I was reading Avinash Kaushik's post on The Great Web Capture Debate (logfiles vs. JavaScript tagging) when I noticed Avinash also did a great interview with Mike Moran of IBM (and one of my former bosses a couple of years back).  I'll focus on both posts here.

First off, I want to say that I read Kaushik's entire post on Web Capture using Google Reader on my SideKick 3 and I find I can process the content better on a small PDA like device….maybe it's just me.

I found out reasons to use JavaScript vs. logfile analysis, because I read Avinash Kaushik's Web Capture post, that I did not know about, like:

"….Increasingly we are heading towards doing a lot more measurement and customer experience analysis beyond just clickstream. Two great examples of this are experimentation and testing (especially multivariate testing) and personalization / behavior targeting. In both cases “add-on” solutions are tacked on to the website and testing / targeting happens. Often these solutions come with their own methods of collecting and analyzing data and measuring success…………………….."….Integrating with these add-on solutions (which often also use javascript tags and cookies and url identifiers) is significantly easier if you use javascript tags. It is easy to read cookies in web logs etc, but he pace at which you can integrate and the ease at which you can integrate is faster if you are using javascript tags."

I've tended to accept logfile analysis as a given with JavaScript (single pixels web beacon) as the improvement over logfile analysis but both work, more or less.  Avinash make it clear why you'd want to use one over the other and the need for a third way - something neither data collection method provides.

Ten Minutes With….. Mike Moran, IBM was a good read for me; currently I'm looking at Mike's manuscript, as yet unnamed, about Marketing.  If I were to pick a title - I'd call it "Marketing 2.0" (sorta after "Web 2.0").  Getting back to the interview, Avinash Kaushik focuses on Mike's 4 Patents.  

IBM, in general, really is rich in Patents and when I started at IBM 4 years ago, I was working in the IBM Hawthorne Research facility and there was a wall with all IBM's Patents (including, I'm sure, Mike's 4 Patents).  I can imagine that some of what makes search engines effective (to the extent they are effective) touches one of Mike Moran's Patents in some part of algorithm process.

Avanish focuses the interview with Mike Moran on SEO/SEM - but to me - Mike is much broader than Search Engine Optimization; his experience encompasses Personalization, which his team at IBM.com had a lot to do with architecting.  

A couple of months ago Mike left IBM.com to work for IBM Software Group managing OmniFind - IBM's Search Engine that works with WebSphere. Last week I wrote up OYE! (Vay?) -IBM-Yahoo Search Engine for Enterprise and Internet Search about the OmniFind OYE! edition that was just released.

Avinash's interview with Mike Moran worth a close read; and I'm glad that I know and worked for him (in fact, Mike was one of the 7 or 8 people who interviewed me initially to get into IBM in the first place).