The old sporting joke went like this:

“And now for a partial score: Pittsburgh 8″.

See?

It doesn’t mean anything except in relation to other data.

Page views? No: Conversions as a percentage of page views.

Unique visitors? Nice! Better: amount of times (on average) visitors came before converting.

Popular Pages? Good. But what about popular pages as related to what campaigns took them there? And then, how about using that data to craft new messages to the visitors to those popular pages? You figure, if they came to the landing page, then went to the “Punky Brewster” page, then there is a segment of your visitors that should get a new message about Punky Brewster. Seems like common sense. But not done often enough, not nearly so.

Reports are just pixels on a screen. Context is the result of report correlation and implied meaning. Sure, one day humans will retire from this field too, as they have retired from fields like limestone-block hauling and the profession of what used to be called “knacking” (look it up, you’ll find it interesting); but for now we don’t yet have Artificial Intelligence capable of telling people what data means to the business.  And that means someone has to look at the reports; ask questions; dig in; make a recommendation.

Action? Naturally this is the outcome of insight. But undirected action is more like energy dissipated than energy focused. Like a spilled cup of chai rather than an arrow from a crossbow.

So, think about context. Think about understanding how the accurately collected data seems in context with other data. Combine measures. Patterns overlay patterns and suggest answers only people can deliver (so far). Dig in and find the meaning. Any executable plan relies on meaningful data. It’s all available in web analytics, but not necessarily in the toolkit all by itself.

I’m a tree-lover if not a tree-hugger and I have always hated to see trees torn down as I think most do unless they are in the bulldozer business. So I have always tried to wean off of paper where possible even where digital seems just a tiny bit more of a pain. For instance, do you know how many passwords I have? Guess where the safest place to keep the list is? On paper. Paper is not generally hackable though it can be physically stolen of course.

But this is really about what happened on Saturday night when I bought the Sunday New York Times (Early Edition) in anticipation of a Sunday of bagels and coffee and slippers and robes and slick sheets that advertise digital cameras for Mother’s Day.

I have not purchased a paper Times in months or maybe even more than a year. And I refuse to subscribe to their digital edition–because, as is oft-lamented, the competition (in this case Zite) is just a click away. I continue to believe (quite naively and self-righteously I am sure) that an edition needing no paper must cost little enough to manufacture such that it can get by on ads alone. And if they leveraged their analytics properly, they’d be even more ahead of the game even though it might get this reader’s privacy goat.

But what I quickly re-discovered about the Sunday Times, even in its shrunken, almost apologetic form, and even as it costs 5 bucks, is that the reading experience is vastly superior to that of the digital version. And I will admit it may be because the experience reawakened in me some atavistic urge to touch pulp and smell ink and randomly thumb through pages with my very fingers.

But there was more, and I believe it had to do with randomness and perhaps even serendipity. I found a headline about a terrible wasting disease which then led me to a totally random story about a satirist who’d recently passed on, which led me to thumb back a few pages to see the different paths to victory for either Romney or Obama for 2012. And the only algorithm involved was a musculo-skeletal one somehow linked to the relatively inefficient synapses of my own thinking-box. There was a distinct sense of discovery. As if, even though I know the Times tailored the articles and has a specific patrician/center/liberal point of view that at times seems almost priggish, I could sense that these things were given to me as a unit for me to peruse without further assistance.

The freedom from algorithms was rather exhilarating. I must try it again sometime. Even if it costs a few logs of the old fashioned, wooden kind.

Picture a loft in New York’s Chelsea full of entrepreneurs at tables, pitching investors who would then vote the three best ventures; add a diverse crowd ranging from hip hop impresarios to craggy investor types; hyperrealist club-hangover art on the walls; a creaky old elevator with a notch cut out; plus lively conversation about the future of tech in New York: and you have some idea of what it was like at Alan Brody’s always worthwhile Startupalooza at WixLounge last evening.

Aside from oreos and hard cider, there were some promising ventures in play and not all of them required a computer. There was a card game entrepreneur; a startup that supplies packaging and paraphernalia to the medical marijuana industry; and a company that manufactures incredibly bright lights using serial LEDs in a wand that uses very little electricity.

But the technology entrants seemed to garner most interest, as is typical even if New York is not exactly the hotbed of advanced technology that is Silicon Valley (though they do keep trying). The general tenor of investors in New York tend to be of the less adventurous type, and certainly less knowledgeable about technology itself. But that is another discussion.

My personal favorite was called spacesplitter.com and it provides a way for roommates to divvy up expenses, supplies and chores on line and without the hassle of sitting down every once in a while trying to figure out who ate the most yogurt. CEO Rob Caucci was young enough to seem as if his target market were folks like himself. I thought it interesting enough to text my son who rooms away at college these days and he said it sounded “cool beans” which is a good thing.

Another keen and very narrow entrant was mypackageplace.com where the plan was to relieve young urbanites from the heartbreak of having no way to receive packages while living in a five story walk-up and never being home in any case. Very targeted but very relevant, I thought this one too had legs. Their concept is to automate the process of having UPS ship your Zappos to a nearby shop so you can go pick it up any time. Simple, effective, useful–but not so much, if you have a doorman.

Somewhat out of my ken was a sartorial entrant called fasterpants.com that operated a display layer based on an algorithm that would note that you had just looked at a shirt at retailer X and then suggest pants, jacket and socks that would go with that shirt–not necessarily from the same brand, but from the same store. Entrepreneur Ben Wolff said it was a great way for guys to match outfits without having to worry about picking the wrong stuff, while also offering a great way for on line merchants to cross-sell and upsell (and isn’t that the point of on-line sales?).

There were quite a few others and I didn’t have time to look at them all. I found it a fascinating look under the hood of where startups are heading today in New York. There is certainly no shortage of talent looking for investors. My feeling is that some west coast investors could come down this way and possibly make a killing.