Guy Kawasaki’s blog post on his web stats raised a lot of discussion. Some people disputed the results while others denounced the blog as being low in content.
I think some people need to take a chill pill.
It’s Guy’s blog. He can write what he wants. I personally found it interesting what he produced – it shows that the combination of celebrity plus great content can produce great results in a short amount of time. It’s a great comparison to our own efforts in self-branding through infurious. Some readers of that blog were disheartened somewhat by only generating 1300 hits in two months without realising it’s still an incredible result.
Anyway.
This post is meant to be about the difference between DATA and INFORMATION.
Data is meaningless. It’s just numbers and words and noughts and zeroes. It’s raw, it’s unformed and because it’s unformed it cannot be used to INFORM. Information, on the other hand, has had the crap stripped out of it, and it’s been reordered and sorted so it actually means something.
The problem is that the line between Data and Information is blurred. It’s not really a process where you pass data through a filter and pure, uncontaminated information comes out. Data analysis is a continuous process. There’s information available almost immediately. And new information will come to light the more you examine it.
Web stats are just the first extract of information from data, not the last.
And if I was internationally famous[1], then we’d have had higher hits on our blog 
and we’d not have made a red cent because we’re not doing the adwords thing.
[1] technically I am. But not for this…