Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualization and Social Media

Google Acquires MeasureMap

I've been using MeasureMap for a while to monitor blog traffic. Jeff Veen just mailed out to MeasureMap's alpha testers that it has been acquired by Google. It's blogged by Google here.

Ironically, Jeff's announcement states:

For the near term, you will see no difference in its operations.

Not quite true: it looks like the modding of the home page to add the Google link has messed up the layout horribly (linux/firefox)! Hopefully this acquisition will not see the problems that Google's acquisition of Urchin produced. At that time, Urchin became unusable and there were many complaints from existing users about price restructuring.

BlogBeat Update

BlogBeat, which I posted about earlier, looks like it is making some significant changes. Unfortunately, I can't seem to log in and during the upgrade access seems problematic. MeasureMap has set a seriously high bar for blog specific site stats, so it's going to be exciting to see what the new version of BlogBeat looks like. Stay tuned.

Google Analytics/MeasureMap

Like Steve Rubel and, I'm sure, many others, I got a glimpse of my Google Analytics results last night. I have to say, I was really impressed with the functionality and much of the interface design. However, the quality of the service is so poor that it out-weighs anything one can say about the interface. I attempted to login this morning and at every try was redirected to the standard Google search page.

My initial reaction to the Google data was to suspect that MeasureMap was going to be dead in the water. However, it is important to underline the fact that MeasureMap is a weblog stats tool, not a general website stats tool. Consequently, it explicitly models the structure of and possible interactions with a weblog and reports data on vistor behaviour with respect to these. This feature, together with the fact that it actually works, unlike Google's offering, means that I am unlikely to revisit my stats page at Google for a while.

Google Analytics

Google has launched a free web analytics service (this is turning into an active space - MeasureMap, BlogBeat, Mint). The widespread use of this service will be a big win for Google as it gives them more data about who is visiting which site. They will be using this data to the fullest extent:

Google and its wholly owned subsidiaries may retain and use, subject to the terms of its Privacy Policy (located at http://www.google.com/privacy.html , or such other URL as Google may provide from time to time), information collected in Your use of the Service.

(Via MicroPersuasion).

MeasureMap Update

MeasureMap has begun initial testing and sports a new home page. I hope to get a testing account in the next few days after which I will write up a fuller account of the service. The importance of powerful blog site analysis is certainly reflected in the number of entrants into this space. Knowing how people get to your blog (which searches), where they visit (archives, tags, etc.) and how they move around the content helps the author tune postings to suite the emerging audience. With a bit of knowhow, it is possible to identify individual bloggers visiting your page (for example, when they click on referal link data that you leave behind in their site analysis pages!)

Melted Mint

I was looking forward to having a look at Mint, another new entry into the site monitoring space (along with BlogBeat and MeasureMap). The fact that their demo site (which I'm guessing shows their results for their own site) couldn't handle the 100s of hits per minute it received is pretty disappointing. Here is their spin:

The demo has been temporarily disabled. While Mint can easily handle recording hundreds—if not thousands—of hits a minute, it is not optimized to display data at that rate. Please check back once some of the initial interest has died down.

The heat from the blog space is giving rise to secondary applications, but I'm surprised that these are being rushed out (just as BlogBeat was - still full of glitches) with minimal QA. The beta tag is always convenient, but it is becoming overly used to indicate lack of discipline IMHO.

BTW, no real news on MeasureMap as yet, though there is a picture on flickr...