Avinash Kaushik has a couple new Podcasts at the Web Analytics Association on measuring Rich Media Applications (Flash, AJAX, etc).  Among the points Avinash makes:

1. Preplanning: Unlike other things for this area you need to do a lot of pre-planning and make sure your code is included in the rich experience before you get started. On web pages we can recover and tag later etc. In this area it is very hard to do so set a lot of time for planning.
2. Integration of data, hyper important because A) you can’t measure in a silo (so you need to know what the differences are in outcomes based on where different segments of people come from or based on offers or what they might have seen before or after the experience) B) you want to know what people “think”, so in our case it is important to integrate into mechanisms such as website surveys.
3. Testing, testing, testing, testing. You are ready for rich experiences, but are your customers ready? I have a great example of this in the podcast above. Failing faster is a awesome recipe for long term success. 

I have been measuring Rich Media and Podcasts and it's a lot of work….. and there's no clean way to do it.  One thing I do notice….stuff is published without much or any testing and then detailed metrics are expected ….not so easy to deliver when there's been little testing.

Micro Persuasion points out, rightly, Yahoo! has been sending very mixed messages about RSS feeds.  I moved over to Google Reader last month because MyYahoo! would not export my RSS Feeds.  Everyone else does support that – except Yahoo.  Why?  They're just in it for the money – eyeballs.

And now we're coming to the issue of what RSS does …… it allows me, and any other subscriber to view content in the way (and place) I want it …… which might well be in a feed reader that's not on one of Yahoo's sites. 

No "eyeballs" …. no washy…     I guess Yahoo really is just about making money …. they want you to go to their properties and stay – for a long time …

So….with that goal in mind….. to quote Steve Rubel …."..In the past few weeks Yahoo has rolled out three major new web sites – Yahoo! Food, Yahoo! Advertising and Yahoo! TV. They're great sites, but none of them has feeds. There's a reason why – eyeballs."

"….My gut feeling is that Yahoo is trying to create content that you can only get on their sites and nowhere else. It's all very Lloyd Braun. They want consumers spending as much time as possible on their properties. If they put RSS feeds on these sites, it will mean fewer page views because people will only click in on content that they really care about. In other words, it means less time spent. Browsing and clicking creates page views. By skipping RSS, they will serve up more ads.

Could this be the beginning of a larger trend?"

Yes, but not for most sites …… just some publishers.   And you have to wonder if Yahoo is going against the trend…….everything is going away from going to the the site ….since you can get most of it in the RSS Reader – or whatever your using.

However, reading content in an RSS reader also presents Web Metrics issues – as it's hard, with Caching done by the Internet Providers and perhaps, by the Search Engines, to know exactly how much your content is being consumed.  

At least, when people came to your site directly – you got eyeballs AND stats …you knew how many people were on the site, more or less, and what they're doing.   Now…..it's much harder since a lot of the activity is happening in the RSS Reader.  In other words, the revenue models in place don't really deal with content that's consumed off your site – that you can't measure.

And yes, there's workarounds, like putting ads in the RSS feeds, but it's not universally adopted and many people don't want to see or deal with Ads in their RSS Feed Reader – I see them in Google Reader a lot …but I'd never click on them.

Visual Search Engines sound like they should be fun, should work better than textual based search (Google/Yahoo/MSN) but most people don't search using Kartoo or any of the number of variants out there – because the pictures don't add much value.

John Battelle mentioned a new search engine, PageBull, that actually is fun to use. It's one thing to go to each page, one by one, and look at them – it's quite another thing to the top pages about a subject next to each other with the keywords highlighted.

Lets' see what we can learn about People.

Avinash Kaushik - people talk about Avinash more than he does himself …..as the pictures show.

Amy Crehore -  Can see a lot about Amy's paintings and who she's illustrated for as well as pictures of her.

Fred Stonehouse - Look at the different "Fred Stonehouse's" out there – there's some noise but it's an interesting comparison.  Doing a search on Fred Stonehouse Painting shows two versions of my interview with in in ArtNewYorkCity.com

Brice Marden's work and life are much easier to see with PageBull than Google.

And Joe Coleman's paintings and life are a lot easier to take in visual – in this format – than textually.

What about Subjects such as Blu Ray Disks?   Just found out there is now a 100GB Blue Ray Disk when last I heard, the capacity was 20-20 GB (replacing today's DVD's).

Otto Dix - I saw a lot of his work at the Met recently in the Verist painting ( Verism – German Portraits from the 1920s @ Metropolitan Museum of Art ) show that's currently up and wrote about it on ArtNewYorkCity.com   I did a search on Verist Art which actually produced some good results (but some noise too).

And what about Political Figures like George W. Bush?  You can kinda see that with all the positive stuff – result number 4 is a "Bush Watch" site.

Will be using PageBull a lot more.