Tuesday, July 3, 2007

How can I improve our Published Metrics?

I ask this question every week at my inworld office hours and in my regular blog posts, but there's no such thing as too much input on this, especially when I get reviews like this. (ouchie!) This post is fair criticism of our February stats, though certainly these past few months since have brought a lot of changes and improvements, on each of the concerns raised. Some bloggers are noticing the improvements. Each of these is a step forward, and I have lots more to come, but I would postulate that we are the most transparent and open company in both the Metaverse and MMO spaces in terms of real published metrics. I hope to stay well ahead of the curve with this, too.

Metrics Terms Definitions - our new wiki page for the Metrics Glossary will be the core updated source of explanation of the numbers. There is already a starter discussion happening about it, please contribute your questions/comments there, or comment here. The next step is to link the glossary terms from the headers of the actual reports. I have an interesting approach I'll be using for this- to be expanded in an upcoming post.

I have two new categories in the public JIRA, under the WEB heading. One is for our public reports and charts that we publish on a regular basis, and the other is for our data feeds. This is our tool for entering new feature (report) requests and to identify and track any bugs that you find. Please use this tool to vote for which new datasets you would like to see- and if there's one you want that isn't listed, please add it! There's a great guide for using JIRA for non-techies on Kala Bijoux's blog that's worth your time to explore.