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I’ve poured a lot of time and money into this house, but it’s that time again.

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I frequent digg.com fairly often, but just happened to notice that they were going to have a live broadcast via uStream.tv to address users issues and questions. This is something that I have never seen before from any (albeit a startup) company. Before the townhall meeting, they collected comments and questions from users on this Digg story and went through the top 20 questions.

This townhall meeting could be viewed as very successful in my eyes, because it achieved two things:

1. Allowed users to submit issues to the creators of Digg.com about usability and features that are/aren’t working for them - and have them addressed.
2. Allowed the creators of Digg to collect opinions about the site and have them essentially ranked in order of importance by the avid user base.

Now, as a web analyst, one thing pops into my mind about the value of this type of forum. The goal of being a web analyst is not just to to learn what the user is doing, but to understand why the users are at your site and how they are using it. It is rare that you will have a very clear cut survey telling you exactly what users are concerned about. Currently I am working with my main web developer at my new job to create event tags on main functions of one of our sites to find out if they are actually using certain features or not. This requires man-hours, testing, implementation, and this method is not scalable for a massive site (we’re only measuring clicks on the home page) - and that’s just to measure a behavior, not to add a new feature/functionality/content! In the townhall format, they ended up with a much more dynamic and democratic version of a user survey from real users. (extra reading: Kaushik.net - the importance of surveys) They also appear to be more open to the public (in addition to diggnation) which builds trust from the user base that they are actually doing it for “us”.

Anyways, that’s enough nerdy web analytics talk for one post. I also wanted to point out that while having Digg.com CEO Jay Adelson answer some of the questions was good, he comes off as a huge dork, and definitely needs more time on camera before stepping up to another live Town Hall broadcast. Kevin Rose should not let him talk as much as possible. Don’t believe me? Watch the archived live broadcast for yourself on Mashable or Digg.com/Townhall. Jay’s the one on the left.

In web analytics news, I will be attending the Web Managers Roundtable tomorrow in DC…see you there!

I finally took the time to scan in the bulk of the remainder of my obsessively collected movie ticket stubs. Thankfully my scanner can detect multiple items and automatically splits the images apart. I added about 75 or so scans of movie tickets to my “Scanned Tickets” set on Flickr, as well as two concert tickets that will forever be burnt into my mind. Weezer’s comeback concert at the 9:30 Club after being dormant for many years, and Phish @ Meriweather when Don and I drove to and from all the way from JMU almost passing out countless times while driving on the way back.

These tickets date all the way back to 1997, when I was still in highschool and saw an average of a movie a week, and usually paid for none of them. The recent scans also reveal movies I’m embarrassed to have seen like Dude, Where’s My Car?, the worst movie ever made Deep Impact, and Rob Schneider’s Deuce Bigalow. Anyways, this archival process is mostly for me, but you might find it interesting…

Scanned Tickets Set on Flickr.

This past Christmas, my parents really scored with a random gift that I never asked for, didn’t realize I wanted, but turned out to be something that I really like. It has now been a couple months with my Garmin Nüvi 650 GPS navigation system and it’s awesome. I will start out with some of the positives and then dwell on some of the negatives that really bug me.

Positives

A few years ago, for me it was both unpractical to get a navigation system stock in a car or as an add on accessory because they cost too much. I still think that they’re a little unnecessary because I usually know when I’m going. These units have come down significantly in price and I believe improved their usability, screen size and features. I haven’t followed this segment of the market too closely because I wasn’t in the market for one.

Some features that I really like are the turn by turn voice directions, that tell you to turn or stay straight at the right time based on the distance and your speed, saving of favorite locations, searching for nearby landmarks such as restaurants, gas stations or parking garages, the large 4.3″ touch screen and of course the many stats that you can get about your current trip like max speed, average moving speed, average overall speed, time idle, etc. There are also many features that I will probably never use, like the ability to load audio books onto the onboard memory or SD card slot and the (painfully slow) picture viewer.

Most of all, the Garmin is super easy to use. In fact, it doesn’t even come with an instruction manual (but for those technologically challenged, the manual is available for viewing online). Once you fire it up for the first time, you answer a few setup questions and then you’re ready to go. The main menu has many quick options that are handy like, go home, go to favorites, find food/gas/lodging, etc. This becomes useful when you’re in an area (like MD!) where you don’t know where the hell anything is. I’ve used it a couple times around my new office building and on the way to work. But unfortunately like all or most map systems (online map or GPS unit), it might not give you the best directions. When you manually type in an address, it will pick up the street name, state, or city within the first three letters. This reduces the time to type in the whole street name. You can search by intersection, street name, or business name, so if you don’t know any of these - just get off the road and ask someone please.

Negatives

Of course there are negatives to every product, and this one is no different. The good news is that while they are annoying, for the amount that I use it, they are tolerable.

The first negative is the way that it’s charged and mounted. In order for you to suction cup the unit to your windshield, you need to lift the GPS antenna, then clip in a mount that has the charging port. For some reason, even if the unit is off, and the GPS antenna is up, the battery is still being used. This means that you have to remove the clip/charging unit to put down the antenna. So essentially mounting and un-mounting the GPS is a three step process and requires you to find places in your car to store all the random pieces. Quite annoying.

The battery lasts a decent time. It’s rated at 7-8 hours, but I find that it dies a couple hours sooner than that. And annoyingly, it doesn’t tell you that the battery is about to die, it just shuts off leaving you wondering when to take that next turn. Some features that I wish it had, but are available on more expensive models are live traffic updates (available with an expensive add-on), and bluetooth calling. With the traffic feature, I would probably tend to use this unit almost every day.

Conclusions

I would recommend this Garmin but with caution. If you’re lost all the time, and anticipate being a heavy user, opt for a more feature laden unit with traffic and bluetooth. I’m not sure if all the models have the same mount/charging issue, but it’s something else to look in to, or at least be aware of the nuisance. For the more casual user, this should be fine, and can find it for <$300 at Costco. I use mine probably about once every couple weeks, so it’s not too much of a pain to fire up whenever I need to find something.

Any questions?  Please leave a comment, or send me a message…

Garmin 650 Site

On Vimeo

After editing this video together, I realized that I’m not even in it. Think of it as supplementary to Dave’s video - his video proves I was really there!  And as a side-note, I’m kinda disappointed with iMovie 08’s lack of video editing.  Apparently that’s going to be addressed in future updates.

Dave just compiled a video of our trip to San Fran from a few months ago. Beware, it’s random, strange, extreme and contains a lot of slow motion videos! I guess that’s what happens when you get together with your old band from college. I can’t wait to get out there again soon. (on Vimeo)