Beyond Measure

AI Agent Analytics with Vercel & MotherDuck

Thu, 30 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

If you have a website these days you might be missing out on a lot of valuable data. You used to be able to just drop a simple widget on your site and track your visitors. While the accuracy of that has steadily declined with ad blockers and legislative requirements, it has been the go to for identifying users on your website or app. Now there is a new way of interacting with your online content that doesn’t care at all about your carefully crafted web analytics setup: agents. When you ask your favorite AI tool like Claude or ChatGPT to research a topic, product or site they will request purely the content of your site. Your JavaScript tracking widgets and events are never executed, tracking pixels are completely ignored by agents. Your Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics or PostHog instance has no clue a visitor has even passed by.

MotherDuck on Cloudflare Workers: real-time apps at the edge

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

So, you want real time and interactive, but handle large analytical data at the same time? Cloudflare Workers are small serverless functions that allow you to create fast, scalable apps on Cloudflare’s edge network. However, Cloudflare Workers are lightweight functions and therefore do not support native DuckDB bindings. They can, however, connect to MotherDuck through the Postgres endpoint using the pg package. This gives you an alternative path to query MotherDuck from edge functions without relying on DuckDB dependencies. In this post we’ll build a end-to-end application with a TypeScript back-end and a front-end app with HTML/CSS. Let’s go!

You're right to be anxious about AI: This is how much we are building

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

It feels like there’s a new tool, framework, or SaaS product every hour. That feeling isn’t wrong. I looked at a bunch of signals to validate this feeling: Show HN launches, GitHub repos, npm, Rust and PyPI package registries, even Product Hunt, the rate at which people ship new things is accelerating. Here’s the data.

Show HN: the shipping rate is accelerating

Not every one might read Hacker News, but if you’re in the tech scene it’s hard to miss. There is a specific type of post called ‘Show HN’ where someone can show their project. If you’ve build an online (side-)project you want to share with the world this is one of the first places to go.

Microbatch: how to supercharge dbt-duckdb with the right incremental model

Mon, 02 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

TLDR: Use microbatching for large, time-based tables where robustness and backfilling is important. Always use multi-threading in dbt-duckdb, but more threads and more RAM is not always worth it.

Why We Built Microbatch Support for dbt-duckdb

I like a good benchmark as much as anyone, as long as it’s not benchmarketing. But benchmarks don’t tell the whole truth about your production workload.

They don’t tell you what it’s like to stay late on a Friday evening while everyone’s heading home, just because the table that was 10GB last year is now 4TB—and it takes forever to replace the columns that had a bug in them.

LLMs Are Cheap Enough to Change How You Work With Data

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We talk a lot about whether AI is smart enough to take our jobs. But I think we’re missing half the equation: it’s not just about being smart, it’s also about being cheap. Last month I backfilled roughly 60,000 historical job postings on selectfrom.work using an LLM. Each request extracted a summary, salary information, technologies mentioned, and job type. Total cost? $10.

Sure, there are some mistakes here and there. But for me this enables a type of analysis at a scale that was completely out of reach before. I don’t think an actual job was taken here, but there’s definitely a competitive advantage to be had when you can process tens of thousands of documents for the price of two coffees.

DuckDB is my new Excel

Mon, 03 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’ll admit it, as a data engineer I still use Excel. It’s great for exploring unknown datasets or CSVs from stakeholders. There is something just so convenient about seeing data in a tabular format in a tool that everyone has, knows and uses. I’m here to tell you that you can 10x your Excel powers without even using AI. As much as I like the tabular format, the downsides are also very real:

Turn Thousands of Messy JSON Files into One Parquet: DuckDB for Fast Data Warehouse Ingestion

Mon, 22 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

If you work with API data long enough you eventually inherit a directory or bucket full of tiny JSON files—one per product, event batch, log minute, user snapshot—because “it was easy at the time.” That convenience tax shows up later as slow scans, schema anxiety, and rising warehouse bills. DuckDB lets you pay that tax once: consolidate early, then model against something stable and polite.

Why Tiny JSON Files Hurt Your Pipeline

APIs commonly emit one JSON per entity or per interval, produce uneven batches, introduce or drop nested fields over time, and repeat key names excessively. On object storage you then pay a latency and request tax just to list and fetch thousands of small objects before you even parse them. Warehouses must then repeatedly decode untyped text. Schema drift further forces defensive SQL, and “quick reprocessing” means walking the file tree again. Instead of pushing that complexity downstream, you can touch your raw files once, normalize early and expose a stable surface for analytics and modeling 🤘.

LLM Personas with Faitch: An AI-Powered Fetch for Content Analysis and making your life bearable

Sun, 14 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Nietzsche reading Hacker News. Not metaphorically, but literally: I can run faitch https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45168823 -t nietzsche and get the German philosopher’s take on whatever tech drama is unfolding today. Or have Wittgenstein analyze a job posting with his characteristic precision about language games and empty corporate speak.

This isn’t just a party trick (though it is entertaining). It’s the result of solving a real productivity problem: I found myself copy-pasting articles into Claude or ChatGPT to get quick summaries for work. What started as a simple automation has become a way to bring different analytical perspectives to any web content with a single command (and make me laugh a few times a day).

Beyond Tables and Views: Building a Custom dbt Materialization to Deploy Streamlit Apps on Snowflake

Wed, 27 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Deploying Streamlit apps with dbt on Snowflake using a custom dbt materialization: a practical tutorial and exploration

If you want to jump straight into the code, you can find it on Github.

What if your dbt model could deploy a dashboard instead of creating a table? If you’ve worked with dbt for any amount of time, you’re familiar with the usual suspects: table, view, and incremental materializations. These are the bread and butter of data transformation—turning your SQL into database objects that store or reference your transformed data. Tables persist your results, views create virtual representations, and incremental models efficiently update existing datasets.

Optimizing Snowflake Costs with dbt Query Tags

Sat, 19 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

If you’re using Snowflake, you know that things can get expensive very quickly if you don’t watch out. Whether it is turning down the default warehouse timeout settings from 10 to 1 minute, limiting the autoscaling, or making sure that your undersized warehouse times out when trying to process more data than it can handle instead of continuing throughout the weekend… Out of the box it can be hard to see the full picture of what is going on in your Snowflake account, especially when you have dbt running alongside other queries. The following trick will help you improve the visibility on your Snowflake costs from dbt. You will be able to tell

Test Driven Development (TDD) with dbt: Test First, SQL Later

Fri, 27 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

If you’ve spent more than three days as an analytics engineer, you’ve probably had that moment: your dbt model runs, but the numbers look… off. Not broken, just weird enough to make you question your life choices (or at least your SQL). The code works, but the data? Not so much. And let’s be honest, most of these “surprises” start with the classic: “Let me just quickly fix this.” Fast forward a week, and you’re untangling a mess that would make spaghetti jealous. Ensuring data model quality isn’t just about passing tests or making your code run. It’s about making sure your data is actually useful, trustworthy, and won’t get you a passive-aggressive Slack from your stakeholders.

