The joint is jumpin’
It’s really somethin’
The beat is pumpin’
My heart is thumpin’
Spent my money on you honey
- HAD A DREAM ABOUT YOU, BABY

It’s pretty addictive watching your blog stats, isn’t it? Remember when Google Analytics came to town and instead of waiting days to see traffic reports, you could see updates in mere hours. On a good day, you could sometimes see things in 15 minutes. Well, GA, there is a new new kid on the block, he shows you data in real time, and his name is chartbeat.

I’d never heard of it until last week when I was lucky enough to meet the cool folk at betaworks (@Borthwick and @aweissman). These guys don’t mess around – they’re behind such social media hits as TweetDeck, bit.ly and twitterfeed. You heard it here first – chartbeat is going to be big.

It’s really easy to get started – you just stick a couple of JavaScript tags onto all your pages a.l.a. Google Analytics, and you are done. The reports you get are much simpler than those from GA, but it is really real time. You can see the visitors on your site within a couple of seconds of their arrival. I wrote a test link bait post (sorry), tweeted it, and saw my 17 concurrent visitors within seconds.

Visitors to your site in real time. Notice one person is writing a comment. Click for large image.

But there is more. GA simply registers a hit when a page is loaded. chartbeat has a heartbeat and chats to the server every couple of seconds. This means that it can more accurately measure time spent on the site, user actions like scrolling (giving a nice scroll depth metric), and even keypresses. In the screenshot above, you’ll see one person is writing – they were leaving a comment at the time.

Typical detail page. Gotta love the scroll depth and engagement indicators

It also comes with a nice preintegration with backtype. This searches the social media buzz of the interwebs and reports activity as part of your report. When @izahoor, @theg, @irina_guseva, @cmsreport and @kevinc2003 were kind enough to retweet my horseshit blog post, I saw my dashboard get a bit busier and saw their link love appear shortly afterwards in the backtype console. Good stuff.

Nice integration with backtype. Click for large image.

It has an API and a bucket of prebuilt widgets. I haven’t had time to play with these, but I might add a widget here soon. The downside being, of course, it would pretty much always say “1 user currently viewing this page”. And that would be you.

It gets better. chartbeat even monitors the health of your site. While I was testing, my dickhead hosting company GoDaddy had yet another embolism, and my site flatlined for about 5 minutes. But unlike the previous million times this happened, it didn’t die silenty. I got a nice email from chartbeat informing me of the tragedy. Also, it tells you how long a page took to load for each user. 20 seconds isn’t great, GoDaddy. And yes, it has a free iPhone app too.

Because I’m a social media guru who understands transparancy and douchebaggery, I’ve shared my wonderful stats with the world. So have a look at my chartbeat dashboard.

You do have to pay a small fee for all this goodness, but it is money well spent. Buy it. Finally, a huge nod to @arctictony for helping me out.

I already assumed
That we’re in the felony room
But I ain’t a judge, you don’t have to be nice to me
But please tell that
To your friend in the cowboy hat
You know he keeps on sayin’ ev’rythin’ twice to me
- SHE’S YOUR LOVER NOW

We’ve got some more BlueWashing going on. IBM announced today that they’re acquired analytics and marketing vendor Unica for $480 million. It seems like a lot of cash to me, but then again IBM have got plenty and what do I know. I do know it follows quite shortly after they bought pure analytics vendor CoreMetrics.

The “Farewell to Coremetrics and Web Analytics as you knew it” post from the Unica blog (two months ago) is quite interesting in retrospect:

Now, IBM’s acquisition of Coremetrics follows suit as IBM folds Coremetrics into Websphere with the likely intention of making it part of the Websphere eCommerce technology stack.

With no major standalone contenders remaining in the market (WebTrends had signaled their interest in getting acquired) prospective web analytics buyers must evaluate the core competencies of the parent company in order to determine the best match for their current and future needs.

IBM does NOT appear to be making a play for a broader analytics offering

The wise seem to be saying that IBM isn’t actually going to bother marketing either Unica or CoreMetrics, but rather just add them into the already vast IBM Suite. Which effectively mean they’re being withdrawn from the Analytics battlefield. If that is the case, then the three players that will be slugging it out will be Adobe Omniture, Google Analytics and WebTrends. And although WebTrends are alledgely not trying to put themselves up for sale, I suspect they might be gobbled up quite soon. Maybe AAPL will feel left out of an Adobe vs Google slugfest, and buy WebTrends just to join the fracas. Maybe we should count Nedstat too, but I don’t see much of them. Or have they already been bought?

