I was bursting at the seems wanting to talk about this ahead of time, but one has to respect timing! The company I work for Webtrends, has produced an advertisement campaign to kick start a conversation that has often come up on Portland Transport, here, and other transit related blogs in the City of Portland. Webtrends will be providing analysis to this campaign across the web to show the power and strength of effective analytics. As Jascha Kaykas-Wolff our VP of Marketing has written,
“What we are really advertising is our strength; the power of our products. The ability to measure conversations whether they happen on your site (visit pdx.webtrends.com for more details) or off your site (social media) regardless of the topic.”
Web analytics has a way of expanding our knowledge about marketing, sales, and business related information, but it also has the ability to expand our knowledge about ourselves. It represents accuracy in our social existence beyond the simple interaction of business. So the question now is, how will citizens of Portland represent upon the blogs, Twitter, and the sundry of great website available throughout the city? I'll bet pretty well considering Portland's connectedness.
Personally I'm stoked to have a connection between one of my amateur fascinations and actual professional work. I look forward to the City's results, as measured by Webtrends. :) Now some of my regular readers might think – oh great, they'll do this study and the data will just disappear! Oh contraire, in will be collated and crunched and put together to properly correlate appropriate causations and be open and via the site available here: pdx.webtrends.com.
Hope you transit riders (and, walkers, drivers, boaters, flyers, ferry boat riders & cyclists) will join in and add your opinion to, "Should cyclists pay a road tax?".