On CardinalPath blog:Practical solution: extracting a list of Query Strings from URLs

On the blog: Practical solution: extracting a list of Query Strings from URLs
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The knowledge worker in 3 acts: Microsoft.nl

I spent a day with the team at Microsoft Netherlands - thanks to These Days. In this post, my thoughts are not about web analytics or the future of the industry - visiting Microsoft got me thinking about how we are working today and how we will in the near future.

Act I: the office desk

Every Microsoft employee is empowered with a fully loaded and powerful laptop running the latest Windows 7,  Office 2010 and a slew of other Microsoft (and non-MS) tools. If Microsoft aims to "make it great" it needs to understand the behavior and expectations of its users. Back in my days as a sysadmin and webmaster at Softimage (then a subsidiary of Microsoft), the "eat your own dog food" mentra wasn't an obligation, it was a pleasure! 93,000 employees in 100 countries (Wikipedia) makes for a pretty good test bed.

I used to work on three, sometimes four computers. Now I only use my laptop which I will sometimes hook up to a bigger screen, keyboard and mouse. At any given time only a third of Microsoft.nl employees are in the office - the others are working from home or wherever else.

There is no office desk anymore - it's your laptop, your iPhone, your iPad...

Act II: the office space

What is striking about Microsoft.nl office is... the space! It doesn't even look like an office, it looks like a cozy modern hotel lobby. There are areas for meetings, for inspiration, for open conversations or if you need to be calm and focused you can go into sound proof cubicles. Of course, there are also the relaxing areas, gaming and a Microsoft Surface table. Food is great and drinks are plenty - just like home.

The office is just like home, home is your office, your office is anywhere.

Act III: the social space

A huge part of our work is filled with social interactions that are beyond mere job-related conversations. Being freelance and working from home (most of the time) is great. The negative side is socializing at work is pretty much non-existent. Facebook or Twitter are not alternatives...

The Microsoft.nl office is clearly set up to facilitate formal and informal social connections. For that matter, my little experience confirmed two stereotypes of the Dutch: 1) bicycles are everywhere and 2) there is a vibrant at-work and after-work lifestyle.

The only real conversion of any social media is getting to meet someone in real life.

The finally

People come to Microsoft.nl offices from all around the world - sometimes just to see and understand the evolving workplace dynamics. Over the weekend I spoke to someone who's employer thought "it would be cool to have iPads for everyone" but still requires them to show up at the office from 9 to 5... they don't get it! We, web analysts and online aficionados, are living in a microcosm ahead of the mass - we are lucky but it's a curse - lets not forget it.

For more info about what's so special about Microsoft.nl office, check out "New World Of Work Microsoft Netherlands Case Study" on Slideshare.

Web Analytics Conversations: Winter 2009

I've been following dozens of web analytics blogs over the past couple of years and one of my goals has always been to make it easy to share and leverage this information with other web analytics practitionners.

• 2007: I created a master Feedburner feed I called "Web Analytics Conversations" and manually maintained a list I published on my blog. Maintaining the list was long and tedious.
  
• 2008: In the fall of 2008, I developed a mashup of Feedburner and Google Blogs Search which provided latest posts and automated ranking of blogs. However, Feedburner is having so much trouble and the API is so unreliable that my solution didn't really work well.
• 2008: In late 2008, AllTop create a topic dedicated to web analytics. However, I don't find the interface that intuitive either.
• 2009: I have created a Wikio page dedicated to web analytics. This looks very promising: all feeds are readily available if you want to subscribe to specific ones and you can vote for the best articles. The approach is very interesting, so I'll give it a try!
  
  However, there are a couple of things I'm not sure about: If you add this page to your own Wikio account and I add/remove feeds later on, will you get those changes too?
  

Check out this very cool Google News visualization from marumushi.com:

Now, it would be amazingly cool to have this feature for the Web Analytics Conversations!

Cool features on the new WASP site

I revamped the WebAnalyticsSolutionProfiler.com website when I launched WASP v1.0 last week. I'm now leveraging a couple of pretty cool services. The number of innovative services is staggering, but here's a couple I find most interesting.

Kampyle

Kampyle feedback analytics: I've been using it for a while and like it very much. I talked about it many times already. For the site revamp, I have modified the feedback categories and sub-categories to better fit my needs. Each page includes the Give Feedback button so visitors can easily get in touch with me, either anonymously or providing their email. It's a great way to engage the conversation privately!

Get Satisfaction

Get Satisfaction is the "people powered customer support". A mix of discussion forum and trouble ticket system. Again, a great way to be "open" about feedback and issues. I'm also using it as a knowledge base, so whenever I get asked a question through other channels and find it valuable, I simply enter it in Get Satisfaction so it becomes available for my WASP users to see.

User Voice

User Voice might be the "voice of customer" at its best! WASP aficionados can ask for new features and enhancement and vote for the ones they find the most interesting. Right now, anonymous voting is enabled, but I could turn it off if I find there is some abuse...