Unit Testing dbt Macros: A workaround for dbt's unit testing limitations

Mon, 10 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

If you come from an analytics background you might still know what it was like to have folders full of notes and SQL files to keep track of your transformation queries for dashboards and analyses for business questions. Dbt solved a lot of the problems with that approach by keeping track of changing queries in a team setting through version control, splitting long queries into smaller building blocks, even testing the resulting tables or views. But one key piece was still missing: unit testing.

Data Observability is not a tool: understanding data quality at the source, in transformations and in governance

Mon, 08 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Have you ever wasted time or money because you made a decision based on incorrect data? Then you’ll appreciate the quality of your data. Fixing data quality issues, however, is a whole different beast. There are many different tools and technologies claiming to fix your data quality: data observability tools, data lineage, semantic layers, data catalogues, but to find the right solution to your problems, you need to understand why data quality is an issue in your organisation in the first place.

Data Ingestion Pipelines Without Headaches: 8 simple steps

Tue, 12 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This post has been expanded to appear in my book The Fundamentals of Analytics Engineering, a perfect handbook if you are looking to learn more about data modeling, data quality, data warehousing and data ingestion.

We all know that data, like wine and cheese, becomes more valuable when combined. And, just like wine and cheese, they can lead to serious headaches. Whether you are emailing Excel files around, capturing data from thousands of IoT-devices, or just joining your Google Analytics and sales data, you can benefit from following a structured process to minimize your headaches. After yet another pipeline debugging session I’ve come with the following 8+3 model of 8 steps and 3 focus areas.

Adding Geo and ISP data to your analytics hits with Snowplow and Cloudflare Workers

Sun, 18 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Have you ever seen certain small towns in your analytics reports with thousands of visitors? Or maybe a lot of traffic from a country where your products don’t even ship to? Google Analytics used to have a very nice feature that would allow you to see the Internet Service Provider (ISP) of the originating request. This made it easy to identify bot traffic and spam in your analytics account. That feature is no longer there, but we can still leverage that data and recreate the feature for ourselves in Snowplow. As you may know, I’m a big fan of Cloudflare, especially their Workers. Cloudflare Workers are small functions that allow you to enrich or adjust an HTTP request. Using Cloudflare Workers we can enhance our request

Own your web analytics pipeline for €0.02 per day: Snowplow, Terraform, dbt, BigQuery and Docker

Sun, 18 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

With Google Analytics’ sub-par performance over the last few years, you may have been on the lookout for alternatives or just overwhelmed with the amount of LinkedIn posts claiming to have the ultimate list of alternatives. In any case, many of us have stopped a moment to think: “What do I actually want from an analytics tool?” I don’t know about you, but I want a cheap, customisable, self-hosted solution for my blog that is pleasant to work with. Let’s see if we can use Snowplow for that!

Fetching IPv4 CIDR ranges from AWS, GCP, Azure and Cloudflare for bot detection with Python

Tue, 23 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Bots are a big part of the internet. Some are legitimate, like the Google Search crawler, but others have more nefarious purposes, like scanning for vulnerabilities. If you want to understand which part of your traffic is related to bots or automation, you can use a couple of attributes to identify this traffic. The user agent is probably the most important one, but also the referrer URL or page path can be an identifier when it’s used for referrer spam for example. But while a user agent can easily be spoofed, one of the most important attributes in bot detection that’s not spoofable is the IP address.

Automatically Lint and Publish your Snowplow Schemas with Github Actions

Wed, 17 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Imagine this: your website team has developed a great new feature. The developers are proud, the product owner is happy, and now they come to you to hear how it’s impacting sessions and conversions. You look at the data and realise they messed up the tracking implementation.

Snowplow fixes a lot of these tracking problems by giving you the ability to work with schemas, a codified description of expected data. For example the schema with the expected values of a booking appointment event could be described in a JSON format similar to this:

Using Search Console BigQuery data with NLP to extract and group by the most important topics

Sun, 19 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

With the recent update to Google Search Console (GSC) allowing us to export search console data to BigQuery it becomes very easy to do some fun stuff. BigQuery has a ton of capabilities to process and slice data. To better understand the trends of certain topics over time, we’ll extract those topics from the search queries directly so we can see how clicks and impressions for those topics evolve over time. With a little bit of black magic —that’s what some would call using JavaScript functions in SQL— we can make these crazy charts tracking topics and their underlying queries over time.

Why web analytics is still a mess in 2023

Sun, 26 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

How hard can it be to measure how many people visited your site? I recently spent a few days at a fantastic (web) analytics conference. After talking to so many smart people it suddenly struck me: we are not solving the problem of web analytics, we are solving how to work around the problems. Sounds too philosophical? Let me start with a picture first.

For a long time web analytics looked like the Webalizer image above. A few default charts indicating the amount of traffic to your site. We solved the problem of web analytics, right? People view pages on your site. You see how many pages have been viewed. Done. Then how come web analytics teams keep doubling in size? How come we have agencies, consultants, conferences and an entire industry still discussing solutions to problems that once seemed solved? How can web analytics be as simple as the chart above and so complex at the same time? How come everyone can understand how a website works, yet every conversation on the analytics of that website ends with: “But why are these two numbers not the same?”

Mastering Time in dbt: Incremental Merging of Estimates and Actuals for large datasets

Tue, 21 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Incrementality is hard. Updating larges table with new information while also updating existing entries is not for the faint-hearted, but of course you are here because you’ve risen to the challenge. And so we shall conquer time and (storage) space together! The challenge ahead of us today is that of overwriting estimated data points with actual data points when they arrive (like the cavalry).

Let’s first take a step back and reiterate what incrementality is, why it can be problematic when we have data or rows that need to be updated at a later point in time from the original entry (also called late arriving facts). Have a look at the following table from a spreadsheet that contains sales data from Peppa and George.

