Friday April 13, 2007
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Friday April 13, 2007 Quantum vs. Classical Web Analytics
Let me drag you through your science lesson for the day. I promise you won't need your white lab coat or safety goggles.
There are two basic scientific models of the world. The older one, dating back to Sir Issac Newton is commonly referred to as "Classical Mechanics" and describes the world in terms of continuums. That means that measures of the physical world can be infinitely and arbitrarily broken down into smaller and smaller units. A unit of energy, for example, can be divided in smaller and smaller pieces with no limit to how you divide it or how small you make it.
This model worked fine to describe things for hundreds of years, up until around the early 20th Century when scientists began observing phenomenon that the Classical model could not explain. They found that in reality, the world can not be broken down into arbitrarily small units, but rather, was better explained by a model consisting of small, discretely sized units, or "quanta". This became known as quantum mechanics.
So, what the heck does this have to do with Web Analytics?
Web Analytics is going the opposite direction. We are transitioning from Quantum Web Analytics to Classical Web Analytics.
The paradigm that Web Analytics has been based on is a "quantum" model of page views. The user experience has been conveniently described as a series of discrete steps, from page view to page view. However, this model is starting to break down. With the introduction of new rich internet applications (AJAX, videos, etc.) the user experience is no longer a herky-jerky succession of steps from one page to the next. It is becoming a smoother flow from one activity to the next--more of a continuum rather than a series of steps.
How this change in paradigm will ultimately impact the way we think about web analytics is yet to be seen. However, we might be able to draw upon hundreds of years of scientific models to provide guidance.
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