I’m the kind of guy that likes to believe the IBM <-> HAL thing (although Arthur denies it), and I’ve got this vision of poor IBM acquired vendors trying to wriggle free of the corporation. For no good reason, let’s end on this:

Dave Bowman: Open the pod bay doors, HAL.
HAL: I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.

She’s got everything she needs,
She’s an artist, she don’t look back.
- SHE BELONGS TO ME

Baaaah. I said I wouldn’t write this post, and a few people advised me not to. “Don’t Look Back!” they cried. But, dear readers, some of you begged for it. More importantly, I’m doing it for me (thanks Finnur) as a record. So if you don’t like these Blog Year In Review posts, stop reading now. Bye bye, and Happy New Year.

The Numbers

I finally started this blog in March 2009. The main reasons were a) I was up most of the night anyway due to baby’s sleeping habits and b) I was forced to take some holiday in March. I was never expecting anyone to read it, so a huge huge thank you to those that did, and helped me get some traffic love juice. I also got lucky with my timing as the infamous CMS Vendor Meme started just when I did. In 10 months, I’ve done:

• Real Life beers with about 30 or 40 people I’d never have met if I didn’t start this blog. You know who you are.
• According to Alexa, a mere 700,000 sites are more popular than mine. I’ve got a Page Rank of 5, although these don’t mean anything any more.
• 65 blog posts (34 in the long gone super-keen first 3 months). So averaging 1.5 posts per week. Each post has lyrics from a different Bob Dylan song. I’m aiming for 100 before a theme change.
• 571 comments (just over 8 per post). Probably 100 of these are from me!
• 5,224 spam comments that Akismet has saved me from
• 21,700 visits, or 45,500 page views, according to Google Analytics

My biggest day ever was about 400 visits. A shitty weekend is about 30. The traffic numbers have actually stayed reasonably constant since I started, although the frequency of new posts has dropped enormously.

Most Underrated

These are the 5 posts I liked most that never even made the Top 20. Please read them and tell all your friends. The poor guys never stood a chance.

Most Read

Here is the obligatory Top 10 by traffic. I’ve used number of unique visits as my metric.

Best Traffic Sources

Here is just a summary of where the traffic came from. Again, a massive thanks to those that lowered the tone of their sites by linking to me.

• 25% of my traffic was from search engines. Google is the only one that matters sending about 95% of these.
• 30% of the traffic was “direct”. I never bothered to set up tracking from Tweets but I’d bet the majority of these came from Twitter clients like Seesmic or Tweetdeck. Which means I get much more traffic from Twitter than Google. The other 45% of the traffic is from referring sites.
• Twitter was my top referrer by miles, with 25% of my direct visits.
• Second, third and fourth were all very close – cmswire.com, cmswatch.com and jboye.com. Eighth went to cmsreport.com
• FaceBook, LinkedIn and Delicious made the Top 20.
• The blogs in the Top 20 referrers were julianwraith.com (6), asserttrue.blogspot.com (7), reddotcmsblog.com (9), 2020visions.wordpress.com (13), sala.us (14), ecmarchitect.com (15), tristanrenaud.jahia.com (17), irinaguseva.wordpress.com (19) and persuasivecontent.com (20)

Well, that’s that. If for some reason you’re interested in a stat I didn’t share, ask in the comments. Be excellent to each other, and I’ll see you on the other side of the noughties for that beer. It’s been real.

There’s kissing in the valley,
Thieving in the alley,
Fighting every inch of the way.
Trying to be tender
With somebody I remember
In a night that’s always brighter’n the day.
- SEVEN DAYS

Picture the scene

You work for a big organisation. You’ve initiated a new major WCM project. You’ve got your board approval, you’ve had your budget signed off, and you’ve a vague idea of what you want:  a friendly CMS, a decent Search Engine, something to handle User Generated Content and some kick-ass Analytics. You’ve got a team of pragmatic-developer-ninjas waiting in the wings to integrate them beautifully. You’re in a good place. Time to procure some products. That should be easy. Let’s start with a cartoon which I made using the wonderful Project Cartoon.

You don't want this to happen, do you?

How Many Tenders?

So you need WCMS, Search, UGC and Analytics. We’re going to call these The Four Pillars for today. First question: How many RFIs/RFPs do you issue? Just the one so that a single vendor (or consortium) supplies all of the products? Or how about a single one with “Lots” allowing vendors to only respond to part of it? Or, on the other extreme, a separate RFP for each product? Some of you won’t have this choice as it is dictated by your procurement rules, but let’s pretend you do.

