When you live in a place like D.C., you tend to worry about things like terrorists bombing the Pentagon or people attacking the President.  Don’t get me wrong.  Winter here is horrible.  Whoever said it was mild has never lived through a Phoenix summer.  But this week – I experienced an Earthquake.  NO, I wasn’t visiting California, I was on the 16th floor of my work building and felt a shaking.  You didn’t have to tell me to leave the building — but first (and here’s the tie in with my regular themes of technology and social media)

I went to google, typed in earthquake and looked at the news tab.  NOTHING.  So… I went to Twitter and BOOM!!! There were all kinds of comments.  Did you feel that?  DC earthquake started trending as a topic.  And yes… I tweeeted before I packed the laptop and ran down the stairs.  (all 16 flights thank you very much)

Twitter was first on the scene.  People were talking about traffic (so I avoided it) and my relatives and friends were communicating with me that way when the cell phone was just not working.

Now with the Earthquake behind us, Hurricane Irene is upon us.  There are a lot of cool things going on to keep people informed.  I love the google map links to Hurricane Irene information.  You can see the path and it’s really interactive. I also appreciate President Obama’s remarks and then the fact that the White House tweeted links to keep people prepared and informed.  Then again, Barry doesn’t play when it comes to social media…

So in a time of unexpected weather, Twitter was used to confirm and share stories and when there was expected weather, Twitter was used to inform and prepare folks for the weather.  Not bad.  Not bad at all.

@madia for my digital tweets @lovemadia for my music tweets.

Okay folks, hold on to your seats. This is my first post from the iPhone. Yes, it’s like typing one super long text message. So writing straight from the device may be used for shorter posts. With the wp app you can maintain multiple blogs as well.

Here’s the good news. I’m going to post a lot more.

It used to be that if I didn’t have a notebook and a pen, I’d freak out.  Since I have a particularly bad memory, being able to write things down was always essential.  Aside from my memory issues, I also feared that in a moment of inspiration for a song or poem or short story – I’d be lost without a way to record it.  Yes, pen and paper were very important.  (I always dreaded writing in pencil even for math class.  It just seemed so temporary…)

So now, I’m all about my devices.  After all, when I have a moment of inspiration I write it in my Blackberry (BB) Notes.  If I have a song idea, I sing it into my voice recorder.  If I have a funny, short thought – I tweet it using my BB.  If I miss a friend, I’ll send them a “we need to get together” text message.  If I don’t have my phone, I can’t do any of that.

Oh and what about my music?  Wherever there is internet (work computer, or BB), Pandora can come through in a clutch with streaming radio stations filled with artists of my choice.  My music device of choice is Zune HD.  It’s not because of my Microsoft PC affinity, actually Zune just has a $15/month subscription that lets me download all the music I want.  iTunes doesn’t offer that.  (Sorry iFriends)  So as much as I like my iPod Touch, that is reserved for funky apps.  My Zune has music and podcasts.

My kindle has books (those that I haven’t found for cheaper on half.com), my digital camera has pictures that will never be developed, most likely downloaded for slideshows and fun screensavers, my digital voice recorder sits in a drawer – and on and on.

I have a lot of gadgets.  I love them all but I’d have to say that the BB and Zune HD are the ones that I roll with every day.  They are my modern day pen and pad.  It’s a convenient thought to have a device that does it all, but for some things like my kindle, the luxury is in having a dedicated device.  I can’t explain it.  It’s just where I am.

I was going to take a class on web analytics but instead, I decided to read Web Analytics 2.0 by Avinash Kaushik. First, this guy is legitimate. He’s an analytics evangelist for Google (wait… I’m totally a digital marketing evangelist.) Note to self: Use those search terms on TheLadders tonight.

The book contains a cool first page – It’s a $25 Adwords gift card from Google. I know some of you do, but I refuse to believe that the little guy has become the establishment. They’re just a little bigger now, and we can get cool gift cards and advice from their evangelists now because of it.

Back to the book… By the time I got to page 5, I was convinced.  He really DOES know what he’s talking about here.  I too was sooooo excited about all the data I got from my WebTrends but amazed at how little “actionable insight” I actually had.  I just had all that data but I didn’t know how to make it mean something.  He, correctly in my opinion, attributes this to clickstream data being great at the what but not at the why.

I really like the way he explains the paradigm of web analytics graphically.  The insights are still a part of it, but there are other things to quantify and measure, like voice of the customer and competitive intelligence.

That’s where I’ll end this post because… well I gotta get back to reading.  I will end on this cool fact I learned from the book.  Did you know there are websites that will compare your website’s performance to your competitors??  How COOL is that?  The one he talks about in the book is www.compete.com.  At a glance it seems that you may need to create a free profile to get some cool insights but it seems GREAT.  Adding competitive data to your insights is useful and probably new for a lot of us, not yet working in a company that has an an analytics evangelist.

I’m going to keep reading but I have a feeling my recommendation will only get more insistent.

Cool Blog Alert:
Avinash has a blog on web analytics and if you’re into that, you may want to bookmark: www.kaushik.net/avinash.

Okay, I’ve been building up the rationale to buy a Kindle2. I try not to purchase the first thing because well there have to be improvements but I’m all for hopping on V2. Since I’m an avid reader (and highlighter) I love the idea of being able to carry several books around in a neat chic Kindle. I’ve decided that I have to check the titles that are available and play with one before I purchase.

But where? Where can I go to play with a Kindle?

So I’m walking in the airport the other day and it hit me. Kindle should have airport booths. They should get the expo setup and do a tour through the really busy airports. They could have two or three people man the booth and give a special offer to those purchasing – like a free book download coupon so you could track who got information through the booth. Amazon can always test the idea at the Seattle airport and see how it goes. I’m not sure of the implementation details.

…I can tell you that if a Kindle were in the airport when I was, I would be an owner by now.