I’m not sure why it took so long to show up in my Google News RSS feed but I just read Dmitry Buterin’s post “Web analytics are worthless – for many organizations” in which he jokes that “the web analytics industry is very much like the mob – always talking about traffic, users and hits.”

I’m still laughing.

This reminded me of the Sterne-ism about how “hits” is an acronym for “How Idiots Track Success” which is strangely enough in a Web 2.0 world becoming less true every day.

Either way, the comparison of web data analysts to shadowy underworld figures with nefarious goals is strangely appropriate. I can hear the conversation: “You need some help changing your pages? I got some data that just fell off a truck that does not refute your hypothesis …”