While each product certainly covers a Separate Concern of the site, the reality is that there will be a lot of integrating to do. The world doesn’t have mature enough standards to allow you to switch them in and out like the proverbial Lego blocks. The products will also certainly have large functionality overlaps. If you go for separate RFPs or split it into Lots, it is exceptionally important that you explicitly list the integration points between them. I’d suggest that WCMS and Search probably have the most integration points and should get special attention. User Generated Content/Social products often have widly different architectures and so should also get a lot of focus. They won’t all slot neatly into your solution in the same way. On the other hand, the major Analytics products all have the same basic architecture and so is, in my opinion, the one that is easiest to tender for in isolation. Because I am nice and want to help you all, I plan to write a followup blog post listing the most common integration points soon.

If each product is being selected in isolation, you need to be extremely careful. You could follow the selection and evaluation criteria by the book and end up with four products that are each “best of breed” and match your requirements wonderfully. But throw them into the same architecture diagram and they behave like four cats on heat. On the other hand, if you go for one process to select all the products, you could end up with a monster that you don’t really understand and that would need to be replaced in its entirety should one part of it become obsolete. I think its a fairly safe bet that you’d want to replace at least one of the Four Pillars within the next 2 or 3 years. You need to make very sure that this doesn’t mean you need to replace the other three. Finally, make sure your developer-ninjas have input into the selection criteria. You don’t want your team of C# developers to all have to rush to a COBOL training course.

Give a budget range. Seriously.

Janus Boye started a discussion about this on his blog entry CMS Selection: Reveal budget in the RFP? I’ll repeat the comment I left on his blog:

I’ve seen 2 RFPs in the last few months in which client didn’t specify a range and got something like this (I’m paraphrasing, of course):

2000 Ford Taurus SES – $2,482
1993 Toyota Camry LE – $3,582
2008 Lexus LS 600h L – $99,995
2002 Hyundai Sonata GLS – $4,300

They wanted to buy the Lexus, but their procurement was having none of it. They had to extend the RFP to attract more responses that allowed a “like for like” comparison. If think they’ve even had to go back to the Ford, Toyota and Hyundia salesman and ask them what they could do for more money … If the RFP had given a range (say $75,000 – $150,000) they’d have saved themselves a load of time and effort.

Also, if you have a weighted scoring matrix, make your selection criteria transparent so vendors allocate an appropriate amount of time to each section. Procurement like a fair fight. If they don’t think it’s fair, they might throw the whole thing back in your face.

Other Procurement Gotchas

The whole process can take a lot longer than you think. Many of the RFPs we respond to are extremely clear that they will never, under any circumstances, extend the deadline for submission. However, many of these delay the announced decision dates by weeks or even months. That’s not really fair now, is it. Give yourself enough time. Remember, the longer your RFP, the longer you’ll need to read and evaluate the submissions. In addition to procurement, include your legal department early too. Dotting i’s and crossing t’s isn’t as quick as it sounds.

Some clients I deal with have to go to procurement for everything. It seems a pity to go through a massive process to by a $99 Web Server Plugin. Make sure you know the thresholds so you can start the process in good time. I recently suggested to a client going through this that they buy all five options rather than going through procurement to select one. I was sort of joking and it probably isn’t legal, but the sad truth is that would be cheaper and all the vendors would be happy.

Something else I’ve seen a couple of times recently revolves around cross-country procurement. The rules in different countries are often different and, if you plan to use the software in multiple regions, you might need to go through “global procurement” or some equivalent. I still don’t really understand how to define when software is “used” (and so needs to be procured) in a region. If I have a server farm in country A and country B each hosting their respective country sites, then I’ll probably need to procure for both. But what if I have a single farm serving all coumtry sites? Or what if the whole shebang is *aaS hosted out of the Cayman islands? Bearing in mind you probably won’t know the architecture of the product when you issue the tender, it is even more important you understand the procurement rules.

Another gotcha I’ve seen a few times recently – falling foul of procurement’s “we’ve already got a Global Enterprise Unlimited Uberlicense for product X so best you used that instead”. Dilbert explains this better than I ever could:

Finally, make sure you cover license costs for development, staging and pre-production environments. And think about disaster recovery licenses and maintenance fees. Sometimes this isn’t as easy as it sounds as you haven’t procured all the products so probably don’t know your architecture yet. For example, having an Active-Active DR environment often means very different license costs from an Active-Passive.

My advice: involve procurement in the process early to ensure you understand the process. Although procurement exists to ensure you negotiate a good deal (which is great) in a fair, ethical manner (which is even more important) you need to make sure you don’t get hammered by a process that screws your plans or timelines. You’d be surprised how often software procurement is on the critical path and delays a project.

Now, there’s a woman on my block,
She just sit there as the night grows still.
She say who gonna take away his license to kill?
- LICENSE TO KILL

Just come back from a nice Brick Lane curry and a few beers with my old colleagues from Accenture. Just enough beers, in fact, for a minor rant. Before I start, I’d like to say that there is nothing I dislike more than someone that complains about problems without offering a sensible solution. Which is exactly what I’m about to do.

