Prospective clients often ask me how you can prove there is a potential for improvement when there are countless competitors or seemingly no room for growth. This is particularly important to the field of search engine optimization (SEO), which some feel is harder to forecast than advertising. My mentor, Mike Levin, often talks about how there is a finite number of searches happening everyday. You might be able to slightly influence that level through publicity, but generally marketers all fight over the same piece of the pie in their industry.

(Shigeru Miyamoto holding a Nintendo Wiimote, photo from Sklathill)

But what if you could grow the pie instead? The Nintendo Wii is one of the most famous case studies for this very idea. Miyamoto-san looked outside of the current market and connected with a non-traditional audience. Now more people are playing games than ever before.

How can you visualize that latent potential?

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Last night I gave a short talk on web traffic analysis to a data mining class taught by my friend, Dr. Aleks Jakulin, at Columbia University. Sharing the podium with Dr. Hilary Mason from Bit.ly and Blaz Fortuna from the Josef Stefan Institute in Slovenia, I decided to present a primer on the web analytics industry and leave the science to the experts.

It is a rare 400 level course with no prerequisites, so some students come from a statistics background while others study mathematics or business. What could I say that would be useful to all three disciplines? The main point I wanted to get across was simply the importance of acting upon your insights, regardless of whether you pursue such interests for academic or financial reasons.

I still find this to be the largest problem within web analytics today. At HitTail, we championed the idea of actionable analytics in 2006 (and even before that in Connors’ client offerings). Now, suddenly other companies keep using that word. I do not think it means what they think it means.

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I am usually more interested in Internet architecture than civil infrastructure, but living in New York for six years has helped me appreciate the importance of the nation’s most extensive mass transit network. I don’t think it is a stretch to say that this city owes much of its character, popularity, and economy to the massive 24/7 subway system.

The MTA has been getting a lot of flack lately for its recent budget cuts. There are rarely easy decisions in this matter, and you can count me among those affected. I regularly take the W local train from my home in Astoria to Manhattan. That line is being disbanded in favor of adapting the weekday N from express to local service. Yet even as these and other reductions take effect, portions of the Second Avenue Subway may actually be completed in our lifetimes.

What you may not know is that there were trains running along Second Avenue for 60 years, viewable in this system map from 1939. Of course, within three years of the city taking it over, passengers were soon met with this notice:

The Second Avenue Line was above ground, noisy, and dirty. Yet it is still a shame that people have all but forgotten it because elevated tracks are still in use today. It would probably be a lot cheaper to extend the N train for much-needed service to LaGuardia Airport (LGA) than tunnel underground for the proposed T line.

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