OPEN

Image: Shadows…

I have a thought that I would like to share with you. It requires a bit of pre-amble from me and attention on your part, so it disobeys quite a few of Nielsen’s rules for McNugget size info-morsel web writing.

But this is my notebook, not my newspaper, so I’ll go right ahead…

Jeff Jarvis often mentions the idea of your Google shadow, the impression on the Google indexed web that you leave by talking about things and by people talking about you. I think that the shadows we as individuals and as membrs of networks, communities of interest are going to grow in all sorts of interesting and useful ways.

To my mind, there are basically three ways that people add to the network that is the web, the social web, the Web 2.0 operating system, however you like to think of it. Three kinds of data that people create that is useful to others in the network:

1. Creations: What we classically think of as “content”. Images, videos, blog posts, Tweets etc. Stuff we make and upload to the web.
2. Conversations: The comments, the ratings, the activities Forrester ascribes to the “Critic” class of user behaviour in social media in their emminently useful Technographics profiling. [LINK]
3. Behaviour: Everything we do on the web leaves a trail that affects the way that the web works, what it knows, in a way. When we search and click on things it improves the way Google works, when we read a blog post or a news article we notch another point up on the analytics measuring that.

We’ve been doing a lot of work on the measurement side of things at iCrossing. Although there’s a lot to measure out there and a lot of ways to measure it, we sense that people have yet to grasp the full potential for themselves and their businesses of being aware of what they can learn from data.

Through what we’ve been calling the engagement framework and active listening, we’ve developed a kind an ethos of “numbers and stories” that can distill, elicit, divine meaning from the mass of website analytics and data that you can pull together by listening carefully to your networks. Stories carry the meaning, the numbers show they’re true, would be the way it makes sense to me.

We think you can see all sorts of things. The ways that people behave on online, the things they talk about reflect an impact throughout their lives.

But more of that another time. The thought I wanted to share was that as the web becomes ubiquitous in our lives, the conversations, creations and behaviours we leave there are interesting not just in their own right but as echoes of what we are thinking, doing and saying in the rest of our lives.