5 yksinkertaista askelta – tavoitteiden mittaaminen verkkopalveluiden kehityksessä.

Although this post will be short for a blog post and almost short enough for Twitter, please see this excellent cheat sheet for HTML5 by DesignModo. It’s still missing a printable version, but they’ve done a great job simplifying some of the new tags and events HTML5 brings us.

I’m curious, what are the best HTML5 websites you’ve seen? http://www.youtube.com/html5?

I was introduced to VNA cards a week ago at a seminar held at the Finnish Broadcasting Company’s (YLE‘s) facilities. After the seminar the participants were gathered to join a workshop. The idea was to innovate new web concepts using VNA cards. The cards were randomly selected and given to groups of people, who would then mix n’ match the V(erbs), N(ouns) and A(djectives) and try to create ideas for a new web service from that. Some great ideas arose. I became aware of the power of the VNA cards and got hooked.

The VNA cards originate from the game industry, which, no doubt, needs tools such as these. They were developed in cooperation with the Tampere University, or so I was told. The VNA cards are most powerful at helping when no boundaries or preliminary ideas exist. Because using them was both efficient and enjoyable, I wanted to try them myself. @Tuija was kind enough to point me to the right direction, and I got the VNA card templates. Next, I bought cardboard paper and glue, printed out the VNA cards and I was ready to cut & paste — the old way.

Here’s what you need to DIY:

• 12 sheets of A4 sized (210 x 297 mm / 8.3″ x 11.7″) cardboard paper
• Glue (don’t make the mistake I did: get a running glue, not a paper glue such as the one on the picture)
• The VNA cards
• A good knife to cut the cards out
• A ruler might be good, so you can flatten the air pockets when gluing down the papers and cardboard

And here’s what to do:

1. Print out the cards
2. Glue them on both sides of the cardboard sheet
3. When the glue has dried down, cut the cards out

The whole thing cost 10.04€ at Tiimari hobby store, and I got a few extra sheets of cardboard, just in case. The knife I already had, but those you can buy from any hardware store. Quite inexpensive, huh?

Passed the ISTQB foundation level certification test I blogged about earlier with 35/40 points. I found the practice exam we did during the cert course a lot harder than the actual test. Anyways, wuhuu!

I just read this bit older blog post about QR codes by P. Mertanen.

After having installed, re-installed and finally removed UpCode for several times myself on my Windows Mobile phone (the HTC Touch Diamond2) during the past year, I thought I’d give it one more go. Waddayaknow — I was thrilled to find a QR Code reader that did not crash every single time — namely, i-nigma. UpCode has a version that is supposed to work on my mobile, but every time the camera should be closing in on the QR code, the software crashes and takes down the whole camera, which works again only after a reboot.

The Quick Response Code (QR code) is the “new” 2d barcode that has pretty much replaced barcodes in many products but has also given new grounds for innovation. The QR is used worldwide on bus stops, business cards, product tags, marketing etc. Not that it’s that much more special than the good ol’ barcode, it’s just that almost every handheld owner can now have the reader handy all the time. The QR code has become quite a good tool for measuring multichannel transitions. Take Kiinteistömaailma (a Finnish real estate company) for example. They have used the QR codes on their business cards for a couple of years now, I think. When read, the QR code simply fetches the business card owner’s contact details on your mobile for easy contact addition. It is not a revolutionary innovation but works for the task at hand. If they are measuring the QR reads, they can actually know a little bit more about the impact of their business cards than would have been possible twenty years ago. The bus stops in Southern Finland are also covered with QR codes. By reading one, you’ll see a timetable of the buses passing by that particular stop.

Try out QR codes yourself!

• Morovia.com online QR code generator: www.morovia.com
• I-nigma QR reader for your Windows Mobile handheld: www.i-nigma.com

It so happened that I took a test for the ISTQB foundation level testing certificate today. I don’t know if I’ve passed yet, but I have some mixed feelings about the test. Googling it down after taking the test I found this blog post by James Bach that had some interesting points about the ISTQB as well as other testing certificates.

