Evaluating evaluations.

It thrills me to see my personal blog's statistics.  I average around 40 hits a day mostly for one or two posts that people have found through searches on search engines such as google.  How do I know all this?  Wordpress tells me so.  Every month is laid out in a line graph showing number of hit with highest hitting posts for the month being listed in summary below.  You can even look at the statistics for each day, seeing how people found your site, what they used and searched under to discover you. 

Now if I, an individual, can get excited about statistics, I can only imagine how wonderful an institution would think such a service.

Google Alerts is a very handy tool that I can see being very handy for study in the coming year.  The main feature is that you gather the information you want in one place where you already go to review articles, be it either your email, or RSS feed.  Unfortunately you can't do an advanced search and make the search ignore anything that is coming from inside the organisation.  I got alot of miss-hits from my searches that I would have with a more refined search terms option.

I must say, the excercise of creating a Google Alert for  the place where I live was demoralising.  Honestly I don't live in such a violent suburb.  I wish I had created a Google Alert for work now.

Feed Burner was confusing but I can see the advantage for the organisation.  Having one location that provides all the statistical information about several blogs in one location.  I was interested to see the Publicize  tab that give tips and help to make your blog more accessible.  I personally like the ability from this one site to change all my blogs access all subscription services.  I can not speak ofr Feed Burner's statistics as  they weren't available.

Zoomerang was good fun, though I do find writing a good survey is harder than it sounds, the software with it's template surveys did help considerably.  Here is my survey for a Christmas Party.  This could have been very handy recently while organising our own Christmas Party plans.

So on the whole.  I can't say I learnt anything new about my topic through Google Alerts but  I can see that it is a great tool for getting a broad look at a topic from day to day.  Feed Burner has it's uses in managing multiple blogs and helping promote them online.  Zoomerang was great fun but doesn't replace a well trained staff member in survey writing.  In the hands of such a staff member, programs like Survey Monkey and Zoomerang are wonderful.  If staff aren't trained in survey writing, they can annoy and alienate customer with ill-conceived surveys that provide little in the way of useful information.

As usual no matter how good the application, it comes down to the skill and knowledge of staff to make the most of them.