Another title for this post could be ... why I blog, or why I wiki. Yesterday I was reviewing some data for a keynote presentation I am giving next week at Motorola's internal learning summit. My topics is using Web 2.0 tools for learning and knowledge collaboration. Thus, I took a trip to my blog's and wiki's Google stats to review the information in terms of presenting a concept on data mining. One huge advantage of being the "owner" of an active blog or wiki site is that my site visitors (i.e. you) leave a data trail. This data helps me understand how folks are conducting research, and if I am intrigued, I can re-run their queries and/or links. As my mind is wired in its own peculiar manner, this process allows me to learn from my visitors ... even those who never comment or contact me.
Yesterday I was intrigued with the query "domain engineering". I'll admit I often think about "knowledge domains", but I had never thought to run the query "domain engineering". Thus, Google I did ... and one of the first results was a page from Carnegie Mellon's software institute. After reviewing the concept of domain engineering on Carnegie's web site, I decided to click upon the first user name /profile link listed in my company's social search results (runs in tandem with Google). The end result was a tag and link to Educypedia.
I was very pleased with my journey. Educypedia is an excellent online encyclopedia which tends to focus on providing valuable links to other content on the web. The folks who have created this site have spent significant time on making their site easy to use. The lists are categorized and organized very effectively. Technologists will find a lot of good information via their site, particularly if you are starting out on a new knowledge discovery project. I am definitely adding Educypedia to the Manuals Section of the Engineering Learning Wiki.
You may want to read the following article at Juice Analytics about a GreaseMonkey script for Firefox that might help you process your Google Analytics results:
http://www.juiceanalytics.com/writing/2008/04/enhancing-google-analytics-using-greasemonkey/
Posted by: David Head | April 13, 2008 at 03:17 PM