In the last release of the GA code, Google added Event Tracking.   In Google-speak, events are actions that visitors take on a web page that do not generate new pageviews. Examples of these events are, interacting with a Flash player, a AJAX widget or an audio player. In the old GA, webbies could track event-data as a pageview.  However, because event tracking using crude pageviews is not very effective, GA added new functionality they refer to as Event Tracking.

There are 4 components in the GA events data model; Objects, Actions, Labels and Values. GA Objects are areas of web pages that visitors interact with, for example a video player or an Ajax widget.  The second part of the GA event tracking data model is Actions.  Actions are related to an Object, representing Actions that visitors perform on the Object.  Labels further describe Actions, associating context with Actions.   Last, but not least, Values are quantities associated with Labels.

Notice how Google defines this event processing model as Event Tracking.   Similar to the reference architecture we described in What is Complex Event Processing?,  operations on single event objects are generally tracking-oriented, often referred to as Event Refinement  in the art-and-science of multisensor data fusion (MSDF). 

The GA event tracking model does not (yet) incorporate Situation Refinement, which in MSDF-speak, would be object-to-object processing, representing a higher level of interaction modelling.   

Can you provide examples where object-to-object interaction between various objects on a single web site represents a real-world situational (complex event) model? 

Taking this one step further, can you think of some examples where object-to-object interaction between various objects on different web sites represents a real-world situational model?

Stephouse steps into Portland, Ore., void: Local firm Stephouse has built out 5 sq mi of business-grade wireless availability in downtown Portland and 2 sq mi in an underserved part of north Portland using Proxim gear for both Wi-Fi and WiMax service. Wi-Fi use is $20 per month or 1 free hour per day up to 10 free hours per month. The offering seems to focus on the business side, though, in competition with services like Towerstream. Prices aren't listed on the company's site.

Hartford drops Wi-Fi effort: Connecticut's trouble capital city has given up on city-wide Wi-Fi. No surprise. No firms ready to build for free, no money, no tangible goals. My wife grew up in the suburb to the west--West Hartford, prosaically enough--and speculates that the lack of county-oriented government in Connecticut has doomed Hartford to be a civic wasteland. It's recovering a bit as housing affordability goes up, and there's more going on in the city than there used to be. But there won't be Wi-Fi. Incidentally, the Mark Twain House & Museum in Hartford, home of one of the world's first bloggers, is near financial ruin. It's a great piece of American history; I'm hoping it's saved again--it's had many lives since Twain built it and went bankrupt.

So then I start messing around with it, and I narrow it down to one of the things that’s more legacy than anything, the now fixed, MS mhtml bug. Uh oh. Yup, the mhtml bug appears to crash mobile Opera instantly. So back to keeping JS turned off, I guess (I haven’t tested if there is another way to cause the crash using a redirection or an iframe, but it takes a long time to test, so I’ll leave that to another day).

Then I start messing with the other options, like the “Identify as” function. With it turned to “handheld device” the user agent reads, “MOT-Q9/01.04.35R Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows CE; Smartphone; 320×240) Opera 8.65 UP.Link/6.3.1.17.0″. Eesh! It gives my actual device type! So then I turn the setting to “desktop computer” it turns to “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1) Opera 8.65 [en] UP.Link/6.3.1.17.0″. Okay, fair enough, that appears to be the more secure setting as at least it doesn’t say the revision and model number of the phone.

That is, of course, until you look at the rest of the headers:

HTTP_ACCEPT = application/xhtml+xml, application/vnd.wap.xhtml+xml, text/html, text/vnd.wap.wml, application/vnd.wap.wmlc, */*,text/x-hdml,image/mng,image/x-mng,video/mng,video/x-mng,image/bmp,text/html
HTTP_ACCEPT_CHARSET = iso-8859-1, utf-8, utf-16, *;q=0.1,*
HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING = deflate, gzip
HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE = en
HTTP_CACHE_CONTROL = no-cache
HTTP_USER_AGENT = Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1) Opera 8.65 [en] UP.Link/6.3.1.17.0
HTTP_VIA = 1.1 alnmagr1fe09WAP2-mbl
HTTP_X_UP_DEVCAP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE = en
HTTP_X_UP_DEVCAP_CHARSET = utf-8,ISO-8859-1,US-ASCII,UTF-16,GB2312,BIG5
HTTP_X_UP_DEVCAP_ISCOLOR = 1
HTTP_X_UP_DEVCAP_NUMSOFTKEYS = 2
HTTP_X_UP_DEVCAP_SCREENDEPTH = 16
HTTP_X_UP_DEVCAP_SCREENPIXELS = 320,240
HTTP_X_UP_DEVCAP_SMARTDIALING = 1
HTTP_X_UP_SUBNO = ppu_105cb54061e_vmag.mycingular.net
HTTP_X_WAP_PROFILE = “http://uaprof.motorola.com/phoneconfig/q-umts/Profile/mot-q9.rdf

Okay, so now we know my provider how big my screen is, that it’s a mobile device of course (the reference to wap), but more importantly we get the actual profile of the phone in the RDF file with all the settings, so you know exactly what may or may not work against the phone! Geez! Talk about giving up too much info! I hardly consider myself a cell phone hacker (for that you’ll need to talk with the Flexillis guys) but in 5 minutes I found all that - that’s not a good start. Whelp, so much for surfing from my phone!