Lately I’ve been reading books online at safari. I’ve found that for about 10 dollars a month I can have 5 books and read only the parts that interest me. So it’s quite a good deal right ?
For about 8 euro a month I can read about the things I want to learn and print out the useful content. This month I selected 3 books:

• Ajax
• Mysql clustering (this one is scary)
• Web measurament hacks (the one I’ll be commenting out)

This is the pyramic model of web measurement:

One of the important things the book tells in the first pages is the terminology of web measurement. A crucial thing if you want to become a professional “web data analyst.” The terms I wanted to emphasize, because I’m going to talk about this later, are the following:

A hit
An action on a web site such as when a user views a page or downloads a file. (definition of webTrends)

A page view
A page view is counted with the successful loading of any document containing content that was requested by a web site visitor, regardless of the mechanism of delivery or the number and frequency with which said content is requested.

Visits
A visit is counted when a unique visitor creates activity on a web site, measured using sequential page views (clickstream), regardless of the duration of this activity as long as the period of inactivity between page views does not extend beyond 30 minutes.

Unique visitors
Unique visitors represent the number of actual individual people, within a designated reporting timeframe, with activity consisting of one or more visits to a site or the delivery of pushed content. Each individual is counted only once in the unique visitor measures for the reporting period.

(+) For the people working on online marketing we can add to the top of the pyramid:

Leads
Which are registration (marked as leads in most affiliate programs). A lead is a user that visited the site and registered. One lead can be a possible sale afterwards.

Sales
Finally at the very top of the pyramid the registered user makes a purchase and becomes a client that will probably return if he is satisfied with your service.

After learning all this terminology you can finally talk like an expert and say things like:

Hits? I’m sorry, we don’t use that term around here unless we’re talking about baseball.

Interesting links I’ve been recently

Leopard Mac OS: Video of a guided tour
Video: What’s Steve Jobs like in a meeting? « counternotions