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Web Survey Bibliography

Title WWW Site Measurement: A Collective Interview
Author Hurwitz, R.
Source World Wide Web Journal, 1, 3, pp. 121-126
Year 1996
Access date 07.08.2004
Full text doc (43k)
Abstract The Web's explosive growth and its consequent discovery by advertisers seem to have turned the measurement of individual site use into a frantic numbers game. There are now obvious incentives to boast about "hits" and push to its limits the tracking of users within and across sites. As a result, advertisers have become skeptical about the meaningfulness of the numbers they hear, while users have grown wary about leaving tracks in cyberspace. Such tensions surfaced at the January, 1996 Workshop on Internet Survey Methodology and Web Demographics, where over a third of the participants listed privacy versus data needs as a chief concern. These tensions will haunt future forums until standards for comparing data and assuring privacy are established. The community of Web developers can speed up the process by looking again at the basic issues in measuring use. Might there not be a small, common set of answers, that satisfy everyone's interests, to questions like: What should we measure? How and why should we do it? How can we reconcile providers' needs for numbers with users' concerns for privacy? What non-invasive methods can overcome problems of counting that come with proxy servers, client-side caches and statelessness? Developers who specialize in the collection and analysis of site use data are one group that should have practical answers to these questions. They, after all, depend on interest from the provider or sponsor, on one hand, and acceptance by the user public, on the other. So, to start the discussion, we invited "loggers" who presented their systems at the January workshop to a virtual interview, summarized below.
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Year of publication1996
Bibliographic typeJournal article
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Web survey bibliography (4086)

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