Walking along the beach in Panama City Florida

This was one of hundreds of snapshots my mother took when my parents visited Panama City Florida sometime in the 1980′s. A few are of interest because the document the changes as they aged. Way too many are of seagulls and plants around the hotel. My mother also took snapshots of the places they ate. Of all these taken with a generic film camera, this one stands out.

A “snapshot” is a picture taken without much thought, usually to document an event or place. In my 45 years as a photographer this image stands on its own. This is a photograph. The viewer asks about the story behind the image. A man walking on the beach. Why don’t we see other people? We see buildings in the image. What do those tell us about the man on the beach? He seems to have stopped. Is he looking at something else on the beach? Is he waiting for someone? Is this man alone?

I can only answer a few of those questions to give the photo a personal meaning. I know it is my father and my mother took the shot. As I look at the image I try to forget the personal details. In fact, I may have spoiled it just now by telling what I do know. I do know this was accidental. Someone else will need to tell me if it really is a photograph of interest.

My current project: A Kinect for my Xbox 360. This is the gizmo that reads body movement, allowing you to control menu selections and play the

games specific to the Kinect. This system differs from the popular Wii game console. The Wii requires the use of hand controllers.

This system includes a camera and a microphone. When calibrating, the screen shows a small image in the corner of your movements. Your hands, a critical part of the control, glow brightly.

The device is very picky about your distance from the screen. A tennis court with lines urges you backward until you are at least six feet from the camera. After shoving furniture aside, the screen rewards you at a distance of eight feet.

The process kindly reminds you to look out for furniture and even suggests you look up as well. (Low chandeliers, I guess.) The promotional pictures and videos show large play spaces with a couch of cheerleaders looking on. I’ve very suspicious of this idea. All the movement and extra hands might confuse the system.

If you have enough room you two can play side by side. This is appears, would require about 10 feet across. Basically you need 80 square feet in front of the game screen/television to use the Kinect. I managed to move enough things out of the way in my tiny 450 square feet apartment. My large TV chair is now mostly in the kitchen. I now have an 8 by 8 lane in front of the TV.

While a lot of settings are available for you to keep yourself to yourself, playing with others around the world is highlighted in some of the videos. The Xbox Live network (at about $8 a month) has been there for game play, no reason not to compete with the Kinect. Well, I have a good reason: I’m old. The physical requirements of competition are beyond me.

The system (Xbox + Kinect) takes pictures while you play. I’m sure you can turn that “feature” off but my first pictures, automatically shown at the end of your game, show me in pajamas with the stuff I shoved out of the way on the edges.

Coming up: Speak, master and friends in different places.

I’m interested in calculating the possibility of a future event. One of my favorite psychology professors, Mr. Brooks, made sure that every student of every class he taught, regardless of the subject, understood that our world is based on probability. Or as he would have put it, 99.4% of his students heard his lecture about probability and questioning if the sun would rise tomorrow.

Mark Twain provided his opinion in his autobiography: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.” If I didn’t know better, I would say that Twain was talking about web metrics.

Internet activity has been recorded from the beginning in server logs. These text based logs record IP addresses, dates, times, pages and browsers. When processed by AWStats or similar program, the data is use to create plenty of useful reports. As long as your web site vendor allows access to those logs, the reports from AWStats represents a decent start to analyzing your web site.

Before I continue: Metric is a measurement of an event. Web metrics are a collection of event data, determined by the collector. Taking the data and making assumptions about it is an analysis. A person who does that with all this web data is a god, I mean web analyst.

Of course all this gathered data in kept in a database somewhere in the Web cloud. Only if you have paid for the data gathering or actually collect and store the data in-house does it matter much to you. The data is out there and you get to use it.

When I began to work with computerized data I was unhappy to discover that a database is a living, breathing entity. As such, it is never really what you think it is. The ability to use the data is as much art as it is science.

I worked with one small database that held about 14,000 records. Even as slowly as it grew (employee hire/fires/transitions) it was never accurate. As part of the conversion from a mainframe to a personal computer, I had to teach the folks responsible that their reports were just fleeting pictures of the data and that some data was out-of-date. It had not been updated, or corrected when discovered or would be wrong because no one knew any different.

All of this is important to know because anyone working with web metrics needs to understand the tenuousness of the reports they read. Because the data is gathered by computer instead of entered and edited by staff, our assumption maybe that the data is more accurate. Don’t make that assumption.

I offer my top two attitudes about databases. Besides just being aware of the slippery status of the stuff, the veracity of the data over time allows you match your experience with the data and decide what to trust (or not.) The second thing to understand is that data may not represent what is seems to. In web metrics, data is gathered by JavaScript Tags and from Web Logs or other ways. The data is process very differently but the column headings may use the same labels. Make sure the labels apply to the same type of data.

Remember the doctor (Gene Wilder) in Young Frankenstein?  “Alive! It’s alive! It’s alive!”  If I didn’t know better, I would say that Doctor Frankenstein could have been talking about web metrics.