I recently talked about how Analytics is building the Newsroom of the Future – and posted a set of excerpts from a BusinessWeek Article about how AOL was perhaps moving towards that promised data driven Newsroom. Ironic perhaps, but the New York Times just ran a story on Bloomberg’s acquisition of BusinessWeek, and more importantly for this debate, some of the analytics processes imposed on BusinessWeek writers.

..Continuing down the rabbit hole, trying to figure out how Data and Analytics can help publisher increase their current performance. Standardization might not look like much of a performance or optimization technique, but not knowing clearly what your are optimizing against, makes the task not only difficult, but also dangerous to the point where you can make more harm than good on certain initiatives. So the laissez-faire metric attitude, should be exchanged for well defined and understood online publisher metrics.

Demographic data in Yahoo! Web Analytics do not precisely represent the overall traffic for Czech websites, but they do seem to be very precise for the many visitors identified through a Yahoo! ID / Cookie. Therefore my conclusion is that, these valuable demographic data points can indeed be utilized in segmentation and analysis of your website visitors – even if they primarily come from small countries such as the Czech Republic