The Rockethouse

Cool stuff. Look at who’s on your site in real time.

So we’re all pretty alarmed by net neutrality issues. And recent issues at comcast surely have many raising their arms in the air praising Comcast for their recent moves. But what gives? Instead of blocking traffic by the corporation that sent it, now they’re blocking traffic by the USER. The guns have been turned away from corporate america and towards you and I. Beware!

What’s going on at Joost? They have had nothing but employee shakeups for what seems like forever. Does anybody even use the service?

It baffles me that there isn’t more of this going on (e.g. monitoring what the set top boxes are doing). Why aren’t the MSO’s capturing census level data across all of their set top boxes for both broadcast and on-demand? And why haven’t they been doing this for years? 

Is Nielsen’s panel really so good and so cheap that nobody’s needed anything better until now?  

Yay

Okay, so let’s dig into this for a second… First of all, in order to prevent illegal acts, you need to snoop ALL traffic going through the network. I can see why people don’t like this. But also keep in mind that the techniques used by the telco’s to filter traffic aren’t able to snoop into encrypted streams. 

So the people who are doing _really_ illegal stuff are going to get past no problem. And the rest who are either a) innocent or b) too stupid to use encryption, are the ones that get snooped.

Why don’t they just block all encrypted traffic?  

Does anybody ever question the data underlying these services? Compete sniffs data out of ISPs. Alexa installs software on a panel. But Songkick? They crawl the web. Well sorry, the crawl myspace and amazon. It would be interesting to see some statisticians chime in on the validity of such limited panels. Are friends on Myspace really indicitive of usage patterns? Songkick captures such static data. Your myspace friends rarely shrink… This gives us an approximate comfort of stability as our fans rush out from under us to find new ground.

It strikes me that the techniques used to by a website to measure its audience (think web analytics ala Omniture, Google Analytics) are one and the same that a marketer would use to track a campaign. Why don’t adds embed the same level of analytics as a website? Why can’t I put analytics tags into my widgets or videos? Interesting article suggesting that my ads should be nothing less than unique content anyway…

It would be interesting to see how many people were double counted in these combined ratings. Can you really just add up online and offline audience? How many offline users also watched online?