The Voice of Web Analytics Thought Leaders
iPerceptions is known for their voice of customer and satisfaction intelligence flagship product and 4Q satisfaction polling tool. They had the brilliant idea to use their open text analysis capabilities to look at the posts of 30 of the thought leaders in the web analytics industry. They don't state who are those 30, but names like Kaushik, Sterne, Jasra, and Thomas should ring a bell... and Hamel too, since I got an email from Sarah-Jane Morris, Marketing Manager at iPerceptions:"Using our proprietary text analysis algorithm, our researchers have quantified the top themes and the dominant concepts that 30 of the leading lights in the web analytics community are blogging about. One of those leading lights is your blog. :)"
Themes and Concepts
The approach reminds me of the research project called Swammer I talked about more than a year ago: leverage the amazing richness of the web content to extract what would typically require human interpretation: themes, concepts, and with Swammer, feelings and emotions. For that mather, if you are interested about the feelings and emotions emanating from blog posts, check out WeFeelFine.org, it's really cool.Not surprisingly, the first themes and concepts that comes out largely revolve around websites, analytics and visits. Then metrics, convert, track, navigate, interesting, engagement, integration and satisfaction. What's also interesting is to dig one level deeper and see how each of those concepts relates with others. Again, I'm not falling off my chair... But wait, there's more!
"the top concepts found in a representative sample of web analytics sites have now been established and in future reports monthly trends will appear"
Wisdom of the crowd or wisdom of the lights?
At first, when I looked at it yesterday, I mistakenly thought the constant flow of people beginning in the web analytics field would make the concepts gravitate around the same topics over and over. Drowning the more advanced discussions in the noise of the crowd. But now I realize this won't be the case since they picked "30 of the leading lights".Read about Top Concepts in the Web Analytics Blogosphere - May and June 2008 and get the report!