The document discusses using business intelligence (BI) and web analytics tools for media companies using open source software. Specifically: 1. It provides background on the Mail & Guardian Online and Amatomu.com websites and challenges around centralized data, vendor lock-in, and lacking BI capabilities for new areas. 2. It considers developing custom open source solutions versus packaged software for BI, noting benefits and risks of each approach. 3. The document outlines their plan to develop a custom open source BI system using frameworks like CodeIgniter and tools like FusionCharts to provide real-time analytics and visualization dashboards tailored to their needs.

1. Business intelligence, web analytics and FOSS Using the Mail & Guardian Online and Amatomu.com as examples

2. Background 0.5 million readers, 100 000 visits a day, various sources of BI, vendor lock-in, new territories that lack BI/web analytics

3. Background Publishing business models dependent on analytics, changes in the Web: Web 2, social media and Semantic Web

4. Reality The business of a media company is to create sell-able statistics, whereas the public mandate is to inform and encourage democratic governance

5. Rethinking Watershed moment, great risk and great opportunity

6. Catalyst Rebuilding our publishing system from the ground up + experience with Amatomu.com

7. More goals than Bafana - A comprehensive series of dashboards - Real-time reports of user activity - Rich visualisation - A product responsive to key metrics

8. Specific Challenges Internally, data is not centralised, standardised or aligned to our knowledge management goals

9. Specific Challenges Web 2, server logging and auditing

11. Amatomu Growing blogging community, social media

12. Amatomu Inspired by a lack of information and the potential to facilitate growth of the SA blogosphere

13. Amatomu Aggregates blog content, gathers analytics and presents personalised statistics, global statistics and rankings

14. Amatomu Collect statistics for 5.6 million PI per month, 2.5k active bloggers producing 1 05 million db transactions per month

15. Lessons learned Real-time analytics systems are difficult to scale, data increases in value as it ages, FOSS can do the job

16. FOSS architecture LAMP stack

17. The great debate Packaged software or create custom code?

18. Packaged software Easy to evaluate, low risk, ongoing development and active community, medium reward, hard to tailor to specific business requirements

19. Custom code Hard to evaluate, high risk, high reward because closely aligned to business processes

20. BI Packages 2 biggest are Pentaho and JasperSoft, both very powerful solutions for out-the-box BI, both offer FOSS servers with paid support

21. The thorny path We have chosen to develop custom code because we’re confident we can do it successfully and no packaged software does what we want it to

22. External factors Systems need to be overhauled every 2 years and rebuilt every 5 years

23. Guiding principles Data must be reusable, interoperability via web services and XML, scalability via the cloud - Amazon EC2, SimpleDB, S3 storage

24. Insurance policy Development using frameworks for PHP, Ajax and CSS: CodeIgniter, JQuery/ExtJS, Google Blueprint

25. Insurance policy Protects us against change in the development team and common mistakes

26. Emphasis Rich media graphing, real-time visualisation, enabling knowledge creation through discovery

27. Inspiration Edward R Tufte Digg Labs

28. Helpful tools FusionCharts - visually attractive graphing, mapping, widgets

29. Thank You Demo and discussion