Posted by Michael Walsh (Check me out!) on February 20th, 2007
Tagged as: Uncategorized
Am I the only one to be a little confused over Alexa’s recent changes in the way they present their site view results?
At face value there’s no real difference.
Old
New
What has changed is the y axis.
No longer does is say “Daily Page Views (per million)” but “Daily Page Views (percent)”.
This confused the hell out of me at first but I think I understand why they did it. Isn’t it easy to assume, looking at the first, that this graph shows an average of 12 million page views per day?
You certainly couldn’t make that mistake with the new parameter. The problem is, this number, while extremely accurate, makes any kind of presentation particularly taxing on client attention.
“Michael, Just what is this number a percent of and why…?”
Looking at them now you can’t go wrong (and I know I have in the past). It’s just that when showing a client relative values, it helps to have a competitor (or five) to compare them against.
Otherwise you might as well save yourself the trouble.
Posted by Michael Walsh (Check me out!) on February 20th, 2007
Tagged as: Uncategorized
There are moments when you look up, notice the time and make some quick realizations.
I’m not talking about life-changing inspirational realizations but that sudden computation that triggers your brain into realizing that you haven’t eaten lunch and it’s nearly dinner time.
I guess that’s what happens when you’re out of the groove. Or at least it certainly appears to be that way for those of us trying to get out of theirs.
Free time becomes time spent planning, creating, writing, re-writing and, occasionally, eating.
I have listened to Rich Schefren tell me that I have to get out of my own way but unfortunately, when you’re at the beginning of whatever enterprise you’re trying to build, the plain and simple truth is that you are very much in charge of everything.
That doesn’t mean you should give up, but excuses are easy to find as you’ve got a million things to do and quite literally an excuse for each of them.
I just knuckled down and got on with it. I planned, I wrote and re-wrote and after six months (yes that long) had no fewer than 3 presentations ready to propose yesterday.
Like most “creatives†the fun lies in pondering over the details and the really, dirty, grubby part comes when you have to “sell†your phantasmagorical idea to someone with less than 1% of your super-human “visionâ€.
That moment for me came yesterday and was, effectively, the first day of the rest of my career. Dirty, exhausting and most definitely uphill but well worth the effort.
Posted by Michael Walsh (Check me out!) on February 1st, 2007
Tagged as: Me
Mr. Rollins leaves and my opposite number my friend from Dell gets into serious “tough love” spats.
If you want to see how diplomacy sometimes treads a very, very fine line, check out the restraint expressed here.
Posted by Michael Walsh (Check me out!) on February 1st, 2007
Tagged as: Me
Now that I’ve managed to reinstall everything after McAfee took down my registry, it’s all systems go with the page rank remapping project.
It’s a pretty complex issue mapping out page rank over hundreds of links and regional sites but it’s certainly worth the challenge. The problem I think is more to do with the PowerPoint presentation I’m trying to prepare to explain all this. What’s the rule? Maximum 5 slides..? Yeah right.
Posted by Michael Walsh (Check me out!) on January 31st, 2007
Tagged as: Me
We got page rank.
No not me, my client. They got a PR8 home page, and PR0 product pages.
Thank God people like Leslie Rohde exist, that make this all insanely easy to figure out. And no, that’s not an affiliate link.
We got problems with session IDs. I’m a bit thin on programming knowledge but have enough to figure out that if you’re a $11+bn company, you need page rank on your product page.
So it’s back to the drawing board for a really massive overhaul. Two weeks to get a presentation ready..
Posted by Michael Walsh (Check me out!) on January 27th, 2007
Tagged as: Me
This has been an eventful month.
First Edelman woke everyone up with a carefully/badly planned media campaign for Vista and shortly afterwards word got out that my client’s operating systems were compromised by a badly-coded ActiveX application.
It was fascinating to watch. A single post was quickly picked up by The Inquirer and from there the story literally exploded. By the end of the day it was on the front page of Slashdot and The Washington Post.
I lined all the cases up over on Alexa, and the sum totals of average daily page views of these sites exceeded one billion (TWP accountd for more than half).
At that point it hit mainstream media and country managers started asking for official responses.
It was a tough test of our PR skills as my client has no official blog and therefore very little way of reacting. It was also 11pm.
However, we got a press release up (fortunately they had a patch ready) the following day and got it noticed on the sites doing the most chatting and let nature take its course.
And the problem died.
It reminded me of an event in Scoble and Israel’s Naked Conversations when a bug surfaced on the blogosphere (if I’m not mistaken) during the development stage of XP. Scoble picked it up, they repaired it and silenced it within 9 hours.
We weren’t that fast but then, like I said, my client doesn’t have a blog. Yet.
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