Monthly Archives: November 2005

Australian Idol Winner: Kate DeAraugo Vs Emily Williams

General

A new article about Australian Idol 2006 finalists Damien Leith & Jessica Mauboy is now available.

Tonight saw the culmination of the third Australian Idol. For the last three months, contestants have been battling and belting out their biggest and brightest notes, in an attempt progress through the aggressive selection progress to make it to the grand final at the Sydney Opera House. What happened tonight, is sure to have gob smacked a vast portion of the Australian public. In some strange twist, Kate DeAraugo managed to out vote Emily Williams to win the grand final.

Kate’s performance throughout Australian Idol has been quite good, however compared to other singers – her overall package and skills were lacking. She has progressed through the weeks, by giving good performances and relying on other singers delivering an ok performance. As the competition crept towards the business end, her weaknesses were starting to show. Week after week, Mark would criticise her for not letting go of her voice, not connecting with the music, not transcending. Yet through all the criticism, the public continued to vote for her.

In stark contrast, Emily Williams has been delivering high grade performances week after week. She has received the ultimate ‘good job’ stamp (read: Touchdown!) from Mark no less than three times in the last few weeks. They suggest that she do something, next week she comes out and delivers it bigger and better than they could have imagined. Kyle went as far to say, that he hasn’t heard someone sing Whitney Huston, that isn’t Whitney Huston and make it worth listening too – yet he gives complements like that to Emily.

I have to believe that Kate DeAraugo has won Australian Idol, not through her ability to sing, nor her ability to perform – but in her Barbie Doll like appearance. No sane person could honestly believe that Kate was a superior singer to Emily, yet Kate stands in utter disbelief that she has won. The organisers of Australian Idol, need to some how factor in who is voting – not just the raw number of votes. Assigning the same importance to a 12 year olds vote as to an adults isn’t fair to the performers, they are just being cheated.

One can only hope that Emily Williams soars to the top, just like her amazing voice.

Google Analytics Released

Internet, Software

In March, Google agreed it would aquire the California based web analytics company Urchin. Urchin have been in the web statistics business since 1995 and are an established player claiming statistics that over 20% of Fortune 500 companies use their package.

Since finalising the deal on the 3rd of March, the Google developers have been hard at work. That work is now available to the general public in the form of Google Analytics. Google Analytics works by embedding a small piece of JavaScript into each page of your site and when a page is viewed, it is reported back to their central server. This is akin to how Google tracks conversion and clicks through AdSense.

Using JavaScript and/or cookies to track statistics isn’t a new thing, its been done before. What I think is different this time, is the scale its being executed on. Traditionally, client side tracking systems provided very limited information about your site. Now that Google have the ability to parse your traffic logs through a server side application like Urchin, the rules and boundaries of client side tracking are changing. Some of the key features Google list include:

  • Keyword Campaign Comparison
  • Executive Summaries
  • AdWords Integration
  • Trend Reporting
  • E-Commerce
  • Funnel Visualization
  • Site Overlay
  • Advanced Visitor Segmentation
  • GeoTargeting
  • Analysis Options

The majority of those features are available in server side log analysis applications. The two features that I think are note worthy, are keyword campaign comparisons and integration with Google AdWords. You can now advertise on Google through AdWords and see the effect that it is having on your site, without having to filter through volumes of information. Don’t think it is limited to tracking Google advertising systems though -you can track (but not necessarily integrate) all other advertising systems as well. The other point of interest with Google Analytics is that since it is client side, you are tracking real people on your site. The single biggest problem with server side packages is that there is no accurate way of filtering out non-human hits (ie, from the Google Bot). The issue of course, is that you are getting false positives which could ultimately change your decision making process in your site design or structure.

Google Analytics is a free service to the public allowing up to 5 million page views per month per account. If you have an active AdWords account, it is provided without the page view limitation. What isn’t outlined on the terms of service is if there is a cost after 5 million page views per account per month, when you don’t have an active AdWords account. If there is, there aren’t going to be a lot of people that take that level of traffic that don’t already have their own statistical package in use.

With the massive audience that Google has and what is on offer with this new product, I would expect there to be a massive update of Google Analytics in the future.