Wednesday, August 24, 2011

Bubble Guppy Analytics

I haven't watched much Nickelodeon since the days of Double Dare and You Can't Do That On Television. I'm slightly intrigued by a cartoon that is in its first season on the well know kids' channel. I actually don't know anything about the show, but Google somehow thinks, or at least one day thought, that my blog is somehow related to Bubble Guppies.

I was just looking around in my analytics and found that a couple weeks ago, someone from Ontario visited my site after googling Bubble Guppies. They were sent to my main blog page, not to a specific post. I have no idea what could have been the draw, other than perhaps a recent post that mentioned swimming in a couple triathlons. I wouldn't think that the mere mention of swimming would be enough to pull in a search for information about preschool-aged cartoon mer-people.

By writing about it now, I am, of course, taking the risk of forever linking my blog to the cartoon like I did with the website Surf the Channel in a post a few years ago that still gets me hundreds of hits every month for no good reason. So to the potentially hundreds of you that may visit in the future, if you actually read all three paragraphs of this post, leave me a comment and let me know what you were looking for when you found this and perhaps an interesting fact about yourself. Don't be afraid that you'll be revealing too much, as I already know quite a bit about you just by your visiting (for example, my unknown visitor from Ontario was using Google Chrome on a 22 inch widescreen monitor over Rogers Cable). And yes, every other website on the internet knows at least that much, if not more, about you when you visit them, especially if they integrate Facebook plugins to their site.

Monday, August 22, 2011

Expectations of Quality

Behold the smartness of Logan City road crews:

zoom in if you don't see it

We all make mistakes, and some like the one above are more easily corrected than others.

It makes me wonder what kind of expectations of quality the road crews have of themselves. We would all do well to think about the expectations we have of our employees, coworkers, and bosses, not to mention the expectations they have of us. If everyone does not set the bar at the same level, the tension can build quickly. Having a work environment where it's safe to fail, balanced with high expectations of each other, will lead to learning experiences. Ultimately the learning experiences will lead to higher quality outcomes if the team can stay in sync. Set the bar too low or get out of sync of the expectations of others, and you end up with the stereotypical "government job" and results like the above.