Tuesday, March 27, 2007
A MuVar Opportunity Knocks
When opportunity knocks, do you open the door? And if you do, how do you recognise it as an opportunity?
I once camped in a desert for several weeks. When we arrived the place was indistinguishable from anywhere else for miles around - flat sand with tufts of spinifex and shimmering heatwaves.
After probably 10 days, an amazing transformation began to take place. Ridges and valleys began to form, and some of the spinifex began to transform into shapes resembling the turpentine scrub farther north. And we began to know our way around, navigating by the newfound topography rather than our compasses.
Had the landscape really changed? No. We had become more discerning. We were picking up subtleties that had completely escaped us when we arrived.
Opportunities are a bit like that. They sneak up on you the more you immerse yourself in your current focus.
Which is why I raised my eyebrows when James Brausch posted that he was looking for suggestions to improve his MuVar multi-variate tracking software. I'd been using it as designed, to optimize the visitor experience on static websites. But the more I explored Wordpress blogs and social networking sites such as Squidoo and Reddit, Myspace and YouTube, the more I wondered whether something such as MuVar could be applied there.
It would need to run on php, and remote servers where administration is shallow, and on variables set by others. But if results akin to those achieved on static sites were possible, it could leverage such freely available business building tools enormously.
Just a thought. There was a knock on the door, you see.
I once camped in a desert for several weeks. When we arrived the place was indistinguishable from anywhere else for miles around - flat sand with tufts of spinifex and shimmering heatwaves.
After probably 10 days, an amazing transformation began to take place. Ridges and valleys began to form, and some of the spinifex began to transform into shapes resembling the turpentine scrub farther north. And we began to know our way around, navigating by the newfound topography rather than our compasses.
Had the landscape really changed? No. We had become more discerning. We were picking up subtleties that had completely escaped us when we arrived.
Opportunities are a bit like that. They sneak up on you the more you immerse yourself in your current focus.
Which is why I raised my eyebrows when James Brausch posted that he was looking for suggestions to improve his MuVar multi-variate tracking software. I'd been using it as designed, to optimize the visitor experience on static websites. But the more I explored Wordpress blogs and social networking sites such as Squidoo and Reddit, Myspace and YouTube, the more I wondered whether something such as MuVar could be applied there.
It would need to run on php, and remote servers where administration is shallow, and on variables set by others. But if results akin to those achieved on static sites were possible, it could leverage such freely available business building tools enormously.
Just a thought. There was a knock on the door, you see.