KB 261186: Computer randomly plays classical music

Want to see an intriguing Knowledge Base article from Microsoft? Read on!

A while back I posted about the evolution of the infamous Microsoft "blue screen" error. I managed to get a Vista Blue Screen!

But today, a friend sent me a link to a real knowledge base article. A real gem! It states:

During normal operation or in Safe mode, your computer may play "Fur Elise" or "It's a Small, Small World" seemingly at random. This is an indication sent to the PC speaker from the computer's BIOS that the CPU fan is failing or has failed, or that the power supply voltages have drifted out of tolerance.
...
Although these symptoms may appear to be virus-like, they are the result of an electronic hardware monitoring component of the motherboard and BIOS.

How clever of them! I wonder if Microsoft did some A/B test to find out if it was better to play classical music instead of heavy metal...

Cool stuff for February

Last month, I posted about cool stuff for January. As I surf, I discover new services, sometimes nuggets of interest on someone else's blog, sometimes stumbling upon something while doing research.

AniBoom

My 15 year old daughter is really into visuals arts and she does fantastics portraits. She also likes animation and she's thinking of pursuing her education in this field. We found AniBOOM to be a fantastic place to discover very cool animations done by professionals and students. Think of it like something akin to YouTube for animated short stories. Some pieces worth looking:

• The way of hope
• End of summer
• Dragon slayer
• and dozens more!
  

Everything Web 2.0

I sometimes feel like we're back in the pre-bubble era. Check out how an exciting era we're living by scooting over 900 Web 2.0 applications classified and tagged for your greatest pleasure and hours of discovery at Go2Web20.net. And if you want to see who's cool and who's loosing ground, head to Movers 2.0.

Data visualization

You might have heard about Swivel, a place where you can explore, share, compare and upload your own data sets and use visualization tools. A similar tool, Many Eyes offers some amazing visualization tools that are more dynamic than Swivel. If you are into data visualization, both are worth a look.

Web geek tool

Web analytics should always be correlated with information about the health of the systems supporting the site itself. Internal monitoring and reporting is important, but sometimes you want to get a better feel of the user experience: just how painfully slow the site can be. Octagate SiteTimer offers a free tool that comes very handy to get a detailed breakdown of each components of a Web page and the time spent waiting and downloading. Other tools offer this kind of breakdown but are part of larger service packages (Gomez, Keynote, etc.). SiteTimer works, it's simple, and it's free.

RSS Feeds + news + social network = myFeedz

I discovered myFeedz, from Adobe Labs, just a few days ago, but I think I will like it. It merges concepts from Google Reader, Feedburner and Technorati into what promise to be a very powerful tool. Ratings, tags, bookmarking are all there, and unlike other feed readers, myFeeds tries to learn from what you read regularly and accordingly displays news items / blog posts that might be of interest to you.

Cool Stuff for January

Following a recent discussion with colleagues and a post from Manoj on Web Analytics World, I will summarize a couple of cool discoveries, some quite new, some a bit older but worth taking a look.

Design/Usability

• Crazy Egg: I talked about it a while back under the heading "heat maps for the mass". You might want to take a look at Click Density too.
• CSS Zen Garden: a must see if you are into web design and separation of form and content.
• Form Assembly: it's form garden is the web forms what Zen Garden is to content. Take a look and you will be enlighten by how flexible careful design can be.
  

Blogging

• MyBlogLog: this community service, simply configured trough a couple of JavaScript lines added to your blog template, brings a lot of useful information about your readership and links and affinities between blogs.
  

Personal

• LinkedIn: I started using it May 2004, which probably makes me an early adopter of this professional networking tool. The power is in the network, the more people use it, the better it gets.
  
• Plaxo: A contact management solution that follows you everywhere. Early on people were suspicious of their privacy protection, but it's getting more widely used. However, I found it automatically establish links with people I only communicated once or very few times.
• Pandora: the ultimate and coolest music engine! It offers recommendations based on your preferences and results from it's user network.
• PageFlakes: you know Google Personalized? PageFlakes goes way beyond with a very nice interface, a vast array of widgets to use, and your custom page can be shared.
  

Culture

• "Inside the soul of the web": this article from the November 2005 issue of Wired is a fascinating inside look at Google, still worth reading today.
• "startup.com: the raise and fall of the American dream": check out my review from February 2004 if you want to better understand the craziness of the Internet Bubble era.
• EPIC: if you have never seen this video about a future where Google and Amazon rule the world, check it out.

Simply cool stuff

• Amaznode: provides a visualization of the links between books found on Amazon. Pretty cool!
• TouchGraph: this company offers a tool similar to Amaznode, but is much more powerful (see snapshot). It also offers a visualization tool based on Google relate which is really interesting to find how a site or a topic is being recognized as part of an "ecosystem" by Google.

Cool stuff you want to share? Post a comment!