Perhaps the really really coolest thing about data is when it starts talking to you. Well, not literally, but as a figure of speech. When you’ve been working on a set of raw data, spent hours cleaning it, twisting it around and getting to know it. Tried some things, not found anything, tried something else. And then suddenly it’s there. The story the data wants to tell. It’s fascinating and I know that I, at least, can get very excited about unraveling the secrets of the data at hand.

And it really doesn’t need to be that much analysis behind it either, sometimes it’s just plain simple data that you haven’t looked at like that before. Like this past week when we’ve had both the icehockey world championships and the Eurovision Song Contest going on. Both of them events that are covered by our newspaper and both of them with potential to attract lots of readers. Which they have done. But the thing that has surprised me this week is how different the two audiences behave. Where the ESC-fans find our articles on social media and end up on our site mainly via Facebook, the hockey fans come directly to our site. This is very interesting and definitely needs to be looked into more in depth. It raises a million questions, the first and foremost: How have I not seen this before? Is this the normal behaviour of these two groups of readers? Why do they behave like this? And how can we leverage on this information?

Most of the times, however, the exciting feeling of a discovery and of data really talking to you, happens when you have a more complex analysis at hand. When you really start seeing patterns emerge from the data and feel the connection between the data and your daily business activities.  I’m currently working on a bigger analysis of our online readers that I’m sure will reveal it’s inner self  given some more time. Already I’ve found some interesting things, like a large group of people never visiting the front page. And by never, I really do mean never, not “a few times” or “seldom”, I truly mean never. But more on that later, after I finish with the analysis. (I know, I too hate these teasers – I’m sorry.)

I hope your data is speaking to you too, because that really is the coolest thing! :nerd_face: