Web analytics grew organically out of the primordial ooze of “the World Wide Web”, html, and browsers. For years the web page was considered central and indispensable to both marketing and measurement. It still is.

But with the advent of social media and mobile media, no small amount of emphasis has shifted away from web pages as we had come to know them. What didn’t change: that the chief purpose behind what is now more accurately called “digital analytics” is to understand and drive better visitor conversion. In plainspeak, that means getting visitors to do what you wanted them to do.

Social media can reasonably be seen as a series of campaigns in different channels: Twitter/Mobile for instance. And where does conversion take place? In this example, it takes place–most likely–on the web. Despite the hullabaloo, there’s not much mystery in this from a functional standpoint. Campaigns drive traffic. The web site converts.

Now comes the art and science of the App. Often enough, stepping into an App means stepping away from the web, kind of the way the old lunar module separated from the command module on its way to the moon. Except the App never comes back to the mothership. More accurately, it’s alien. Many of them never had anything to do with the web. You don’t necessarily obtain it on the web, you don’t access the web, you don’t convert on the web.

The App can do all this on its own. In-app purchase? Yes. Web site conversion? No. So whither analytics?

Two kinds of measurement are coming into play. For example, BuddyMedia provides an application development kit that includes analytics as part of the package. So you can both create content and measure it too. They also let you build web site modules that self-convert and self-measure but that’s not the main thrust. They have created a self-aware content unit–anticipating the needs of marketers in ways the web never did. The likelihood that intelligent apps become the marketplace is high, given enough time. A question remains about objectivity of measurement (because the creator also measures)–but this legitimate concern seems not to have held back the market.

Kontagent, another entrant into application measurement, is more on the application measurement side and features less emphasis on content creation. The major vendors in web analytics are also fielding app measurement tools, and in a real twist, some of them even include content creation capability. Can trusty old analytics tools breed best content tools? Don’t count them out. This rapidly evolving subset of digital analytics is only now getting off the launching pad.

Put on your space-suit. Analytics is going for a ride.

SOPA is dead. Long live Google.

As Netizens, are we feeling good today? We’ve stuck a fork in censorship, right? Given those cologne-drenched lobbyists in suits a haircut and sent them packing? Of course. For one day, at least.

Except for a couple of small things we don’t feel like talking about–or perhaps hardly realize.

Here’s the underlying hypocrisy in all of this, and it isn’t about intellectual property getting shanghaied in Guangzhou. It’s about the real estate that’s been staked out by content rivals, all of whom profit massively from consumers offline and online.

Let’s use Disney as one example and Google as the other. I have nothing in particular against either company and have enjoyed their wares as much as the next. But everybody knows who they are and what they do (generally), and that saves me time.

As Google would have it, Disney wants to censor the Internet and make everyone a criminal. As Disney would have it, Google wants to profit off of content to which they have no right. I am oversimplifying, but these are more or less the arguments.

Let’s put the Disneys aside for the moment: let all those SoCal movie hustlers drift around in the pool for a bit, snuffing their neti pots and complaining that somebody double-dipped a multi-grain chip in the yogurt sauce. And instead put good ol’ Google to an honesty test.

What does Google own? A boatload of servers, some algorithms, and a funny name that has mathematical underpinnings. How’d they make their money? By linking to stuff they didn’t own and not paying the owners for the link. Instead, they made suckers out of all the link-owners by making themselves so darn good at finding the links for folks who wanted to find those links. They were able to offer the service for free because they didn’t pay a nickel for any of the stuff that showed up in their searches. And so far the link-owners have accepted the role of paying supplicant inside the grand palace of Google. On the backs of those link-owning, Google-paying supplicants, Google also built an empire of advertising because they had the savvy to watch what users did and then intermediated ad space to companies that wanted to “find an audience”.

Even if the above begins to sound only semi-legitimate on inspection, the most important hypocrisy is also the most basic. Google (and other gigantic portals like Facebook) have benefited by settling down their large haunches upon free real estate. This real estate is commonly known as “the Internet”. You know, the one that was created at CERN, and released to the world as an open-source, free communications protocol?

Think of it this way: did Google have any more right to privatize what was freely given than Guangzhou had to give away what was meant to be purchased?

Google, Facebook and others with enormous fortunes built by taking a free platform and making large portions of it private (and using your data to sell yourself back to yourself), are the equivalent of entrants in the old Oklahoma land-rush. The land was free for the taking, and they rushed in with poles and chicken wire. And then came fences and shotguns.

So really, what moral platform do they have to protest when another property owner wants to keep varmints off the vegetable patch?

Really none.

So unless you’re a shareholder at Google/Facebook or similar venue, you can consider yourself just another lonesome traveler through self-declared private property that was once free and open; and you realize that Google really is no more your constituency than the Hollywood bigwig floating in his pool behind the palm-fronded mansion.