Here’s my problem. My day job involves me drawing many system architecture diagrams. This poses many challenges: How do I ensure that the solution is fit for purpose, reliable, scalable, extensible, performant, resilient and more? How do I select the best-fit third party products? What colours should the boxes on my Visio diagrams be, and should they have round corners? And how do I say my clients money?

Don't want to do this

It would be ideal if the vendors’ licensing models allowed us to harmoniously achieve all the goals stated above. The sad reality, however, is that the licensing model sometimes means that we have to sabotage our architectures in order to save a fortune on licensing. Some examples situations are given below:

• A per site or domain cost – Many vendors will charge you per “site”, the definition of which isn’t clear. Sometimes this is an IIS site or Application pool, but more often than not it is based on domain. So, if I have a global presense and use domains such as www.globalcorp.com, www.globalcorp.co.uk, www.globalcorp.jp and so on, I can get hammered with a 60 site license. Whereas, if I go with www.globalcorp.com/en-GB/ or www.globalcorp.com/jp/ instead and place simple redirects on my top level domains, I have a single site license. I prefer the first option, but not if it is going to cost the client tens of thousands of $$$/£££’s. Which means we sometimes reluctantly go for option 2. That said, option two does have it’s advantage in that single domains can be easier to manage (SSL certs, SEO and more), but I still prefer a domain per region.
• A per machine / CPU cost for a very small component – There are some vendors which will charge extra for each machine on which a component is installed. My pet hate here is a deployment listener, which is most often seen in a CMS that operates a decoupled publishing model. If, for example, I publish a news story from my content staging environment behind my firewall to my load balanced production environment on the other side, two things normally happen. The content is published to a remote database cluster, and the associated static files (images, for example) are remotely copied to the file system of each in the cluster. If the CMS employs a baking model, the content is normally also deployed as a static file. Now this is all great, until my web tier server farm gets large and I have to pay a ridiculous license fee for each box for the priviledge of having a file copy. The workaround here is simply to install the deployment listener on one server in the cluster, and run some free file system synchronisation tool (for example rsync) that copies that content to the other machines in the cluster. Another workaround is expensive hardware (like a SAN) which may be overkill.
• A cost for each named CMS user or editor - I believe it is extremely important for each user of a system to have a unique username and password, mainly for security and audit trail reasons. However, I’ve seen cases where a single login is shared by multiple editors purely to avoid a per login license. I wouldn’t be surprised if this arrangement violates the licensing terms, and it isn’t something we’ve ever done. I think this model is rare these days, normally replaced with a concurrent user limit.
• Vagaries around inter-, extra- and intranet use – Some licensing models depend on which part of the Enterprise use the system. I think the difference between an internet site and intranet site is still fairly well defined, but an extranet can cause enormous grey areas. Falling foul of this can have massive implications on licensing and needs to be considered when designing the architecture.
• A per hit cost for an Analytics products – Now this is off topic and more a question than a statement. Some of our clients use a free service (you guessed it, Google Analytics), but most use a larger commercial product such as Omniture or WebTrends. The licensing model is often based on the number of hits received by the tracking server. And this is what I was wondering: If I have an extremely high volume site, what happens if I only sample the visitors by, for example, tagging 1 in 1000. This sampling is a bit like an exit poll in an election. It would be quite expensive to ask everyone who they voted for when leaving the booth. Asking a small subset is much cheaper, and yields reliable results if the sample is truly random. This could potentially save a significant amount on licensing, and all I need to do is read my reports in terms of 1000′s of users. Of course this is a terrible idea when using advanced techniques such as A/B Testing or Multivariate Testing to increase the value per user. But it might be a good idea if you’re simply tracking behaviour. For the record, I’ve never tried this and don’t know if it would violate the licensing agreement. Does anyone have any thoughts on this?

I could probably go on a bit more. There are considerations around physical machines versus virtual machines, active-passive Disaster Recovery configurations and the definition of a staging/pre-production site. If anyone could add to the list above I’d be interested to hear from you.

I wish I could end this post with a suggestion for the perfect licensing model for the vendors, but sadly I have no answers. The vendors are all well aware of the short-comings of the existing models and people a whole lot wiser than me have been trying to find logical and fair ways to repair these. If any major vendor does think their price list avoids all these issues, I’d love to see it.

Until these issues are properly addressed, we will have to continue to consider vendor licensing models when designing our system architectures. But it depresses me enormously when a quirk in a pricing matrix makes me do something that I know smells a little bit like horseshit.