Avinash Kaushik has another great post on how to approach web analytics that just Wow'd me, make you want to think.
You need to read Avinash's post yourself - I'm not going to rehash it here. However, I did respond on his blog, that if you have two sides of a triangle, you should be able to deduce the third part from your data. If we're using Trinity (a triangle) as the model of web analysis experience - get any two points of the triangle and the third should more, or less, come into view. I gave a couple of examples in my post on Avinash's blog, Occam's Razor.
By the way, Avinash Kaushik's strong focus on customer segmentation has actually influenced my art, which is, by the way, part of my own personal Trinity. In My Segmented Life - Self Portrait on my ArtNYC blog, I put a self portrait of myself with the traffic of my life "segmented" which was inspired by ClickTrack's visitor segmentation charts (see below).
It's more of a "concept" painting than a finished work (whatever "finished" means) a large 3 feet by 5 feet acrylic painting I did in 4 hours.
I tried to think about how you segment your life, just as Avinash Kaushik segmented the process of Web Analytics into Trinity. 'We use web analytics tools to try to segment, as best we can, traffic by Industry, by Domain, by type of traffic, by Search Engines, By XML Traffic, by all sorts of things. To the extent we can do that, we can answer many questions and make order and meaning where there was chaos.
But to some extent, all of life is a "construct" and what it all "means" is mediated by how it's organized and segmented. That's what my painting was about - how to organize life and represent it in a painting. It's an age old question and my mind goes back to the ancient Chinese monastic murals, some of which I saw at the Metropolitan Museum years and years ago. You can also look at the Mandala as a segmentation diagram. In fact, segmentation, as it is presently understood, is really about drawing a map of web site traffic.
Enough for tonight - time for bed. It's going to be a long day and I hope to spend a lot of it painting and viewing art.
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