About

Mon, 13 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

👋 Hey! I’m Dumky, Developer & Agent Experience Engineer at MotherDuck, the serverless analytics platform built on DuckDB. With a background as a Senior Analytics Engineer, I’m passionate about making data engineering accessible and practical.

I’m also a co-author of Fundamentals of Analytics Engineering and have built everything from €0.02/day Snowplow pipelines to terraformed dbt deployments. When I’m not talking about data, you’ll find me organizing meetups and speaking at conferences about the modern data stack.

Create your own API from BigQuery data in minutes with SQL exports and Cloudflare Workers

Tue, 07 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

How do you expose data in BigQuery with an API? I was recently looking for an easy way to do just that and make data from BigQuery publically available with little effort but still secure. The result of this effort is now available on my analytics page and if I want a JSON response with my BigQuery data, for example pageviews in the last 90 days all I have to do is call /analytics/json/pageviews. Is it magic? Not really, as I’ll show you. But the services supporting this are close to magic.

Dbt In a Box: Using Google Cloud Run and BigQuery to run your dbt SQL models from a Docker container

Sat, 31 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Update June 2023: I have created a massive blog post on how to get started with Snowplow, Terraform, Docker and dbt that has some more insights on how to best run dbt in a container as well. This post is still valid, but know that there’s more if you are interested.

Dbt is a great tool to transform data in your data warehouse. It allows you to version control the rules and business logic you want to apply to your raw data. However, it can be tricky to set up if you’re new to it. For our use case today we’ll transform raw web analytics data in our BigQuery warehouse to dashboard-ready tables with session and user data. To be specific, we’ll use this website’s analytics data tracked with Snowplow and process it with one of Snowplow’s dbt packages. The dbt packages are great because we can leverage the standardised models that the Snowplow team has created and minimise our own efforts. In other words: we’ll have more time for coffee! And not only time, but also money, as our solution will be extremely efficient with resources costing at most a few cents a day: perfect for a small business or blog.

Language Detection in SQL with BigQuery Remote Functions

Thu, 30 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Over the last few years SQL has really started embracing its second adolescence —it’s nearly half a century old after all. It’s been riding the fast sportsbike —dbt— and now the Google BigQuery SQL dialect is trying out something more extreme: native integration with serverless functions, called BigQuery Remote Functions. Ok, maybe that doesn’t sound as exciting as a sportsbike, but hear me out.

A SQL query has always been limited by the constraints of the language and the database it lives in. What if, within that same language, you could take any set of data (rows, columns) and let it take a quick, easy, scalable step outside of that ecosystem and back. That’s basically what BigQuery’s integration with serverless functions means. You can enrich any kind of data from your database through a Python, NodeJS, Java, or whatever-runtime-you-prefer function and pipe it straight back. I can think of a few use cases like adding in realtime stock prices or currency conversions, enrich company or location data from outside APIs, but today I want to start with something simple and language related.

Check Cookie Consent with Playwright's browser automation in Python

Sat, 11 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

If you enjoy this post. I’ve developed an easy package called ‘consentcrawl’ to run a quick check on your site doing nothing more than running consentcrawl <<my-site.com>> in your terminal.

There’s nothing like watching 20 browser windows pop-up on your screen to make you feel like a proper hacker. So I always grab on to any excuse for a browser automation project. In this case we’ll be writing a Python script to do a GDPR consent check with Microsoft’s Playwright for multiple URLs at the same time. After we’re done we should be able to:

Analytics on the edge: server-side request tracking and cookie setting using Cloudflare Workers

Mon, 22 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Server-side tracking is all the rage these days, but let me tell you about the uber-coolest kid on the blockchain: edge analytics. I’m kidding, there’s no such thing as edge analytics (except maybe for IoT devices —story for another time—), but there is the possibility to intercept requests on the ’edge’ of the network. Using Cloudflare Workers, you can send data to Google Analytics for all kinds of scenarios, even for users visiting pages THAT DON’T EVEN EXIST!

How I got millions of credit card details using agencies’ Google Tag Manager (GTM) accounts

Mon, 25 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

If you’ve been around this blog before you might know that I know a thing or two about Google Tag Manager (GTM), the convenient tool that lets you run marketing and analytics scripts on your website. What you might not know is that I’m also a father of two young children, and I can tell you, kids are expensive! So, obviously, on sleepless nights, one starts to ponder all the ways to make a quick buck on the side: “How to use one’s knowledge of the interwebs to create a nice college fund for the kids?”

DocTags: automatically generate documentation from the notes field in Google Tag Manager (GTM)

Tue, 12 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

If you’re just looking for the code and a quick start, you can find everything on Github and you can find a live demo at docs.dumky.net.

Google Tag Manager is a great tool when you first get to know it: you can finally track that button in Google Analytics without having to wait 6 months on your dev team, hurrah! But after a few years reality kicks in. Now you’re three agencies and two interns in and your container is starting to show it: five similar looking pageview triggers, 300 tags of which half seems to. be for pages from before your website migration to a new platform and the other half for the agency you fired but that still pushed the tags for each of their unique display campaigns from DV360 to GTM.

Monitor Google Tag Manager version status and send notifications to Slack: the easy way (Zapier) and hard way (GCP)

Fri, 18 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

One thing that has bothered me over the years is the weirdness of not having any possibility for setting up a pipeline in Google Tag Manager for when new container versions are published. Wouldn’t it be great not only for security reasons to keep an eye on container updates, but also to automatically update documentation, set up notifications in other services, or run some tests. But alas, all we have —and only since recently— is a dropdown that let’s a user receive a notification when a new version is published.

Speeding up GTM with a caching proxy using Cloudflare Workers

Wed, 26 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

“Google Page Speed says GTM is slowing down my site, can we remove it?” I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard that. I wrote about some best practices to improve performance before, but let me show you how to use GTM and still get that coveted 100/100 score on Google Page Speed Insights. We’ll do so by setting up a proxy with a cache and serve Google Tag Manager from that cache instead of from the (slower) Google Tag Manager servers. This has two benefits:

Using GTM with a Content Security Policy (CSP) and impress your DevOps team in the process

Mon, 19 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The internet is a beautiful place. If you think chaos is beautiful, that is, because it is also a place where everyone and everything is hacked, abused, and manipulated for money, status or just the lolz. To prevent your precious Google Tag Manager implementation —and your entire site for that matter— from falling victim to malicious code taking over checkout funnels or secretly listening to form input from visitors it’s time to implement a Content Security Policy (CSP). At the end of this you should understand:

Tf-Idf in Google Sheets: implementing text analysis, keyword counting, tokenisation and stemming in a spreadsheet

Tue, 13 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Google Sheets, the online Excel alternative, is basically the Swiss army knife of any modern knowledge worker. We’re adding to it’s multitude of uses and abuses today by creating a custom Tf-Idf model in Google Sheets. A Tf-Idf model can help us digest large quantities of text like reviews, comments, feedback, chat histories, and even 17th century philosophy books with ease.

