Updates to Omniture on LiveJournal

[theljstaff]

We’re making a change to the way we've been gathering statistics on LiveJournal and wanted to let you know the plan and details in advance.

Back in January, we announced that we'd start using Omniture SiteCatalyst as the system that lets us dig deeper into how members and visitors use LiveJournal. Back then, we had only used Omniture's tracking

Comments

[cacahuate]

I would like an explanation for this too.

[entropy_house]

They were tired of cat-macros?

[cacahuate]

Come on, we all know it takes at least a few pages for the cat macros to kick in. They never had a chance!

[talinthas]

all omniture does is gather data on how many hits a page gets. When i worked for a big video game website, we used to use it to track how various stories were doing, and how our monthly hits were overall. It doesnt tell you anything other than the number of hits a certain page gets, and the times of day that the page is most active. no content of the page is ever revealed.

Note--i don't work for LJ or Omniture or anything related to them, but this is pretty harmless overall.

[rileysaplank]

I'd guess that private means any posts that you've put under the private settings as these are no use to LJ as data gathering pages as no one but you can go to those pages.

[talinthas]

Omniture tells them how many hits a page gets, and when it gets those hits, and nothing more at all. We used to use it at the website i worked at just to gauge how we were doing that week and month.

[txvoodoo]

Not really. "web analytics" is the industry-standard term for this.

It's not so much worded badly as it is using the proper industry nomenclature.

[thevelvetsun]

Thanks for giving us the chance to opt out.

So, we're working on creating a single policy document that is linked from the bottom of every page in the LiveJournal application. To be completely honest, it's going to take us a little bit of time to get that done, since we want to work with everyone from our community as well as the usual folks like lawyers. We think it will be a few weeks, and we'll update on progress as that happens.

Any news on that?

[whetherwoman]

Thanks for providing clear information on how to opt out.

[whetherwoman]

Also, will there be a more public announcement of this change as well? Say, in lj-news?

[wickedgood]

They've been disseminating news in a very fractured manner lately - more commercial/promotional crap on news, with other 'real' news hidden on lj_biz (and hardly ever updating info on paidmembers, which sucks when reinbursements are announced on one source but not on others). And sometimes news posts will refer to ANOTHER source (be it a 'personal' LJ of some random management personnel, or another of their news reporting communities) for members to have to go in order to get the info. I think they are hoping that most members either don't have all news sources 'friended' or fail to click on all relevant links, and management can just give the run-around answer "oh, we announced that important change on (obscure news source #whatever) MONTHS ago" whenever shifts in policy become apparent.

It's a very shady way to do business.

[whetherwoman]

Personally I think it's more an expression of incompetence than maliciousness.

Either way, I'm linking my own friends list to this post.