Inside View

I Have Achieved Parity #milestone

by Bernie Goldbach in Clonmel

FOR THE FIRST TIME in 15 years, my blog has recorded parity because an equal number of people have visited using iOS and Android. My experience mirrors a global trend.

However, when university students return to my classrooms, I suspect their higher usage of Android handsets will push iOS back down into the 40% range with my webstats. Meanwhile, the Micro.blog community is heavily slanted towards Apple products.

[Bernie Goldbach has used Statcounter to track more than 100,000 page views of InsideView.ie]

Bringing strong PowerBI visuals to data points h/t @saorog

WE ARE SHARING a survey about the collaborative uses of cloud services with a framework provided by Office 365 and PowerBI. The data points come from survey work finished by creative students on the Clonmel Digital Campus and the PowerBI toolset has evolved through open documentation offered by Stephen Howell at Microsoft Ireland.

Google Tags Not Firing

MY CURRENT FIRST WORLD PROBLEM revolves around a simple misconfiguration of my Google Tag Manager. It's a skill we teach in the Web Analytics module on the Clonmel Digital Campus.

If you follow Educast on Twitter you will learn more about the problem and its solution.

[Bernie Goldbach teaches creative media for business on the Clonmel Digital Campus of the Limerick Institute of Technology.]

Tracking the slow lane of cycling

I GOT A BICYCLE a few months ago and after moving to a flat area of town, I now feel able to ride the four km to work several times a week.

It's been decades since I rode to work. As a young copilot in California, I had a seven mile journey into a strong headwind. Four years later, I would jump on my bike and ride six miles to the flight line in Oklahoma. The journey happened before sunrise on many occasions. 

Flash foward to 2019 and now it's the easiest run on the biggest bicycle. My current ride came courtesy of Ireland's bike to work scheme which means I got a great machine at a 20% reduced price. Plus I can burn calories while paying for the 21 speed bike.

I tell friends what I have and they agree that I'm equipped for the trek. The Thule panniers can hold my laptop (although I'm often keeping the laptop safely locked up at work). Having to plan my baggage means I carve back my load to things I need for the day.

I've discovered my Samsung Health app tells Strava what I'm doing when I toggle into "workout" mode. This means people farther up the fitness chain can see my progress. Several have offered me high fives for resetting my fitness journey. Sometimes they get to see the sort of screen grabs and trophies that accompany this blog post.

I think I will start sharing a weekly report on my blog because my progress is worth measuring. And I also think I'm going to start hitting the cycle lanes as the sun rises because here in Tipperary we have some brilliant dawn choruses with radiant bursts of light.

[Bernie Goldbach teaches creative media for business on the Clonmel Digital Campus and hope to build an entire photo album  that documents the joys of cycling.]

5252 Page Views High Water Mark

TEN YEARS AGO, on 13 April 2008 when talking about Qik, I hit 5252 page views on my personal blog. It's been all downhill from there.

I've started turning the analytics microscope onto my personal online spaces because I want to develop a refined statistical understanding of how blogging has morphed into microblogging. I think there are major societal impacts surrounding this evolution in our online conversations.

Stepping inside Microsoft Cognitive Services

THE SINGLE GREATEST LEAP I have made with sentiment analysis occurred after using Microsoft's Cognitive Services. I'm diving into the API documentation by clicking on the navigation elements that appear after clicking on the image accompanying this post.

Appreciating evidence-based case studies with Instagram

NEXT WEDNESDAY, MAY 25TH, the hallways and studio space on the Clonmel campus of the Limerick Institute of Technology come alive with samples of creative work during the annual Pen & Pixel exhibition. I'm deeply interested in following the conversation about the event as it trickles far beyond County Tipperary, primarily through social networks such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

Statcounter Measures a Spike #measureit

Screenshot from PowerPoint Online.

I AM USING a Web Analytics module hand-in-hand with Powerpoint Online to gather student feedback directly after lectures. I present the lecture and then students modify the slide deck during a follow-on practical session.

Today's #measureit challenge involves my own blog at Irish.Typepad.com, a site more often known as InsideView.ie. Years ago, that simple blog generated 1000 page views a day. Now it rarely gets more than 100 people a day. I invited students to review a variety of data as well as suggest ways to grab back the attention of dozens of people who used to read my blog posts while on my website.

Analytics of a Failed Start-up

WE CAN OFTEN LEARN more from failure than from success. That is a conclusion I've reinforced after viewing Everpix business intelligence on Github.

Learning a Few Things from Twitter Analytics

Screenshot from my Twitter Analytics.

SEVERAL TWITTER ANALYTICS tools can now be seen by the public in selected markets, which means you might be able to view more about tweets that are retweeted, favourited and replied to. I'm learning more about word choice and time of day through the screenshot above than by merely viewing the actions of those tweets using Boxcar on iOS.

The change was spotted by Christopher Penn, vice president of marketing technology at SHIFT Communications and one-half of the Marketing Over Coffee podcast team. Not all markets can see these analytics because advertising campaigns are not in place in every country. In Ireland, there's no payment mechanism accepted on the advertising dashboard.