How recently was google analytics added to these forums? If you don't want google tracking your every move, go get a cool plugin called ghostery from addons.mozilla.com.

Google Analytics is amazing.

The CustomizeGoogle extension can block it and do a bunch of other stuff.

Are we going to add Visistat as well?

Google is watching me?
Cool, I don't need a tinfoil hat.

:tinfoil::tinfoil::tinfoil::tinfoil::tinfoil:

After I installed ghostery I almost died laughing when my local news site was using something like 7 separate analytics packages.

This needs to have a HUGE tinfoil over it.

Google already does way more useful tracking just off of search results. And of course there's the whole no-personally-identifiable information bit. I am simply using it because it's far and away better than the other analytic software I've used as far as information (screen resolutions, referrals, time spent, etc). Ones that also track your every move yet you've had no problems with thus far

But hey, whatever makes you sleep better at night.

hmmm...can somebody explain this thread to me?

CoolMatty: Ghostery alerts you to and can block a bunch of similar scripts and 1x1 tracking images.



Some of them were probably delivered by advertisements (iframes etc).

Can you export the data so we can see some pretty graphs?

It already makes the pretty graphs

I'll post something up for curious members once I have a month of data.

Except I also have adblock which should block those from loading in the first place.

Nothing tinfoil about it -- they don't just track your site, they track where everyone goes, they literally use this to track internet usage patterns, not just search engine traffic, not just your site. There's a big section about this in their FAQ. The whole point of the service is to gather information from every computer that visits. You load massassi, which in turn loads the google code, which uses javascript to gather information about the visitor's computer, packages it up, and sends it back to google's servers. Google then takes that information and makes pretty graphs for you.

Other tracking/log analysis programs run solely on the server where the site is run -- for example, if I visit massassi, it will send all that info to massassi rather than to google.

Regardless, clearly I don't have a huge problem with it, I was just surprised you put it on here.

I mainly got ghostery because it reduces requests at a number of sites I visit and makes things a lot faster (which really helps on the ferry's slow wifi).

I know what Google uses it for. I also know they track usage patterns well just from search results, and you can't block that. I don't mind disabling it if its page loading a lot. That's a non-tinfoil reason.

Yeah, because metadata is worth a lot. No-one gives a **** what you individually browse for, but loads of people are interested in what a million people, on average, browse for (and how it holds their attention).

It's how Twitter is probably going to be monetised. We all know that an awful lot of tweets are like "I like icecream!" and not very interesting, but if thousands of people all tweet "I like icecream!" at around the same time, that is very interesting and is worth a lot to advertisers, pollsters, and companies in general.

Metadata a much better way to make money than ****ing banner ads.

What's your favorite type of Ice Cream anyway?

pistachio flavour.

Anyway, the Google Analytics scripts are the last thing in the page source for a reason: they to avoid blocking page load. Google Analytics is far from being the only externally hosted analytics package, the fact is that the solutions you can install on your own servers are almost universally terrible.

This. My server runs 3 (4 if you could Webalizer which is more of just bandwidth monitoring than anything), and they're all god awful. Awstats is the best of the bunch, but they all look like they were made back in the 90's as an afterthought.

They probably were.

Speaking of ice cream, does anyone actually like spumoni?

yes!

i used to work at a retirement home for a number of years and the only ice cream they served was chocolate vanilla and spumoni. since chocolate and vanilla get old real quick i learned to love me some spumoni...

Spumoni is wonderful