10k plan

Did some boring/geeky pace maths ahead of trying to run sub-35 mins at the Leeds 10k, I think I will inevitably lose some time over the last km but will try to run a negative split, I’m going to try and run to the following splits

34 minutes

10 km

3:24 minute per km

  • 1 km 03:24
  • 2 km 06:48
  • 3 km 10:12
  • 4 km 13:36
  • 5 km 17:00
  • 6 km 20:24
  • 7 km 23:48
  • 8 km 27:12
  • 9 km 30:36
  • 10 km 34:00

17.65 km per hour

I AM AWARE THIS IS OF INTEREST TO ALMOST NO-ONE!

ACE annual submission

As part of my day job I’ve just had to fill out part of Opera North’s annual Arts Council submission. The ‘digital’ section is all of 6 questions long:

– Do you monitor web metrics for your organisational website? Web metrics are the measures used to quantify the performance of a website, for example page impressions, unique browsers, visits and visit duration.

Please provide the following web metrics for your organisation’s website over the last 12 month period.

– Number of unique browsers?This is the total number of unique devices (e.g. computers or mobile phones) that have made requests to the site in the period being measured.

– Number of page impressions? This is the total number of requests (e.g. mouse clicks) made for a site’s content by users of the site (i.e. unique devices) in the period being measured.

– Number of visits? A visit is a single period of activity by a unique browser.

– How much time have visitors spent on your organisation’s website (in seconds). 

– Does your website have specific content for children and young people aged 0-19 years and / or teachers?

I think that this helps to illustrate my ongoing frustration that it feels that the arts sector doesn’t really ‘get’ the internet/digital/whatever you want to call it, on any meaningful level. These are all ultimately meaningless, vanity metrics. What is this data going to help you to prove? What will it inform? Is there any qualitative information being gathered there? No. Will you get an idea as to how the growth of the mobile web is impacting arts organisations? How organisation’s content is being consumed? Whether audio is more popular than video? Whether blogs are more popular than podcasts? How much ticket buying etc is now happening online? No to every single one of those questions.

It’s interesting that the final question seems to hint towards trying to get some information of value, although when the answer is just ‘yes’ or ‘no’ I’m not sure how deep any insights are going to be. We could have an entire suite of carefully developed educational materials, or we could have a pdf of a handout that is completely unfit for purpose, regardless we would still answer ‘yes’.

But, as ever, maybe I’m missing the point, maybe this is intended to be one big, snapshot, bean-counting exercise designed to create a giant spreadsheet of essentially pointless information.

Although while this is the level of interrogation that the digital element of an organisation’s activity is subject to on a sector-wide basis, from the body that funds everything, I can’t really see things improving any time soon.