Our end result will be this Google Sheet — just make a copy for yourself— that can easily handle the Tf-Idf calculation for more than 50.000 documents. If you’re thinking about handling really large quantities of text, you might want to consider using Python and the NLTK package. But, hey, you’re here now, that means you’re probably a nifty hacker looking for a clever Google Sheets hack to impress your colleagues (isn’t everyone?)

Cookie Consent: A Simple Checklist for Compliance

Wed, 07 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

With terms like GDPR, Cookies, ePrivacy Directive, ePrivacy Regulation, ITP, ETP, most people’s heads will start spinning. Nonetheless, not complying with privacy regulation can be a costly business in three ways.

You can be fined for non-compliance. And, yes, regulators are actually handing out fines, despite anything your local ‘marketeer’ might say. And these fines can range anywhere from €15.000-€15mln (and more if you’re a platform or big player)
You might disappoint your customers for not being honest with them, appearing dishonest because of a faulty implementation, or unnecessarily tracking them, or too much information about them without their actual consent (more than just an absentminded click on ‘proceed’)
It can cause downtime for you (or your app) now that other players like Apple are also cracking down on organisations and apps that mislead customers in their tracking capabilities.

So time to assess your cookie consent implementation with a simple glossary of definitions, a simple checklist, some best practices and actual examples of what’s good and what’s bad. I’ll go over some of the implementation steps to check cookie consent for commonly used tools like Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics.

The 5 essential steps of a (web) analytics pipeline: collection, routing, ingestion, storage and visualisation

Mon, 01 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

When we think of analytics we think of tools like Google Analytics, Mixpanel or even Tableau or PowerBI. But analytics is not just a tool. When we understand the mechanisms behind these tools we are ready to see what each of them brings to the table and how they might solve the problems for the unique snowflakes that we are.

I’m known for being abstract and longwinding —blame the MA in philosophy— so let me try to break down what I mean by ‘understanding the mechanisms’. If we take a tool that we’re all familiar with like Google Analytics, we see that it does a few things at once that can potentially be done in other ways. It:

Why Google’s new GTM server-side tagging solution is a big win-win for both your website and Google.

Wed, 26 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Just a few days ago Google released a new version of their tag management system: Google Tag Manager Server-Side. Here’s why it’ll have a massive impact on analytics, advertising, A/B-testing, privacy and Google’s own cloud solutions. But first things first. What on earth is server-side tagging and why do I need it?

Tagging, the practice of adding small pieces of script and code to your website for —mostly— advertising and conversion tracking, has mostly been done by adding all that code to the website itself. A tag management system (TMS), like Google Tag Manager, Tealium, or Tag Commander makes this very easy for the marketing department because your developers only have to add the code for the TMS once and the rest is handled within the TMS interface by marketeers. In fact it has been so easy that most ecommerce websites are riddled with hundreds of lines of script from Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Criteo and all other major advertising platforms, with Google Tag Manager (GTM) being the weapon of choice for most marketeers.

Building a complete tag monitoring solution for Google Tag Manager

Thu, 09 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Do you know if all your tags are used in Google Tag Manager or if you can remove some? Do you know if they work for all your users? Or if they fire on the right dataLayer events and how long they take to execute? Follow along for a complete solution to monitor your Google Tag Manager implementation including a dashboard. Tag monitoring will allow you to understand if important tags are actually firing for real users on your site and see when they break down.

Real Time Analytics Monitoring with Google Sheets

Sun, 07 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Whether it’s because you don’t want your business to lose money or because you just like to watch videos on YouTube, automating your analytics monitoring can help you sit back and relax knowing that everything’s under control. This time we’ll look at how a simple Google Sheet can help you check your analytics on the fly with the Google Analytics Real Time Reporting API.

The Google Analytics Real Time Reporting API allows you to get data in —you guessed it— real time, instead of waiting for up to 72 hours as is the case with the regular reporting API. Obviously we don’t want check our Google Analytics views every 5 minutes, so we’ll get a script to do it for us. There are a few tricky things to remember though.

Measuring with DataLayers, Data Attributes, Meta Tags and Webhooks: When to use what

Sun, 19 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

When asking developers to add extra information to a site like a user ID, user login status, page category, product price, SKU’s or even product margins the conversation that ensues can be confusing. Do you want everything in a dataLayer push?

If you’re not sure what you want thing can get muddy. What’s the event name for the data layer push containing the page category? pageCategoryReady? That sounds a little weird. And maybe you’re already using <meta> tags that also have the page category for SEO purposes. But shouldn’t you use JSON-LD for that? And what about data attributes? I know, it’s all very 🤯.

Using Puppeteer to automate your google analytics testing

Mon, 13 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

While the general idea of this post is still very much relevant. I’d recommend using Playwright instead of Puppeteer. It is much better maintained and documented and has support for all major browsers. Check out my post on using it to check cookie consent to get an idea of how Playwright works.

Testing your analytics setup regularly can help you prevent uncomfortable situations with your boss or client when there’s been another change on the site and suddenly all your campaigns and goals have zero conversions. I recently wrote about testing your analytics setup with Cypress as part of the development process. This time however, we will look at how to test the actual requests that are being sent to Google Analytics, Facebook, or any other place you have your tags pointed at.

Analytics and tag testing with Cypress

Mon, 06 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

A note beforehand: though I really like Cypress, you might also want to think about using Puppeteer for your testing.

One thing that’s often overlooked in setting up your analytics is making sure it keeps working. When you add new tags or your developers deploy new versions it’s easy to forget about your site tracking until the revenue in your ecommerce reports drops to zero. That’s usually the point where accusations fly back and forth past the office chairs and the boardroom starts asking uncomfortable questions.

Why you should stop using Google Analytics (as we know it)

Mon, 02 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Or why GA’s Web + App property with its event tracking framework is the future of web analytics.

Tell me, what do you do on the web? I promise I’ll be all GDPR and CCPA compliant about it and won’t tell anyone. But seriously, what do you do? Do you buy clothes online? Groceries? Do you read The New York Times? Or just watch videos on Reddit and Facebook? Do you look for jobs or look for people to fill your job openings?

8 ways to optimise Google Tag Manager (GTM) for speed and performance

Mon, 30 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

UPDATE: with the GTM server-side release I’ve added a section on server-side tagging

UPDATE 2: There’s a number 9 that shows you how to serve GTM through a caching proxy to increase performance

Google Tag Manager makes it incredibly easy to add marketing tags to your site. From registering ads conversions and transactions to sophisticated tags that segment users based on the weather in their current location, you can go crazy without having to go back to your development team every time. But that doesn’t mean you should do it all. While your dev and SEO teams are working hard to reach their pagespeed goals, all the marketeers are having a proverbial party in their yard. Here you’ll find a few tips to increase performance, clean up tags and variables, remove unused javascript and keep your Google Tag Manager container lean.

GTM Custom Templates: how to think about building your own

Mon, 24 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Just looking for the template? You can find it on Github.

Recently Google Tag Manager introduced custom templates. Custom templates are a way to make tag management even more manageable and scalable. A great and effective example is a custom template for the Facebook Pixel. In a way GTM’s custom templates can seem very limited, since they’re built on a very restricted, sandboxed version of JavaScript. There’s much potential in custom templates, but it helps to think about the fundamentals of tag management when you start building your own custom template. In this post I’ll show you my thinking behind a custom template for building a frequent-flyer style tag to track user behaviour as an attribute.

ITP 2.1: Why you won’t make your advertising targets, but will finally understand how cookies work

Thu, 16 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This post was also published on the Dept blog on May 8th, 2019

I actually believe you will not make the targets for your online ads this year, and I’m not just saying it for the clicks. This is not your fault, or the developer’s fault, or the social or SEA consultant’s fault, or the creative’s fault. You can blame Apple, but don’t be too quick to judge. Last February, Apple introduced version 2.1 of their so-called Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) causing major impact on a number of fields: A/B testing, analytics, affiliate marketing, conversion tracking and most importantly remarketing. The short version is, as you can read in more detail in various places: you won’t be able to target Safari users after seven days. The long version takes us back to the internet in the ‘90s and makes you rethink the results of your online ad spend.

A Visual Leviathan: Hobbes' Schizophrenic Writing

Thu, 02 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I have spent many hours of my life devoted to studying Thomas Hobbes’ book Leviathan. It was published in 1651 and is considered a starting point of modern political philosophy. It is a fascinating book, I even wrote a thesis on it, but one thing had always nagged me. You see, Hobbes writes very concise and structured arguments. He starts out by considering how people used to live before we had larger societies, this is where the ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’ part comes in —Hobbes wasn’t a fan of prehistoric human life it seem. He then goes on to consider how that ’natural’ state influences and creates a framework for the justification of a centralised ruler, the leviathan. We subject ourselves to the leviathan —a medieval king basically— because we’ll end up in a better place than the prehistoric chaos. That conclusion is drawn halfway through the book though, and after that is when things get messy. Hobbes then basically starts a new book on ‘The Kingdome of God’.

The speed of information: from clay tablets to data trucks

Wed, 04 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

What is the fastest way to transfer 100 petabytes to the cloud—that is to say, about 200 thousand times your laptop’s capacity? Who has that much information, you ask? Plenty of companies with years of digital documents, movie studios, government agencies, you name it. If you think your fiberoptic cable will help you out, think again. At this size and even with the fastest connection we are still talking multiple years of uploading data[note]You can play around with this download speed calculator[/note]. So what is the fastest way? It’s driving. Amazon has a large truck that functions as a single giant harddrive which will upload your archive to the cloud in less than 10 days. With so much information wirelessly available we tend to forget that that information, or the data behind it does actually have a physical component. A truck like that shows you exactly that we have certainly not left the physical realm yet and that the logistics of connecting information and people will not be going away soon.

The Case of The Mistaken Philosopher: How Aristotle didn't write a quote about talents and vocation.

Fri, 29 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Spoiler alert: it wasn’t Aristotle who said “Where the needs of the world and your talents cross, there lies your vocation.” Read on to get the full story.

We’ve all been there. We want to add a little spice to our presentation, give our paper a bit more eloquence, or just appear to have ‘deep thoughts’. So you type those reviled words ‘inspirational’ and ‘quote’ into your search bar and you end up in the vast lands of discontextualised phrases and aphorisms —I too have travelled those lands, I’ll admit. In those lands you find a quote by Aristotle that seems simple, profound, and suited to your needs. It has equally suited the needs of lazy career counsellors, ministers and general dealers of free advise before you. Unfortunately this quote too, has to join the rank of famous sayings that were never said. Just like “Elementary, my dear Watson”[note] I know from personal experience that this quote occurs in none of the stories from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.[/note] was never said by Sherlock Holmes and “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”[note]Salon has a list[/note]⁠ was never said by Albert Einstein. So what was this particular thing that Aristotle didn’t say? “Where the needs of the world and your talents cross, there lies your vocation.”

Innovating on Giants' Shoulders

Sun, 24 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

It is stuck away all at the end of a letter. One of the many Isaac Newton wrote to his adversary Robert Hooke. Their disputes over their work, inventions, and science are still visible in the written words, but they also show a difference in attitude. They show a difference in view of how science works, how innovations come about. Where Hooke was known for his hubris and claimed ownership over inventions that were supposedly still stuck in his brain somewhere, having not yet found their way out, Newton showed more humility as to where his ideas came from. It is at the end of a letter to Hooke dated February 5th, 1675 that he writes: “If I have seen further it is by standing on the sholders of Giants.”[note]James Gleick has an excellent biography of Newton’s life that also discusses this quote[/note] That quote, used so widely nowadays, signifies a fundamental difference between the two. A belief in science and innovation as pure originality and genius or science as building on a ladder of existing ideas. Newton believed firmly in the latter and the idea that you could take ownership over an idea, claiming originality, was madness to him. Yet, centuries later we often still have trouble acknowledging that we stand on the shoulders of giants.

Too Much Information Syndrome (And A Cure)

Fri, 14 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I believe we are built to distinguish signal from noise. It’s not just the fake news on Facebook, the hipsters on Instagram, or the kittens on YouTube that we are able to filter out (or not…). It is a general ability to, in an instant, understand what is important and what is not. Despite the fact that in recent years the all-encompassing interwebs has created a collective attention deficit disorder, our ability to distinguish signal from noise has not changed. It’s just that there’s more noise and more signal. It’s not something just humans do —though, yes, you are special, but I’ll get to that later. It’s an ability a lot of animals have when we say they can smell fear, or hear danger coming. That ability to filter out the noise has helped us survive for millions of years. I think we can use it even more and even better.

