Trying to catch up on all the good stuff I noted recently – writing about helps affix it somehow, making it easier to refer back and study it more, later.   Read about AVC (Fred Wilson) rant on Unique Visitors last week where a study by Scout Analytic s was cited.

“…”reliable cookie” overstates user counts 2 to 4 times. That’s right, if your analytics software uses cookies, it is possible that your unique visitor counts are 2 to 4 times too high.”

That means your Omniture/WebTrends/Coremetrics/Google Analytics website unique visitor count might not be what you thought it was.  What was even more controversial was the use of biometric signatures …

.. biometric signature identified unique users through an individual’s typing pattern to eliminate errors in user counting such as account-sharing.

In other words, Scout Analytics (not to be confused with Scout Labs, who I am also writing about) can figure out who you are based on what you do (how you behave).

That thought about tracking ties into a post I read today by Eric T. Peterson of Web Analytics Demystified fame who wrote about BeenCounter – Know Where Your Visitors Have Been: beencounter - what a fantastic post and great that Eric shared this information about BeenCounter with us.  BeenCounter sounds like it does much what Tealium claims to do -

“…All you have to do is provide beencounter a list of URLs that you want to watch out for and they do the rest.  What’s more is they provide an easy-to-use API so that you can actually query the visitor’s browser in real-time and see if they have been to a site or group of sites.”

That’s right – if you have a list of sites or pages you’d like to know if visitors saw at some point before visiting your site, beencounter is for you.

Built around a single line Javascript tag, beencounter basically gives you access to your site visitor’s browser history files.

And while they cannot tell you all the places your visitors have been, by providing the service with a list of URLs, beencounter can tell you whether your site visitors have been to those URLs sometime in the past.

Here you can see the results for Web Analytics Demystified over a few weeks:

I went to beencounter.com and created a free account which allows me to track if visitors to Webmetricsguru.com have been to up to three sites or pages that I choose – will be curious to see what the results are and will write about them in a few weeks (see below):

And while we’re at it – with Visitor Tracking and Biometrics Tracking there’s also Newsroom tracking …. AKA Web Analytics is building the Newsroom of the Future a post written by my friend Dennis R. Mortensen who is VP of Analytics at Yahoo! which actually harkens back to an article in BusinessWeek today:

BusinessWeek has a truly exciting front page story today (February 21, 2010). Especially for somebody like me who repeatedly and openly declared an obsession with the state of News Media and in particular how Data and Analytics, in that regard, can help publishers increase their current performance.

BusinessWeek: AOL Moves to Build Tech `Newsroom of the Future’

What’s really interesting about this wasn’t just the Web Analytics part in tracking and perhaps building the future of media – as much as my own exposure to the future of Journalism when I visited the Huffington Post last week to meet with my friends at Adaptive Semantics who now monitor and moderate (with Semantic Analysis) all of the Huffington Post’s comments.

What Adaptive Semantics is doing with Huff Po is far more advanced than the Web Analytics tracking   BusinessWeek mentioned in their article.  When I have a chance sometime soon, I’ll write a nice, long post sharing what I saw at Huffington Post and what I think about it all … but not today.

Moving on to the next point – the sacrilegious search results from Google Images that made my morning ride more interesting ….  Wha?  Google the Sinner (wouldn’t be the first time) …

Here is a picture:

That’s right – Google Ranks “Piss Christ” #1 For Chris Image Search - I guess certain words help your Google Rankings  …. hmmm..  I’m sure Google didn’t mean it … or did they?

Note content with being a “sinner” Google livened up today even more with the release of its new adserver – see  Google’s New Ad Server Goes After the Little Guy -  in ReadWriteWeb where it’s said that ….

Google knows you. It knows what type of car you drive from that time, last year, when you looked up the where you could find a cheap set of tires. It knows that you like Mexican food from all the times you’ve looked on Google Maps. And Google knows how to leverage this type of information with services like Google AdWords, AdSense, and DoubleClick Ad Exchange but now it’s moving into what it’s calling “the next generation of ad serving” – a simplified, streamlined ad server.

Sounds an awful lot like the post on “I’ve been saying this is coming” – Big Brother & Google’s Entrance into Social Media Monitoring – from MyCustomer.com that appeared a few weeks ago – maybe DFP is Part Deux, of after the fact – I mean, Google knows pretty much everything about you already … but they wanted an a better adserver to make sure they served you the best ads that make advertisers the most money (which makes Google the most money).

Note to myself:   if  DFP  boils down to advertisers teaching me about stuff I want to see, when I want to see it, I have no problem with it.

Not sure if it’s that simple – but we might as well own up to Google knowing a lot more about us than we might be comfortable with.  But, meanwhile, having “sinned” with the Google Images (above) and with it’s “Big Brother” Ad Server,  Google Distances it’s Buzz From Facebook, Twitter by denying Buzz was ever intended to compete on Facebook or Twitter   ….

