My Blog, My Way

In the past, I have tried to mimic other well known Web Analytics / business blogs(Avinash Kaushik, Adam Greco, Seth Godin). I tried to follow their own pattern of writing, even follow the same format that they did. I have come to realize that while this works for these bloggers, it does not work for my own style.

I have always moved to the beat of a different drum than other people, and writing a blog is no different. While these people are successful, if I want to keep my blog updated, I need to follow my own style.

When I started this blog, I had two things in mind:

• I wanted a source where people could see the A -> C process of Web Analytics
1. The Issue
2. The Solution
3. Why it is the Solution
• I wanted a community that communicates about the topic and requests topics to be written about

Essentially, I want this blog to be ruled by the audience that reads it. You have a question, and I show you my solution to your question. Will my solution always be the optimized solution; no. The beauty of Web Analytics is that there are multiple routes to the solution and none are the right or wrong way.

Now do not get me wrong, I follow these three blogs all the time. When there are new posts, I read them immediately. I highly recommend that if you are not following these people; start. Read their older posts, gather their greatness. What I feel is that these blogs are not the way I want to run this blog.

Avinash is great at telling you how to run a report in his own opinion. I do feel though that he is not telling you the reason why running a report in a different fashion has an issue or what the issue at hand is (not telling the whole story).

Adam is great at telling you the issue and partially telling you the solution. The reason I say it is partially is because he does not actually tell you how to get to the solution. He expects that you can communicate to the developers what you want and how you want it, but not technically how it is done.

Seth is a great business man and gives great words of wisdom. At times, I consider him a fortune cookie; every time you open up his blog, you do not know what he is going to write about. But I believe he is going for quantity, not quality. I feel at times that you need to wade through the nonsense posts to find that one gem (and when the gem comes, it is worth sharing).

Like I mentioned, these three blogs are worth reading and worth keeping up to date with. If you have an RSS feed, add them now. You will not be sorry.

Myself, I work on the more technical side of Web Analytics. I work directly with the business and technology to implement the solutions to answer the questions the business has. With this background, I have great experience using the tool to gain insight about the site. With this, I am in a unique place as not only can I explain the insight that was gained, I can explain how it was done.

Every day at work, someone from the insight team will come to me and ask how is it possible that "X" can be captured in "Y". With my own experience in the technical workings of how Web Analytics is implemented and how the Web Analytics tool works, I am able to explain this to them. This is what I want to do, I want to explain each process to give a full understanding of (A) the Issue (B) The solution (C) Why it is the solution.

Now is the part which I need your help. I have several topics that I want to cover on the blog, but I want this blog to be run by you. What do you expect to see on here? How often do you want a post? What topic would you like to see next? I have ran sessions in the past where the viewers would like me to cover a particular topic and this was a complete success. Now, I am trying the same format but as a blog.

Next post will cover communications: how do we bridge the language difference?