Review - Croll & Power's Communilytics Master Class

Quick Summary

Croll & Power's Communilytics Master Class

I was eager to watch these videos but didn’t know what to expect. Happily I was met with excellent content, explained by an entertaining an knowledgeable instructor in a very well-produced package.

Introduction

Like many developers, I am proficient in conceptualizing, designing, planning and implementing solutions, but after product delivery – when it comes to marketing and optimizing products for their target audience – my skillset thins out a little. While there is a wealth of information out there but finding cohesive and up-to-date information is near impossible. I was therefore excited to receive O’Reilly’s title Croll & Power’s Communilytics Master Class for review.

Production Quality

This is the first O’Reilly video series that I had watched and I approached the title with slight trepidation. The Master Class is the recording of an in-person class that has been formatted and made for sale. I’ve seen similar offerings from other vendors in the past where production value was an afterthought – oftentimes with such offerings it is impossible to see the slides/whiteboard the presenter is working from, audience questions are muted and video quality poor at best. Fortunately O’Reilly has done a great job on this title – and I am hopeful that their other titles are similar. Rather than pointing the camera at a screen/whiteboard, content slides have been merged into the feed during production and are displayed in full screen during video playback. Audio and video are crisp and the camera work is extremely professional (moreso than in any other classroom title I have seen). In essence production value is like a referee – you really only notice it when its bad…

The Speaker

While the content was created by Alistair Croll and Sean Power, Mr. Croll is the speaker for the entire master class. He does a fantastic job of engaging the viewer and blends pre-prepared and conversational information masterfully. The subject could have been extremely dry with plenty of numbers and statistics to quote, but is somehow delivered in an entertaining fashion throughout. Time flew by when watching these videos – a testament to both the content and Mr. Croll’s presentation skills. This is the first time I’ve seen anything delivered by Alistair Croll but I’ll make sure to look out for more in the future.

The Content

This series contains approximately 3.5 hours of video, full of valuable information regarding web analytics and community building. For the most part the information tends more towards descriptive than prescriptive as the course leads the viewer through many of the pitfalls and opportunities analytics helps to address, including a number of case studies. Data is quantified and claims are backed up with real world studies and experience. The content is extremely accessible and would be equally beneficial and comprehensible to a marketing manager or developer.

The Price

Compared to a $200 annual Tekpub subscription (and similar counterparts) the course seems a little expensive at $80. On the other hand, compared to attending such a class in person the price seems very reasonable. Inevitably spending decisions come down to cost benefit analysis and I can safely say there is a ton of information here to justify the purchase. It is difficult to put a price on knowledge. However, I tend to value an hour of my personal time (quite conservatively, may I add) at $20. I can say without a shadow of a doubt that the knowledge, tips and shortcuts in this series will save me more than 4 hours (and $80) in the future.

Conclusion

I was eager to watch these videos but didn’t know what to expect. Happily I was met with excellent content, explained by an entertaining an knowledgeable instructor in a very well-produced package. If anything this series needs a sequel – and I would be first in line to purchase it.

Comments

Anonymous said…
What a great web log. I spend hours on the net reading blogs, about tons of various subjects. I have to first of all give praise to whoever created your theme and second of all to you for writing what i can only describe as an fabulous article. I honestly believe there is a skill to writing articles that only very few posses and honestly you got it. The combining of demonstrative and upper-class content is by all odds super rare with the astronomic amount of blogs on the cyberspace.
February 1, 2011 at 2:59 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Excel - Adding an existing Pivot table to the data model

Image
  I've been working more with, and continue to be amazed by, Power Pivot. I recently ran into an issue where I needed to add the data for an existing Power Pivot report to the Data Model. There is a checkbox that makes this easy when creating a PivotTable: As so often happens, the analysis grew in scope/importance and I found myself needing to add the data to the data model. While it's not obvious how, there is a way to add an existing Pivot table to the data model. There's a More Tables... link in the PivotTable Fields pane.  Clicking on the  More Tables... results in a dialog confirming that you want to Create a New PivotTable .  Doing so will result in the creation of the new PivotTable in a new sheet. By default the data is added to the data model. You'll likely lose some formatting but for anything other than a trivial PivotTable, this should save effort, as it did for me.
Read more

Getting Started with Mirth (Part 1)

Image
This is the first post in a 2 part series. The second post is here Recently I posted about my positive experience when using Mirth by Webreach as an open source communication layer between one of our in-house applications and a third party and proprietary web service interface. That post received a large amount of attention (relative to my other posts :o) ) so now I will post a quickstart guide to creating a similar setup. In this post I will go over the very basics of using Mirth (please dig in and play around with some more advanced options/configurations), specifically I will demonstrate how to use Mirth to read data from a database, package the data up in a SOAP envelope, send the data to a web service and process the SOAP response. I'll also show you how easy it is to monitor channels once deployed. Once you've installed and opened Mirth for the first time you'll be presented with an empty dashboard - but it wont stay empty for long. This is where you'll s...
Read more

Mirth

Image
Introduction Let's talk about Mirth. At it's simplest, Mirth  link is an Open Source HL7 interface engine. HL7 (Health Level 7) is an NPO involved in the development of healthcare standards and the HL7 v2.x and HL7 v3 standards are commonly used in Medical Information for data interchange - including but not limited to clinical, financial, logistical and administrative messaging. I first ran across Mirth over a year ago on a personal quest to find an alternative to our client's legacy HL7 application. Academically, I wrote a number of lexical analysis tools using lexx, yacc, bison and JavaCC and knew the challenges of writing and maintaining complex parsers. I was simply looking for something that could parse HL7 for us, and perhaps log messages and provide a little more transparency than our application currently allowed.  A year later and our legacy application is still going strong (read: my proposal was declined), but Mirth is being used in production, far away from th...
Read more