Patterns: October 26, 1998 issue of New Thinking

October 26, 1998 New Thinking:
Patterns

Website content management

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October 26, 1998

Patterns

By Gerry McGovern

For the last couple of years, this newsletter has risen by a steady 40 subscribers every week. It probably rises by about 60 or so new subscribers with 20 older ones unsubscribing, but I don’t have the capacity to measure this. What I can measure tells me that every week the total subscriber base rises almost religiously by 40. (It’s now at over 6,000.)

Every week for two years, the Nua Internet Surveys newsletter has risen by an average of 250 subscribers. It may slacken off a bit during the summer but despite all the volatility of the Internet, it’s amazing how consistently the newsletter grows. (For every new subscriber, our research indicates an average redistribution of 3, which gives us a total growth in readership of 1,000 per week.)

For all its chaotic beginnings, the Internet has, for me anyway, exhibited a set of consistent, patterned behavior. It seems to have its own set of laws and rules. I suppose many of us have been trying to divine these rules over the last couple of years so that we can benefit from creating plans that reflect them.

When you think about it, the Internet is an open laboratory for human behavior, because the patterns that emerge on the Internet, are patterns that humans make. Website logs, for example, give us information on how users have navigated through our site.

Every day I like to check the logs for our site. However, it really is only a cursory look. As a company we have been so busy growing that we don’t always take as much time to examine carefully our logs and to redevelop our website according to their findings as we should.

Really, the Internet is an incredibly complex environment, requiring a wide range of skills and expertise. The larger websites are investing in ‘data mining’ software and statistical expertise, so as to isolate key business patterns emerging. However, I have heard that websites such as Amazon generate so much data that it becomes a hugely expensive job to make sense of it all.

There are patterns and trends all over the Internet. All of them can seem important in their own way. But there is a danger that with all the statistical tools we have and all the statistics that they generate, we will not be able to see the pattern from the statistic. Or, that we will see so many patterns that all we will end up with is a blur.

My daily logs gives me Visits, Megabytes Downloaded, Hits and Pages Viewed. I for one am not interested in the Megabytes figure and the Hits figures has absolutely no value. And that’s only the beginning of the log, which goes on for page after page. I get information on every version and type of browser that visited. I get information on the search queries used by visitors. I get all sorts of monthly and yearly-to-date totals.

Of course, there’s also the detailed path that each visitor takes through our site. But with an average of 1,500 visitors every day, it’s hard to keep track. The Internet is a paradise of patterns and statistics alright. Figuring out which patterns to observe and to act upon is a different story though.

Gerry McGovern

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There is a danger that with all the statistical tools we have and all the statistics that they generate, we will not be able to see the pattern from the statistic.