Why business is out of sync with evolution

Thu, 13 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I remember running on an English soccer field a few years back. We were playing 7-a-side, I think. What I like about 7 or 5 a-side games is that the pace is a lot faster than the usual 11-a-sides. With the 11-11 you can often take your time if you’re in the back and the game is taking place up front, on the smaller field with the smaller teams, the gameplay can switch in an instant. I remember this particular moment very clearly, because I had a sudden realisation. I saw my team mate picking up speed, passing one of the opponents. I noticed an empty space up front where I could break open the game for my team. I sprinted in to where I thought the ball and I could meet. As it came toward me on the right, I picked it up with my feet, took it along for a few meters, looked up to where our striker was, passed it, and in under the minute this all took place we had scored a goal. I remember this moment, because my realisation was: “This is what we’re supposed to do as humans”. Maybe that’s the downside of playing soccer with other academics: you think to much. But what I mean is not necessarily that we’re made to play soccer all day. What I mean is make use of our ability to sprint at 20 miles per hour for a short moment, predict where another object coming in from the side traveling at a similar speed will be in two seconds, observe the situation and all the relevant elements, and then make a split-second decision. We are not the only animal that can run fast and predict where objects will be, but we are extremely good at combining that with a mental map of the situation and using it to cooperate with others.

Analogieën: de snelweg naar succes

Mon, 30 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Als ik zeg dat ik een concept voor je heb dat een snelweg naar succes is. Wil je aandacht van je publiek? Hier is een beproefde methode om de code te kraken. Waar denk je aan? Zie je het voor je? Het is de analogie, een van de krachtigste communicatiemiddelen. Aandacht is niet een code, het is mentale staat van mensen. Succes is niet te bereiken via een snelweg of wat voor weg dan ook. Toch snappen we gelijk wat er bedoeld wordt. Ik weet dat een snelweg betekent dat ik sneller kan rijden en sneller op mijn bestemming kan komen. Als ik de ‘bestemming’ succes heb, wil ik daar natuurlijk zo snel mogelijk zijn. De elementen —een weg, een carrière— zijn onderling verschillend, maar ze delen “een gemeenschappelijk patroon van relaties”1. We kunnen ons voorstellen dat succes een beginpunt en een eindpunt heeft en dat we de tijd daartussen zo snel mogelijk af willen leggen om bij ons eindpunt te komen, in dit geval het verschil dat we willen overbruggen —nog zo’n analogie— tussen onze huidige situatie en de gewenste situatie van succes. Een ding valt al gelijk op: Het is lastig om abstracte concepten als succes uit te leggen zonder analogie.

TUTORIAL: In 3 stappen je data verbeelden met iconen

Sat, 21 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Hoe enthousiast wordt jij van het cijfer 9? En van 13.5 miljoen? Wat vindt je ervan dat er afgelopen jaar een stijging in de omzet is geweest van 12.3%? Als het aan mij ligt ben ik ondertussen meer geïnteresseerd in de manier waarop de beamer aan het plafond is opgehangen als ik nog niet in slaap gevallen ben… Als je echt impact wil maken met je verhaal moet je betekenis geven aan je data. Een cijfer op zichzelf spreekt niet tot de verbeelding, totdat je het betekenis geeft. Je kunt natuurlijk de cijfers kiezen op basis van het verhaal dat je wil vertellen — Mailchimp doet dat mooi in hun jaarverslagen. Maar soms moet je het doen met de data die je hebt. Gelukkig is er een makkelijke manier om je data levendiger te maken, betekenisvoller.

Tutorial: In 4 stappen van data naar visuele impact

Mon, 16 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Je kent het wel, een tabelletje met verkoopcijfers ergens op slide 18 in presentatie met kwartaalcijfers. Of tabel 6 in dat artikel op pagina 33 dat op pagina 25 besproken wordt. Te vaak wordt data —bewust of onbewust— op zo’n manier gepresenteerd dat afbreuk wordt gedaan aan het verhaal. Soms is het een gebrek aan analyse en inzicht, soms is het een bewuste keuze om de trends in de data minder zichtbaar te maken. Ik wil je vandaag een voorbeeld geven van zo’n verschil. Een verschil dat je laat zien wat de impact van een visualisatie kan zijn. Je hoeft geen expert te zijn in data visualisatie om je eigen impact te vergroten. Met de juiste aanpak en een beetje PowerPoint kom je al een heel eind. Dat geeft je niet alleen de mogelijkheid om indruk te maken op je manager, maar ook om te doorzien waar anderen kansen laten liggen of bewust informatie achterhouden.

Wat de blikopener met Windows XP te maken heeft

Tue, 25 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

“De overheid moet geen koploper zijn op technologiegebied.” Al tientallen keren heb ik dat argument gehoord als het gaat over investeren in online dienstverlening, of zelfs interne (online) communicatie. “Het is niet verantwoord om ambtenaren een Silicon Valley salaris te betalen.” Nog zo een. Goedbedoeld, want het idee is om zuinig om te gaan met belastinggeld. Het enige probleem is dat het niet waar is. Het argument gaat ongeveer als volgt:

De Pizza Hawaii: Een Management Wonder

Sun, 09 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Mijn vader woont in Duitsland. Onderweg naar hem ruik ik de geur van diepvriespizza. De Dr. Oetker fabriek waar de Ristorante pizza’s vandaan komen staat enkele kilometers van zijn huis vandaan. Het is een nietszeggende vierkante doos, zoals zoveel fabrieken, alleen te onderscheiden door het Dr. Oetker logo aan de buitenkant. Aan het eind van hun korte leven worden de pizza’s opgewarmd in de oven en verorberd op de bank voor de televisie of met een stuk of wat bij elkaar op een feestje, naast de tafel met drank. Je zou het niet zeggen, maar de mooiste diepvriespizza, de pizza Hawaii, is het resultaat van tientallen jaren innovatie en procesoptimalisatie. Denk er maar eens over na. Tot begin 19e eeuw werd bijna al het voedsel gegeten op een paar kilometer afstand van waar het werd geproduceerd. De melk, de ham, de kaas, en natuurlijk de ananas, tot enkele tientallen jaren geleden was het überhaupt niet mogelijk om al die ingrediënten tegelijkertijd bij elkaar te krijgen zonder dat ze bedierven —laat staan dat er duizenden pizza’s per jaar van geproduceerd konden worden.

