Information trailblazing

Last week Matt McAlister, InfoWorld's director of online product development, forwarded me a list of the week's 10 most-read stories. I was tickled to see a couple of my stories among them. "You can log in to the reporting system for more detail," Matt said, so I did. Twice. First I logged in to the Web interface that selects report intervals. (No luck doing that on Mac OS X, by the way, where Mozilla, Safari, and MSIE all failed the browser check.) Then I logged in to the Java applet that delivers the reports. Once you burrow into the inner sanctum, you can see the data sliced and diced in every way that the system's designers thought you might need. But there are two huge problems: You can't link to those views, and you can't link to the data that supports them.

I won't take potshots by naming the vendor because, in truth, this system is state-of-the-art. Web analytics has been one of my passions for almost a decade, so I know firsthand the challenge of reducing vast quantities of log data into views that make sense to the business sponsors of a Web site. You've got to boil the stuff down in ways that are instantly accessible to those folks, and this system meets that expectation. But we're at an inflection point, I believe, in terms of what regular folks will expect these systems to do.

Consider librarians. As I mentioned on my Weblog, these are non-technical users who have nonetheless begun to describe their OPACs (online public access catalogs) as being "the wrong kind of software" when they can't adapt to the LibraryLookup style of hyperlink-driven integration. It's becoming apparent to everybody that deep linking isn't some obscure geekism, but rather a vital property of information systems. When an OPAC supports deep linking, integration with other systems is trivial. When an OPAC doesn't support deep linking -- for example, because it delivers only a Java interface, or because it encodes session IDs in URLs -- such integration is much, much harder.  Users are starting to notice the difference.

I'm not discounting the value that client-side Java can bring to the table. Rich clients are an increasingly important part of the emerging picture. But please, pretty please, don't force me to use the rich client to get to the data. Use it, instead, to enhance the presentation of XML data that is also highly accessible by way of hyperlinks and (where appropriate) Web services. The heavy lifting done by a Web analytics engine aggregates the raw log data along many dimensions: page views, referrers, paths (sequences of pageviews), you know the drill. Once that hard work is done, make sure it can be leveraged. If you want to use Java or Flash or another rich-client technology to visualize the data, then great, but make sure that users can share those views by passing around easily discovered links.