The problem is that when people invest $10+ million dollars in a web company, no only do they want numbers, but they want EVERYONE to know those numbers. I work for a website that get ~8 million hits/day and has many regulations to conform to. The accuracy of our logs is what keeps our company alive. I've seen Nielsen, Media Metrics, report numbers for us, and they're all off from what we get. That's to be expected from sampling. What *really* matters from a marketing perspective is how much granularity you can get from these numbers. If you're logs show 20% less than what Nielsen shows, but you can drill down and get demographic/session/referrer/etc. data, then you're in a much better position. Number of hits are useless nowadays, but being able to break up this number into geographic location, time of day, site path, avg. session length, etc. is what makes logs usefull.
Whoever posted this does not speak for me, and probably not many other informed individuals. This person seems to have gotten all his/her knowlege from CmdrTaco and Hemos bitching about patents on/.. There are reasons we have patents, and this person obviously has not clue why. It protects inventors and innovation... sure, some of the recent web patents are out of hand, but that's what courts are for... The patent has *always* issued patents to anyone and let them be challenged in courts. Thay's the way the system is set up. I doubt we want to take away power from the courts and give it to unelected patent officials.
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The problem is that when people invest $10+ million dollars in a web company, no only do they want numbers, but they want EVERYONE to know those numbers. I work for a website that get ~8 million hits/day and has many regulations to conform to. The accuracy of our logs is what keeps our company alive. I've seen Nielsen, Media Metrics, report numbers for us, and they're all off from what we get. That's to be expected from sampling. What *really* matters from a marketing perspective is how much granularity you can get from these numbers. If you're logs show 20% less than what Nielsen shows, but you can drill down and get demographic/session/referrer/etc. data, then you're in a much better position. Number of hits are useless nowadays, but being able to break up this number into geographic location, time of day, site path, avg. session length, etc. is what makes logs usefull.
Whoever posted this does not speak for me, and probably not many other informed individuals. This person seems to have gotten all his/her knowlege from CmdrTaco and Hemos bitching about patents on /.. There are reasons we have patents, and this person obviously has not clue why. It protects inventors and innovation... sure, some of the recent web patents are out of hand, but that's what courts are for... The patent has *always* issued patents to anyone and let them be challenged in courts. Thay's the way the system is set up. I doubt we want to take away power from the courts and give it to unelected patent officials.
Eric
a Linux programmer save a Microsoft service running BSD... The world is smaller that you realize