Memorial Day: Metrics and Memories

Memorial Day weekend is the unofficial start of summer in the US, and for many of us that is beer, bbq, baseball and books. The last two in particular made me think of metrics last week.

Sam Fuld, an injured Tampa Bay Ray, joined the commentators during a game to talk about Sabermetrics. If you have read the book Moneyball or seen the movie or are a reasonably aware baseball fan you know there has been a movement going on for three decades to measure player performance on a new set of metrics like BAPIP and DIPS.  And we have ended up with a body of Sabermetrics – as in SABR (Society for American Baseball Research).

Over on his blog, Seth Godin made me think of book metrics. In the last decade, there have been so many new stats contributed by Amazon and the advent of eBooks. Then there are so many secondary stats. Number of tweets on my GigaOm column about my new book. Number of views on a SlideShare presentation summarizing my book themes. Number of views on YouTube on my talks on the book etc etc. All those expand an audience at least aware of a book’s presence so are arguably important metrics to track in a world where publishers are not marketing much and more authors are self-publishing.

It’s not surprising in a world with all kinds of stats  (with 2430 major league baseball games a year and 300 to 400 trackable events a game, the stats pile up quickly) and powerful analytical abilities available to all (did you know each Excel 2007 spreadsheet has over 16 million cells and we call that “small data”?), that we are so comfortable with metrics.

Memorial Day itself is more about memories than metrics. And often on this day, I will crack open a James Michener. Michener to me is all about heroes and memories from wars in the S. Pacific, Texas and elsewhere.

Michener’s travels often take me to the WorldCat site. It shows me libraries around the world that carry my books. i have no idea how they get the copies (hopefully via donations) but it allows me to fantasize about who reads them in Parramatta, Australia or Wetherby, UK. On this day, I hope I am making some veteran’s day a bit more interesting.