Next generation shopping trolley to trial. I don’t know why this is making me feel uneasy. I mean all the technology has been available for many years and it all seems obvious – meant to happen – what took them so long?

An online shopping list accessible from the trolley. Nutritional information and possibly the eco credentials of my sausages. And of course, offers based on my shopping history…and my movements in the store – yes they can track you down the aisle using an RFID tag.

So, two people walking down the same aisles could be shown different offers, more expensive brands for the bigger spender and the unsecured personal loan deals for those on the shopbrand money savers.

I think the benefits will outweigh the potentially endlessly cynical ways marketers could use this technology – and most shoppers will be pushing around one of these before too long

There seem to be a fundamental shift in scanning when an image is introduced into the results. While the first reaction is to head to the top left corner of the results, seeing the image, people are moving very quickly to the image, checking the copy next to the image first and then making the choice from the listings above and below the image.
The traditional F shape scanning pattern is replaced by an E shape with the user dividing the page into 3 chunks.

The study even goes into looking at personalisation and a future results page where the two may be combined. A great read if you haven’t already.

With the majority of Bandwidth taken up by Video, time spent on a site may provide a better metric, than page views, but, even this starts to fall apart when you look at shared content. If I was to reference a YouTube video on my blog, and someone was to watch it here, my analytics would report a long session, and so would You Tube’s – and the external monitoring services like Hitwise would find it difficult to make sense of any of it – may be they would show my site in the up and down stream to YouTube

In November 2006 Media Metrix reported that MySpace had a higher share of page views than Yahoo! But according to Yahoo! this was entirely down to the introduction of Ajax, which reduces the number of traditional page loads, but maintained the time people spent on the site. Ajax enables a portion of a page to be refreshed without loading an entirely new URL, which is the thing measured by nearly all analytics tools.

My RSS reader lets me read all my favourite blogs without ever going to the site. Is measuring the number of subscribers on Feedburner enough?

What about the number of people that comment on a blog, or link to it, doesn’t this show how successful you’re at being connected?

The technical challenges to evolving new metrics is probably not as difficult as creating a standards that everyone can follow and trust. Whether we use time to measure interaction, or tag events in Ajax and other applications, measure the number of comments or reviews and even links and search engine rankings, there’s much to be agreed and resolved.