The test had 40 questions and 1 hour to complete them. On the certificate course, followed by the exam, we were warned of the test being guileful because of the word-play incorporated in it. James Bach had similar comments to say about it. Although I might not agree with everything he says in the blog post, unfortunately I must share Mr. Bach’s take on the test being too concentrated on semantics. Don’t get me wrong, I love semantics and linguistics (especially when it concerns the Germanic language tree), but this test might just put too much weight on that side instead of actually testing how well one knows the subject of testing. Maybe half of the questions were arranged so that additional time had to be spent just to try to understand the question correctly, but the other half consisted of relevant and not deliberately messed up questions. We were also warned of questions with double negatives (e.g. “I do not disagree”) but I don’t think I spotted any (might be my mistake, though). Nevertheless, I think the certificate training course was spot on for the foundation level — i.e. “[..]aimed at anyone involved in software testing”, as stated on the ISTQB website. It gives a good outline for the basic concepts, testing techniques, test planning and tools.

Taking the test soon? Even though I don’t know if I passed yet, I thought I’d share a couple of things you might want to consider when preparing for the test:

• Memorize the terminology, but also understand the underlying concepts because the test might use a bit stirred up terminology
• Go through the first answering round quickly and then go back to questions you have marked difficult, this way you’ll ensure you have answered something to all 40Q’s
• Be alert when reading the questions. Look for double negatives and fully understand the question before answering it
• It helps to have even a bit of coding background. If you don’t, at least understand this much about flowcharts:
  

Google has made it possible to share your Google Analytics or AdWords test results. You can decide what information to share and what tests to share, and will be given a link to the results. Here’s a link to my GAIC test that I blogged about earlier.

To create yours, here’s what to do:

1. Go to the Google Testing Center and sign in to your account.
2. Click the Manage Your Test Records link.
3. Click the Add link.
4. On the next screen, select the information that you want included in the test record. The Description can be any name you want; you’ll be the only one who sees this name.
5. Click Save. You’ll now see a test record.
6. Click the Description name to get the link. You can share your test record by copying and pasting the link.(Taken from the GA team’s marketing e-mail about sharing test results)

Logging to my MySpace account tonight, I was delighted to see that MySpace has a new analytics dashboard for artists! Although it only shows little information for now such as song plays and friends’ demographics, it is definitely a move towards the right direction. I’m also delighted to see that different social media platforms are more and more beginning to collaborate – they know they have to. I enjoy being able to feed my Reverbnation.com status to my Twitter, MySpace and Facebook profiles as this simply saves time.

Nonetheless, Social Media Analytics is still a mere infant and has a hard n’ long way to go. There are various SMA tools on the market but none of them handles communities that are shrouded behind passwords. None of these tools can read Facebook walls, to put it another way around.

More echo for the announcement of the new GA features on 20th October 2009? No. Although, I too, see these as absolutely brilliant and necessary improvements, today I’m writing out of discontent. This is because I’m seeing everyone else cheer the excellency of the new improvements, and I cannot access them on any of my Google Analytics profiles or accounts. This sucks.

On another blog I then found out that the features are not rolled out on every account at the same time, but in steps. Google, I’m asking you to please include a golive roadmap in the future for similar release announcements! Or at least clearly state that you’re not giving out the features to everyone just yet.

Other than that, I praise the Google Analytics team for the short update release intervals. If we’re seeing a new update with feature improvements come out every half year in the future, Google will evidently make it even more difficult to move from GA to other more robust but seriously more costly solutions and will be catching up on them anyway.

Yesterday and today two rather interesting company acquisitions took place in the internet field. First, yesterday Adobe announced having bought one of the leading web analytics software vendors, Omniture, and today Google announced to have obtained reCaptcha. Omniture’s acquisition by Adobe has shaken the web analytics world quite a bit, at least judging from the numerous tweets and blog echoes around the web. Here’s some thoughts on the acquisition bya former Omniture employee, Adam Greco.