I agree with the central point, that web analytics lacks rigor. But I don't think it's wholly true that the problem is that our own motivations cause our analysis to lack objectivity. I think the other reason the author gives is the really key one: analytics data tantalises us with the idea that it may be coherent, complete and realistic; in fact it is wildly diffuse and represents only a tiny slice of the lived experience of users.
There was so much to enjoy in Embassytown: the Hosts, the Metaphors, the Festival of Lies, biorigging, Immer, the super-cerebral ending. Anyone come across anything equally juicy recently?
I've been doing this too, with mine! A recent discovery is that if you keep all the Y pieces pointing in the same compass direction you seem to end up with a track which is always 100% traversable in either forward or reverse.
The Browser! https://thebrowser.com. I frequently see its recommendations percolating through to the front page of HN. 5 hand-picked articles a day drawn from every corner of the internet, covering philosophy, literature, technology and other things, linked, pithily summarised and available as email newsletter, RSS feed, or full-text Instapaper/Pocket auto-push.
> In many private industries, even highly regulated ones like finance, the people who first successfully transitioned the industries to computer based systems are now dying of old age. The NHS hasn't even started.
Google's model rests on the assumption that all the ads on the site will be Google ads, and as such this scheme comes with a fairly heavy incentive for content providers to carry Google ads only.
Declaration of interest: we're trying to do something in the same space with content-that-should-be-or-is-paywalled with Financial Times articles on The Browser (http://thebrowser.com)
I wrote a post on a similar topic this week. https://mechanicalsurvival.com/blog/failing-to-visualise-web...