Good and bad analytics

Analytics can be bad or good. Here are some ideas for both.

Bad analytics

• Track a user’s eye movements on your advert
• Time an employee’s loo break.
• Record someone’s speech in a place that feels private.
• Guess demographic information. For example, guess their gender from their first name.
• Track everything “just in case you want it one day”.
• Get someone to agree to all of this by giving them a long and hard-to-read terms-and-conditions.
• Pump it all into a large language model.
• Desperately watch the ‘like counter’ go up.
• Grade children with a sit-down test at age 6.
• Judge public opinion by reading tweets.
• Don’t campaign against a first-past-the-post voting system.

Good analytics

Here are some ideas I have for good analytics.

• Listen to when the audience laughs in your comedy routine.
• Welcome thoughts and feedback from your online audience. Read the good-faith comments. Bin the rest.
• Develop a trusting relationship with your class, and empower them to assess their own understanding during a lesson.
• Check your class’s self-assessments by asking them to ‘be the teacher’ and show you (or their friends) what they just learned.
• Remember that you are not your work. Enjoy improving your stuff, while knowing that it doesn’t affect your self-esteem (positively or negatively).
• Invite people to fill in a ‘guest book’ on your website.
• Be a true part of yourself regardless of any success/failure. Don’t seek to change that. Seek the people that ‘get you’.
• Raise money for charity and notice which social media platforms donate the most.
• Ask your paying supporters to put your videos in a tier list.

Tell me what you think! My contact details are on todepond dot com.

Back to the blogi.