Notes to myself: and maybe that’s Buzz’s real purpose is  to create so much new messaging and content that it drowns out Facebook and Twitter – after all, how much can one pay attention to one’s tweets when one is being overwhelmed with Google’s messaging via Buzz.

While I think all the stuff I just shared with you is the most important things I’ve read lately – TechCrunch thinks otherwise … in fact the biggest piece of news today was Twitter Hits 50 Million Tweets Per Day.

… Twitter is now processing 50 million Tweets a day, which comes to about 1.5 billion Tweets a month. Royal Pingdom recently reported that Twitter passed one billion Tweets a month last December and measured about 1.2 billion in January. On a daily basis, Royal Pindom was measuring 27 million Tweets a day back in November, 2009. But the latest data comes from Twitter itself (after attempting to strip out spam Tweets).

Yeah .. take that … Google.   I mean, Google is flooding us with Buzzing messages via Gmail that even dwarf  the 50 million tweets a day – but then, I’m sure Google has a plan to monetize everything.  I’m just wondering it it gets to a point that we have so much “input” that we just “shut down” – that we get too much information and we end up being paralyzed by it.   The most important thing is not how much information we get, but if we’re getting good information (the right information).

And that reminds me – I was just having a conversation today on advertiser research where Comscore came to mind (I worked alot with Comscore MyMetrix when I was at Monster.com) and was excited to hear that comScore Launched Platform To Help Publishers Optimize Ads allowing publishers to provide advertisers and media planners with the ability to reach their most valuable audiences.

In a way Comscore’s new comScore Audience Advantage platform plays into Google’s new AdServer as both are trying to help identify who is going to be most receptive to the messaging being sent out.   How does it do it?

comScore Audience Advantage uses proprietary audience scoring algorithms to determine optimal audiences for advertisers using predictive variables as inputs.

These variables come from a variety of observable behaviors online as measured via comScore’s opt-in research panel, including site visitation, search activity, video views, advertising engagements, online purchases or any other number of behaviors that may relevant to an advertiser.

The Audience Advantage platform does use cookies to create it s predictive algorithms.

Instead, they are using the actual observed behavior and characteristics of the opt-in comScore panelists. comScore says its platform can also use third-party databases that are integrated with its research panel to provide anonymous offline purchase behavior as another important predictive input to these algorithms.

I will say that I think there is a place for this in PR - but most people are not thinking that way yet.   This reminds me of a post I wrote  in 2008 about Brand Virility – new measure of Brand Relevence? Nielsen thinks so where  Nielsen BrandPulse to Find hyperlinks that go to from blogs to NYT.  The links to the NYT were aggregated  into sections then looked at based on generalized behaviors as part of  a New York Times Brand Influence Project.

The study found out  people who advertise in the New York Times are 5 times more likely to talk about Luxury Brand “x” than the general public (graph shown); NYT thinks that advertising there is effective, based on the chart shown and highlight this kind of measurement as a way to look at how you could do this.

What comScore Audience Advantage platform is attempting to do, I think, is come to the same information, but in a different way, using panel data and it’s audience observed behaviors and drawing on predictive analysis.

So, for a particular advertiser and a particular message there may be optimum places (publisher placements) where the messaging could appear – and the process of learning what that could be is what, I think, comScore Audience Advantage platform offers.

On the other side of it  Google’s DFP is trying to do is deliver the right advertising to the right “cookie value” (if I understand this right) – at the end – we’re just trying to get the right people to see what they want at the right time – and if it were only as simple as that … the world would be a better place.

But just when we have the the world figured out – Jeff Jarvis comes in the room and offers us his “world view” of information to get us all confused again – more maybe, see the world of information in a newer and better way (see below):

Right now I’m not sure how I feel about Jeff Jarvis’s world view of information and influence – but it’s interesting to note how many circles of influence overlap and intersect.   I think Jeff is trying hard to figure out how the world of “new media” works and this is what he makes of it at this time.

Finally, I’m ending this post on a high note with the Dali Lama – yes, the Dalai Lama Joins Twitter – This Time It’s Verified

And by the way, I’ll be posting to the Web Analytics RockStars blog in a few days – as part of IQ Workforce’s sponsorship of my blog.

One more thing – Sentiment Analysis Symposium Announces Agenda and Speakers for Inaugural Event in April, 2010 …..

“The symposium will provide an unmatched opportunity to learn about sentiment technologies: the range of solutions, how they’re applied, performance standards and ROI, and how to select the right provider,” according to Grimes, who is conference chair. “I’m especially looking forward to an on-stage conversation with Nathan Gilliatt and Marshall Sponder about ‘Selecting a Social Media Analysis Platform/Provider,‘.” Nathan Gilliatt is founder and principal at Social Target. Marshall Sponder is a social media and Web analyst with webmetricsguru.com.

Ha …. I’m smiling and grinning.