Category Archives: lilypad

Piwik: Alternative Analytics Presentation in Chicago

Yours truly will be presenting, “Piwik: An Analytics Alternative,” a short presentation at this year’s Open Analytics Summit at the City Winery in Chicago on March 27th.

OAS is for Developers, Engineers, Data Scientists, CMOs, Data Analysts, CTOs, Architects, Brand Managers, and anyone passionate about open source technologies, big data, or data analytics. My presentation will be particularly interesting to digital marketers, enterprise technologists, Web analytics practitioners and others that are interested in a viable way to provide solid measurement while removing Google from their Web analytics stack.

Full Schedule and Register

If there is interest, I’ll post the presentation here as well.

History of Web Analytics…Annotated.

Most history of Web analytics postings and stories routinely cover Analog by Dr. Steve Turner a rather simplistic log file analyzer. Others mention i/Pro, netGenesis, Interse, NetCount and WebTrends.

What they often miss is Lilypad, a marketing and adertising oriented Web-based analytics application. Lilypad was developed by Streams Online Media Development in 1995 and announced in the Fall of 1995. Unlike most of the other technical log file analytics tools, Lilypad was original in that it focused on promotional measurement. Importantly, Lilypad utilized its own database of activity and was coded in Perl leveraging server-side inludes the predecessor to JavaScript page tags.

Lilypad was programmed by James Allenspach under my direction during dowtime in-between client projects. Dave Skwarzek and I worked to brand and promote the product in  way that marketers could appreciate. A seminal offering by a scrappy Web boutique start-up to be sure, Lilypad was influential as an early site metrics tracking application:

If you are doing research on the history of site analytics, digital media tracking or online media measurement, you can learn more about Lilypad here.