Overheidsmanager? Dit is waarom je volgende ICT-project weer te duur, te laat, en niet gebruiksvriendelijk is

Sun, 09 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Een van mijn hobby’s is om oude versies van websites te bekijken. Neem bijvoorbeeld Netfllix, eind jaren ‘90. De website was niet meer dan een rare banner met glimmende DVD’s, een plaatje van een paar films en een brievenbus. Het concept was: we sturen mensen een DVD per post, die kijken ze, en dan sturen ze de DVD weer terug. Ik herhaal het nog een keer: je ‘huurt’ online een film, je wacht totdat die met de post bezorgd wordt, en dan moet je zelf de film weer terugsturen met de post. Nu, bijna twintig jaar later heeft Netflix ruim 83 miljoen abonnees wereldwijd. Wat is er gebeurd?

Welke online marketing tools gebruiken Nederlandse websites?

Sun, 03 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Onlangs was ik me aan het oriënteren op de inzet van een aantal tools voor het optimaliseren van een website. De eerste vraag is natuurlijk wat wil je precies bereiken? Wil je alleen bezoekersgedrag bijhouden? wil je A/B-tests gaan doen? Wil je klanten in hun hele ‘journey’ volgen met een data management platform (DMP)? Ter inspiratie keek ik even op een aantal andere websites, maar het rechtsklikken en ‘inspect’ wordt al snel vermoeiend. Ik was benieuwd wat de meest gebruikte tools zijn op Nederlandse sites en dan gaan we het met rechtsklikken niet redden.

De agile overheid: bureaucratie in de 21e eeuw

Fri, 17 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

“Fail fast, fail often, fail forward.” Het is het credo van de lean startups, de softwarebedrijfjes, de app-ontwikkelaars, de crowd-funded makers. En het werkt. De snelheid waarmee een product op de markt komt is extreem hoog, de producten sluiten aan op de wensen van klanten, en niet de omslag kunnen maken naar deze agile manier van werken betekent einde verhaal. Spotify is het schoolvoorbeeld van agile werken: autonome teams die aan kleine onderdelen van het geheel werken; prototypes testen op kleine groepen en dan pas verder; vertrouwen in het proces, focus op de klant; en bovenal: fouten en successen, alles wordt gedeeld.

Hoe ziet de inhoudsopgave van de toekomst er uit?

Wed, 08 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Er moet een moment zijn geweest dat iemand aan het schrijven was en dacht: “Hmm, dit wordt wel erg lang, misschien kan ik vooraan de structuur opschrijven, zodat mensen door de tekst kunnen navigeren.” Ik vind dat fascinerend. Want wanneer komt het punt dat je denkt: “Dit is te veel informatie?” Ik zie een inhoudsopgave als een instrument om de informatie in een tekst op een andere manier te ontsluiten. De inhoudsopgave is een manier van kijken naar de tekst, een perspectief zoals ik dat laatst beschreef. Het geeft dezelfde informatie op een andere manier weer, en sterker nog, het geeft je de mogelijkheid om de tekst beter te begrijpen, of juist alleen die stukken te lezen die voor jou interessant zijn. Dat laatste is ook de motivatie voor een van de eerste inhoudsopgaven, opgetekend door Plinius de oudere:

Feiten spreken niet voor zichzelf: perspectieven in visuele communicatie

Thu, 12 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Mocht ik ergens nog hebben gedacht dat feiten voor zich konden spreken dan heeft dit beeld me definitief van gedachten doen veranderen. Als ik je vraag om in een warboel van cijfers alle negens te tellen dan lukt dat uiteindelijk wel, maar je bent even bezig. Als ik je hetzelfde vraag, maar met de negens vetgedrukt, dan kost het geen enkele moeite. Dat beeld maakte voor mij in één oogopslag duidelijk dat je je publiek een handje moet helpen om van informatie naar inzicht te komen. Feiten spreken niet voor zichzelf, dat moet je voor ze doen. Feiten kunnen zich verbergen achter andere feiten. Bij het delen van informatie, zeker in grote hoeveelheden, en bij complexe informatie, is het van belang om stil te staan bij het ordeningsprincipe van die informatie. Ik geloof dat je met de keuze van een ordeningsprincipe je publiek kan helpen de informatie beter te begrijpen. Ik geloof dat elke keuze per definitie minder objectiviteit betekent, maar dat minder tot objectiviteit tot meer inzicht kan leiden. Ik wil je meenemen in een vergelijking van ordeningsprincipes die je hopelijk niet alleen laat zien wat een ordeningsprincipe is, maar ook inzicht geeft in de toepasbaarheid er van.

Branden blussen en toeristen vissen: De brandweer Amsterdam-Amstelland van 2005-2015

Sat, 16 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

De Gemeente Amsterdam heeft sinds een paar maanden data van de brandweer Amsterdam-Amstelland beschikbaar gesteld. Volgens de omschrijving zou de data set alle meldingen van 2010-2015 bevatten, in de praktijk bevat de data meldingen vanaf 31 maart 2005 tot ongeveer halverwege 2015. Bijna 10 jaar aan branden blussen, dieren redden, en liften openen.

Een eerste blik laat zien dat de observaties aardig gedetailleerd zijn. We kunnen onder andere de buurt, het type incident en het exacte tijdstip terugvinden, dat maakt het interessant genoeg om te kijken of er patronen te vinden zijn. Laten we beginnen met een overzicht van de belangrijkste buurten en type incidenten.

Een jaar in stappen

Wed, 03 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Eind 2014 kocht ik de iPhone 6. Die heeft sinds die tijd stilletjes mijn stappen geteld. En nu 2015 voorbij is heb ik een jaar aan data over mijn activiteit. Een mooi moment om eens terug te kijken. Apple’s Health App heeft een mooi gekleurd hartje en een paar leuke grafiekjes, maar heel veel informatie is er niet echt uit te lezen ondanks de belofte van een “innovative new way to use your health and ﬁtness information.” Waar ik in geïnteresseerd ben is of er patronen te herkennen zijn in een jaar bewegen.

