Was tired enough when I got home tonight that I wasn’t planning to post anything – as soon as I rested for a few, I realized I had to post about a lot of what I saw and heard over the last 3 or 4 days.

One of my twitter friends asked about a replacement for Google Analytics – I rattled off the usual suspects but he was looking for something else and it just so happened I read that Chartbeat is to Google Analytics as Blogs are to Print Newspapers on Both Sides of The Table blog.  I haven’t tried Heartbeat yet, but it’s not the first time I heard of it – but it’s the first time I heard the opinion of not liking Google Analytics (free) as the basic analytics tools most companies use in one form or another.

I guess it should come as no surprise the Majority of Top Media Destinations Are Social according to a study  co-sponsored by The Nielsen Company and  Ketchum called “2010 Social Media Matters Study“.  If you think about it (look at the chart below) …

if you add together blogs, user generated content, message boards and social networks you have as much if not more traffic (even with overlaps) than internet search using Google.  You’d think a lot more money should be moving into Social than has, so far.

According to Shannon Paul Most Online Metrics Won’t Show You Social Media Dark Matter which Shannon offers up some interesting thoughts about Lurkers being the Dark Matter of the Internet.

Most estimates conclude 1% of community members contribute content. I believe this percentage is higher when we think of sharing links and other social behaviors, but the majority are just searching and consuming.

But what would happen if everyone equally produced content?  We’d have a lot more content to wade through.

Meanwhile, a reader over at Crimson Hexagon took my postings about the Sentiment Analysis Symposium to heard and wrote this about me:

Indeed, a post by Marshall Sponder over at webmetricsguru.com makes the point that sentiment analysis is best done by people. At the Sentiment Analysis Symposium, he used several popular fully automated social media monitoring tools to study the conversation about Social Media Week, and obtained drastically different results from each tool.

The post cites some earlier research Crimson Hexagon did with Microsoft.  I think there is room for automated and human sentiment analysis to co-exist, by the way.  But as a an adjunct study Techcrunch  measures The Value Of Social Media Advertising and finds fault in the study.

I’d like to write more but my eyes are closing as I was at the #140conf and party tonight  – it’s late and tomorrow is another long one.  I’ll fill in the rest the dates another time.