If I can for a moment, break my three month blog-fast to say how annoyed I am with the current “women’s month” reporting in SA.

Over the last few days, I have heard countless news reports on the radio and tv that refer to SA’s “fairer sex”, and it totally baffles me how one could write a piece about gender discrimination and not notice the inherent bias and assumptions contained in those two little words.

I quote an SABC piece here: “The survey also shows South Africa’s fairer sex will not tolerate gender inequality” (SA Women less optimistic about their lives – survey August 10 2009).

Defining a person by their looks (ignoring the stereotype included in that) is a major part of gender inequality. I am surprised the newsreader didnt go so far as to conclude that the “fairer sex” shouldnt worry our pretty little heads about such manly matters.

Wake up, journalists!

[Here is a great Hayibo article about women's day: http://www.hayibo.co.za/articles/view/1103]

What is the value of knowing the bounce rate across your whole site, rather than one specific page? Or that visitors spend 2 min browsing your pages? How can I use that info to shape my web strategy?

Or rather, what I’m really asking, is “Does providing non-web savvy clients with analytics data have any real value?”

Analytics has became a bit of buzz word with middle managers in off line companies in SA, and they are either demanding this info to feed back to their boards, or web companies are using the existence of these reports to further sell their services.

But I think that some of this info represents both wasted time (on the part of the report writer) and false value to the client. If you have a purely information focussed site (small, seldom updated, “this is us, now contact us in the real world” type site), wouldn’t you just want to know, “am I getting visitors?” or “are we growing?”.

I would argue that automating this type of reporting is the way forward, especially since it frees up time to spend on valuable reporting, the kind that looks at user journeys and their relative success or failure. Or is the lack of “analysis” too controversial?

Do you do reporting for your clients / organisation? What is valuable information to you?

Just to let you know that I’ve finally updated my flickr profile, adding Nick and Lucy’s wedding and general JHB shenanigans. Check it out here.