I noticed a brilliant full moon tonight as I was walking home and found it was indeed called a “Super Full Moon” and happens only once every 18 years or so – it’s the point in the Moon’s orbit where the Earth and Moon are closest together, wish I had seen it just before sunset.

Well, I have an iPAD 1, but now the iPAD 2 came out people are wondering if it’s worth upgrading.  When I replaced my iPhone 3GS with the iPhone4, I didn’t expect it would be much of an improvement, but it was, because it added new features like an extra camera that I use a lot with Skype.   The same could be said about the iPAD 2, but if you’re looking for sheer processing power, the differences aren’t enough to buy one, though no doubt, with applications being optimized for the iPAD 2, the differences between old and new will be more significant.

But that gets me going on one point – optimization.   After all, it’s one thing to have a good idea or piece of hardware/software, another to optimize the use of it, and we just come up with something new, if we end up using it the same old way, there will be little difference, as the video above, showed, and we can apply that idea to a lot of other things beyond the iPAD and stretching my imagination, can think of many instances where an idea or product might be great, but all the surrounding things around it didn’t change, muting any improvements that might take place (and somethings making things worse).

And this week a new version of Google Analytics was released, and this was rumored a week or two ago in various Web Analytics boards that I read.  Here’s a video of some of the new features – there aren’t yet too many examples of the new features and this video is the best I found so far.

Most of the new Google Analytics features focus on usability, unlocking more of the power inherit in the platform and presenting it a more streamlined and quicker way – I don’t see anything earth shattering or game changing here – but it is interesting to see word clouds appear in Analytics; it’s another sign that Web Analytics and Social Media Analytics are merging.     Sure, word clouds and tag clouds are nothing new – but they almost never appear in site analytics … till now.

And EMetrics San Francisco took place this week – as usual, I didn’t attend; the last EMetrics I went to was in October of 2008 in Washington DC, but the conference continues to innovate and I expect when my book is published I may end up being at EMetrics again, at some point.   I certainly have many friends who attend it including Gary Angel of Semphonic.com who wrote a great post about Sentiment Analysis (along the lines of what is in the book); here’s some of what Gary Angel said that struck home with me:

What’s the right way to start using Social Data?
As impactful as Social Media Dashboarding and the integration of Social Data into Scorecards is, it isn’t necessarily the right first step. In Web Analytics, almost every organization does reporting before analysis. In Social Media, they should do it the other way around. Why?

It’s pretty simple really. It takes time and effort to get comfortable with Social Media data collection, culling and classification. The best way to really understand your data is to analyze it in-depth. Dashboards and reports don’t do that – and they tend to leave serious problems in the data buried and undetected. With the Web Analytics vendors, a reasonable job in implementation will get you a pretty clean and understandable data stream. That’s just not true in Social Media.

Companies need to walk before they can run. In Web analytics that means reporting before analysis, but in Social Media it’s just the opposite.

I interviewed Gary for my book and got him to go into more depth about the uses of Social data, how long it takes to prepare it and there’s an excellent case study that no one has seen yet which illustrates a successful implementation of social listening with 10  disparate data sources.   I also agree with Gary that it is too early for agencies to standardize on one platform or tool:

….Tools are a big decision and big pain point for Social Media analysis. One of the most important points I’d make here is that organizations don’t need to (and probably shouldn’t) standardize on a single tool. The market is too nascent and the functional requirements too distinct to make it likely that one tool will meet all your needs.

And talking about mobile devices, AOL TechCrunch has a thought-provoking post about under counting that is going on with mobile ads on the iPhone platform, see  Study: Mobile Ad-Tracking Systems Are “Blind” To 80 Percent Of Apple IOS Devices.

There was also rumors that Google is launching a new product called Google Social Circles – but Google has denied it. However, given who is involved in the rumors, it’s hard for me to believe Google here; more likely the news was leaked too earlier and PR is trying to mitigate the damage.

The service has been developed with extensive participation by Chris Messina, the co-creator of numerous successful social and software phenomena online, from BarCamp to Hashtags and much more. Messina declined to comment for this story. Jonathan Sposato, CEO of the photo editing service Piknik that Google acquired last year, is working on Circles as well. Sposato may be the only entrepreneur to have sold not one but two startups to Google – having founded Phatbits, a service that was acquired by Google in 2005 and became Google Gadgets. These are heavy hitting tech leaders and the service should be very interesting.

It’s one thing to say a platform is coming out, quite another to tack a few well-known influentials to it and hard for me to imagine the whole thing is made up.

There’s also unofficial news that Eric Schmidt of Google (who is stepping down as CEO) has been nominated for the new Secretary of Commerce position by President Obama; that doesn’t surprise me as he was widely looked at to run the technology of the US Government when Obama ran for his first term in 2008.  I think it’s a good choice to pick Eric Schmidt and is illustrative of another point I make in my book that technology and the means to deliver it are now so bound with the messaging and ways we do things that it no longer is possible to separate them.  In order to succeed now you need to master both technology and business, both the idea and it’s execution – not by separate teams, but in fact, by the same team and often, it ends up falling to the same individual to merge them.

And by the way, Digg is dead, according to AOL TechCrunch’s Sarah Lacy… RIP Digg. That news doesn’t surprise me as I have heard less and less about Digg, it’s as if they have faded out of awareness.   Digg was about community, but to me they lost  credibility when it became obvious that Digg could be rigged.   But I think what really might have done Digg in is the fact people moved on to something else, and Digg didn’t.

It’s pretty clear that Digg is on that path. The company isn’t dead, but it’s been fading away for a while, and its soul is all but gone. The company can spin it however it wants– the final nail in the coffin is news that founder Kevin Rose– long Digg’s greatest asset– is leaving.

It seems to me that to remain successful and relevant means to evolve and perhaps, change into something else (you have to keep raising the bar because your audience is evolving and they are constantly asking for more); and it’s always dangerous to have a company too closely associated with a single valued asset.  If Kevin Rose really is the spirit of Digg, well, Digg is probably done.