Tufte's box plot: De data-inkt ratio

Sun, 24 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

In zijn boek The Visual Display of Quantative Information gaat Edward Tufte in op een aantal best practices in de data visualisatie. Een daarvan is wat hij noemt de data-inkt ratio: hoeveel van de inkt op de pagina draagt daadwerkelijk bij aan het overbrengen van informatie? Heb je die 3D-grafiek met knipperende discokleuren echt nodig? Nee, waarschijnlijk niet, maar hoeveel kun je nou echt weglaten zonder dat er informatie verloren gaat? Meer dan je denkt. Laten we eens stapsgewijs kijken naar een van de voorbeelden van Tufte, de box-plot.

Wat de smaak van wijn écht bepaalt

Fri, 19 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

“Wat bepaalt de smaak van de wijn?” Die vraag kreeg ik onlangs, samen met een stel vrienden, op een wijnproeverij. “De druif”, riep iemand. “De grond en weersomstandigheden.” “Het vat!” Allemaal erg belangrijk voor de smaak van de wijn, maar mijn eerste ingeving was: de prijs. Waarom? De smaak van de wijn wordt namelijk niet alleen bepaald door de wijn, maar bovenal door wie hem proeft. En dat is te beïnvloeden. De rauwe input van onze zintuigen wordt op weg door de hersenen in hapklare stukjes gehakt die voor ons te begrijpen zijn. Dat betekent dat we niet overprikkeld raken door geur, smaak, temperatuur, licht, en omgeving, maar dat we de stimuli ervaren als betekenisvolle informatie over de wereld. Onze hersenen helpen ons in het zoeken naar patronen om de wereld begrijpelijk te maken en zo snel actie te kunnen ondernemen.

3 modellen om te innoveren met story telling

Sat, 31 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Toen Bernard Sadow 40 jaar geleden terug kwam uit Aruba met zijn vrouw en kinderen had hij niet kunnen bedenken dat hij aan de wieg zou staan van de treinladingen trailer trash stedentrippers die dagelijks uit Amsterdam Centraal en alle vergelijkbare aankomst- en vertrekhallen over de hele wereld stromen, hun roze trolley achter zich aan rollend als verlengstuk van hun identiteit. Sadow maakte dit alles mogelijk doordat hij, slepend met de bagage door de aankomsthal van het vliegveld, zich realiseerde dat we 6000 jaar na dato nog steeds niet tot de conclusie waren gekomen dat je wielen ook aan je koffer kunt vastmaken. Na wat prototypes verkocht hij zijn eerste model aan Macy’s. De rest, zoals men zegt, is history.

Deze 6 verhalen zijn alles wat je nodig hebt om een storyteller te worden

Fri, 23 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Er is al te veel informatie in deze wereld. Niemand heeft behoefte aan meer feiten. Serieus, TL;DR is ons levensmotto, want ‘Too Long; Didn’t Read’ is al te veel moeite om uit te schrijven. Feiten gaan je niet helpen om een berg te verzetten, dat lukt je alleen met geloof en vertrouwen. Maar waarom zou ik je vertrouwen als ik je niet ken?

Een verhaal geeft je de mogelijkheid om iets ingenieus te doen. Kijk, het lukt je niet altijd om daadwerkelijk te laten zien dat je te vertrouwen bent, maar the next best thing is om je toehoorders mee te nemen in een simulatie van je acties en handelingen: een verhaal. Als je een stukje van jezelf laat zien is het makkelijker voor anderen om zich daar in te herkennen en een band te voelen. Hoe doe je dat? Dat laat Annette Simmons zien in The Story Factor.

Calling names: migrants, settlers and foreigners after the 1800s in words and data

Sun, 09 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

In his book Exodus Paul Collier notes the following: “between 1810 and 1830 a subtle change occurred in the language used to describe migrants. Around 1810 the term most frequently used in newspapers was “emigrants.” But by 1830, “emigrants” had given way to a new term, “settlers.” I think that this change was not innocuous; the two terms imply radically different narratives”

Google Ngram confirms this, although either Collier or Ngram is a couple of years off, which may be attributed to the fact that Ngram uses books instead of newspapers which may delay the change in use of the terms a bit. But when we look in more detail we also see some other interesting facts. We see a big influx of European immigrants from the 1860’s to the 1920’s, this, however, is only picked up in literature after the 1900’s when we start to see books with titles like “Mentality of the Arriving Immigrant”, “On the Trail of the Immigrant”, and “The Immigrant and the Community”. I believe this is the start of the contemporary immigration narrative as Collier calls is.

What!? How ... ? But Why!? Seven Ways to Ask Better Questions

Sun, 10 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000

A while a go I was trying to form a research question. That odd process where scientific results are supposed to suddenly appear when you ask the right question. More often than not you find an interesting answer and try to figure out the corresponding question like a lame, dinner time game show. I realised, however, that the way I asked the question pointed me in a certain direction. Asking a question starting with ‘How …’ unfolded a mechanism, a way things worked. ‘How did the Second World War start?’ will give you a description of how one event unfolded into another. Compare that with ‘Why did the Second World War start?’ or ‘What was the start of the Second World War?’ and you’ll begin to see the difference. You’ll get a motivation, or a specification depending on what you ask. With the risk of stating the obvious, but the way you ask a question highly influences the answer you’ll get. So here are seven ways to ask better questions.

Story Asymmetry: 4 Ways You're Missing Out on Customer Experience

Sun, 03 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000

“A very good morning ladies and gentlemen. I’m happy to announce that we have safely reached our destination, The Hague. All that’s left for me to do is to wish you all a fulfilling and productive day! From here on, you’re on your own.”

Everyone around me on the train had a grin on their face when they heard this announcement from the train driver at eight in the morning. The grin was sheepish, yes, but they noticed it. Even if only a little, it changed their day for the better. And this was just from the people I could see in my compartment, multiply that by twenty and you get an idea of the power a train driver has every morning. This is the asymmetry of the story. The train driver might feel he is repeating himself over and over, but everyday has a new morning. We’re all experts in picking up emotions and tone of voice in other people’s speech, so we notice his disdain and uninterestedness and let it affect us. It might also be the first time we hear the announcement. It might be the first time on a train ever.

On Productivity or: How to Fail, Miss Out and Be Happy about it

Thu, 10 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

“A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night, and in between he does what he wants.”

— Bob Dylan

Just Do It

I like my Adidas running shoes. I really do. But there’s just something about Nike’s Just Do It sloganthat resonates with me. Probably because it’s true. Truth, however, —despite what many philosophers say— won’t get you very far. So how do you “just do it”? That question of productivity has become more important with my returning to university a couple of months ago, but it is an issue that I believe is important for anyone who wants to get things done and stay happy doing it. I believe there are a few aspects that are important when it comes to productivity.