[8617] in www-talk@info.cern.ch
Re: Accurate user-based log file analysis
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Brian Behlendorf)
Mon Jul 17 19:42:11 1995
Date: Mon, 17 Jul 1995 16:33:49 -0700 (PDT)
From: Brian Behlendorf <brian@organic.com>
To: Terry Myerson <tmyerson@iserver.interse.com>
Cc: www-talk@w3.org
In-Reply-To: <199507172308.QAA03916@iserver.interse.com>
Resent-From: www-talk@www10.w3.org
If you send marketing stuff like this to a technical list like www-talk,=20
I presume you intend for it to be a locus of conversation on the topic. =20
I'll even ignore the fact that is was cross-posted to three other lists=20
which have nothing to do with this tool (www-html, www-lib, www-style).
On Mon, 17 Jul 1995, Terry Myerson wrote:
> We started shipping today Inters=E9=92 market focus, a Windows based Inte=
rnet
> marketing tool.
>=20
> Inters=E9 market focus creates trend graphs, bar charts, tables, and sort=
ed
> lists from standard web site log files. While other tools count "hits" or
> "hosts", Inters=E9 market focus provides you with an accurate tally of W=
eb
> site users. You can analyze your entire log file, or select and analyze
> sub-sets of the logs for targetted analysis.
I'd like to see your definition of "users". For a sufficiently small=20
site, letting users=3Dunique hosts *might* be acceptible. For large sites,=
=20
there could be 20 people coming from behind sgigate.sgi.com or=20
www.hensa.ac.uk or wwwproxy.edu.au or *.proxy.aol.com - how does your=20
software divine those individuals? What assumptions are being made about=
=20
visitors? Is the analysis happening on standard common log files, or=20
are other types of logfiles generated and used?
If it's getstats++, say so. But don't say it provides counts of "users"=20
without also stating the assumptions used to generate that number.
> The software includes the Inters=E9 Internet database, which contains mos=
t
> U.S. Internet domains indexed by city, state, and zip code, combined with
> other Internet demographic information. Coupling this information with yo=
ur
> log files, the software translates Internet address into actual organizat=
ion
> names and produce geogrpahic analyses of your site=92s specific user comm=
unity.
There's going to be a whole lotta hits coming from Vienna, Virginia,=20
White Plains, NY, and Columbus, Ohio!
=09Brian
--=3D-=3D-=3D-=3D-=3D-=3D-=3D-=3D-=3D-=3D-=3D-=3D-=3D-=3D-=3D-=3D-=3D-=3D-=
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--
brian@organic.com brian@hyperreal.com http://www.[hyperreal,organic].com/
