IA people, it’s time to get excited! Mockingbird is a nominally priced web-based wireframing tool which works in your browser. It was created by San Francisco based Some Character.

Happy New Year! I just read about Pion – a tool from Atomic Labs which works with all the leading web analytics products available today. I will learn more about it and write what I find out. A free edition is available as well as paid service levels.

Yeah, this topic deserves more than one post.

Web analytics tag management is important because getting good data into the WA tool you’re using is essential to creating good results. Adobe is now providing the Tag Manager solution which seems to be a flexible, serious tool for managing your tags in a way which gives you the ability to track versions and more. When you visit the link above, take a look on the right sidebar, and sign up to receive the Forrester guide to tag management tools – its a nice freebie indeed.

You’ll get a minty fresh feeling when you try Mint, a rather new kid on the web analytics block. The pricing is reasonable at $30/site. What I like is that it appears to be an easy to use, self-hosted alternative to Google Analytics or AWstats. Ever tried installing AWstats? Well, maybe I had some extra fun trying to make it run on IIS6/Windows, but ease of use really means a lot these days. Give it a spin – it may exactly what you’re looking for, without giving away the store to Mother G.

Yeah – I bet that headline got your attention for a second. How could a URL be compared to a cookie? It takes a moment to get used to the idea, but that very concept was suggested by a couple articles I read today.

It all started when I got a spam with a short bitly URL embedded within. I became curious to know if there was a such thing as a bitly decoder, and surely there was! So that bitly URL mapped to a Twitter t.co URL. That was when I decided to delete the spam altogether. But I found this article about t.co URLs being useful for web analytics, and that article lead to this article which raised the question of this post’s headline. Read the articles and judge for yourself. Go through your own Tweets and web analytics and prove it out for yourself.

Here’s a scratchpad post to help me remember to look further into Composite C1, a free open-source CMS based upon Microsoft dotNet. The other day I was searching for some alternative .Net CMS tools and it is good to know some exist! Check this Wikipedia entry for a complete, platform-independent list of content management systems paid or free.

Here’s another random item: ain interactive marketing ROI calculator. It is a neat toy for Business Intelligence geeks.

Ever heard of Regular Expressions? The first time I read the term I thought, “Hmm, so what’s the difference between a regular expression and an irregular expresson?”

Ha ha.

Since that day I’ve used regular expressions to save time and to cover a lot of ground really fast when searching through large text files (http log files), for text parsing in programming, and when confiiguring web analytics tools.

So, what are regular expressions, anyway? First, you might see them referred to as Regex. Regular Expressions are short, rather cryptic patterns used for finding text within large files. If memory serves, Regex originated in the Perl programming language. Anyway, regular expressions are fast. And handy. (And why on earth aren’t they more widely supported in Omniture?) Many widely used tools such as text editors and many programming languages support various implementations of Regex. Take the time to learn them and you’ll save a lot of time combing through large files trying to find all occurrences of a certain text string.

Web analytics consultancy Lunametrics has kindly released a nice little ebook about Regular Expressions and how they can be used in Google Analytics. It’s a free download – check it out! Your web analytics will be better for your learning effort.

One fantastic tool I use which supports Regex is AstroGrep (available from Sourceforge.net). I frequently use AstroGrep as a programming tool and as a http logfile utility. So useful for finding all log entries for a certain site visitor (sessionalizing a user’s clickstream), etc.

I feel this is a topic to watch – that of web tracking opt-in / opt-out. Many in the web industry are watching this closely. Optincookie.com is one site which will help you keep apprised of developments and how they can affect the web analytics community.

Everyone wants to tag along with Facebook’s popularity and grab some traffic there. If you’re running Omniture SiteCatalyst web analytics, this blog post discusses some integration options without giving away the store. There’s a lot of good info here – I hope to have some time soon to test the techniques demonstrated.

This post will grow and eventually turn into a more complete resource, but for now here is a start. This comparison page places three web analytics tools side-by-side, and as a little bonus lists CMS integration info (at the bottom of the table). The three tools examined at the link above are Piwik, Google Analytics, and Open Web Analytics (OWA).