It is crazy long-tail twitchy user goodness. (The friend and I, we both hack up quick shell scripts for our apache logs to track images on the rss feeds and other stuff like that.)

You say: “I understand the importance of quantitative measurements, but I think that internet analysts put far too much emphasis on only quantitative metrics.”

I also think the wrong quantitative measurements are used.

Let’s face it, all these measurements matter for one reason: money (otherwise you could just measure qualitatively by how quality the experience was for you, and not “the market”). Therefore, a better reporting metric would have to “transactions influenced” (Cost per Action in the broadest sense?). What can pageviews and time spent really tell us about the monetary “value” of a site?

Just a thought…