some stuff on the back end (getting web hosting/domain name/maybe moving to WordPress), so probably infrequent updates for a bit.
Oh, the new Harvey Danger album is good.
iTunes v5.0 Redux
I ended up spending a few hours yesterday cleaning up my iTunes library. Basically, when I first starting using iTunes (a couple of years ago), I didn't want it to control which songs it would sync to my iPod. I wanted control over that.
A couple of years pass and now my two libraries (the iPod and iTunes) are out of sync. When you manually update, iTunes doesn't bring play counts and last played data back from the iPod, so you lose some of the cool smart playlist abilities. It's bugged me for a while, almost to the point of writing a Perl script to update the data myself each time the iPod sync'd.
Instead, I figured I'd just spend some time merging my libraries. I started with CopyPod, which lets you merge your iPod library (play counts, ratings, etc.) back into iTunes. This, however, left me with an entire duplicate library. Thankfully, I could just sort by date added. Boom, dumped all the duplicates, leaving myself with a merged library.
How to control what songs sync to my iPod? I created a playlist called iPod Songs. This playlist contains all of the songs I want sync'd out to my iPod. Now, if I want to make a smart playlist that will work on my iPod, I just make sure it includes a criteria that the song exists on the iPod Songs playlist. Surprisingly, it works really well.
Finally, I figured I'd add album art in to iTunes. Found this nice app that will do it automagically by going out to Amazon and downloading the album art. It made a few mistakes, but 30 minutes of work cleaned that up.
So now I've got a single library, with both my normal iPod and my iPod Shuffle updating play counts. Now I can start adding some older CDs in and building out one big library, which was the plan all along.
The point: iTunes made all of this a pain, but once you get things working sort of the way iTunes likes it, it's a really good application. I'm a much bigger fan of the new interface and some of the abilities it has (playlist folders, particularly).
iTunes 5.0
iTunes 5.0 is out. It's got a slightly new interface, which I like.
It's packaged with Bonjour (for the PC). Apple never asked if I wanted this installed or running. They just install it and launch it without asking. That's not very nice. I don't think this was the case in older versions of iTunes, but I could be crazy.
It's still missing the big feature I need -- the ability to sync ratings and play counts back to the library from the iPod when using manual sync. It astounds me that it still doesn't have this. Bleh.
Otherwise, seems like a pretty minor upgrade. Not sure why it gets to be called 5.0. This is really like 4.95.
Music I've Been Digging
Since I've become jobless (hopefully ending soon), I've been listening to a ton more music. And spending a lot more money on music, which is counterintuitive, but whatever, I get bored.
So, here's some cool songs I've been listening to. This way you can be assured I'm a wannabe indie hipster minus any bone in my body being hip.
stellastarr* - Sweet Troubled Soul
It's the first single off stellastarr*'s (yes, that looks awfully weird) second album. It rocks. Their first album is one of my favorite albums of recent years and they rock live, so it's almost a given I'd like this song. But then it kicks so much more ass. All hard driving, while still showing the new wave-y influences. Awesome.
The New Pornographers - Sing Me Spanish Techno
One of the tracks of Carl Newman's newest pop masterpiece. It's just infectious. Between Carl Newman and Adam Schlesinger/Chris Collingwood, it's a wonderful time to be a fan of the pop music. Speaking of Fountains of Wayne ...
Fountains of Wayne - I'll Do the Driving
It's an older song that's gotten it's first release on the recent 2 CD set. It's pure FoW power pop with a huge hook, jangly guitars, and clever lyrics. I dig.
Hall & Oates - She's Gone
I'm so not even kidding. Saw a really good cover band at the Burren in Davis Sq. a couple of weeks back and they covered this, and I remembered how much I loved the Oates, so I grabbed the song from iTunes. Honestly, is it possible to not love this song? Really, is it possible?
The Decemberists - The Engine Driver
I don't think there's a song on the new Decemberists' album that's as good as 90% of the stuff off of "Castaways and Cutouts", but this is the closest, I think.
Ambulance, LTD - Stay Where You Are
It's a couple of years old now, but this song ages well. Soooo good.
Aaron Perrino - Every Year
I went and saw Aaron Perrino play a solo show a couple of months back and his solo version of his old band's "Every Year" was just plain awesome. His new band plays some shows at the start of September and I won't miss them.
I haven't heard any hip hop in the past few weeks that has blown my mind. I'm not a huge Kanye West fan, so I'm thinking the next time I hear a track that catches my ear it'll probably be off of the DJ DangerMouse/MF Doom/Adult Swim collaboration.