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I first heard about the trails on Mt Sutro from the SF Urban Riders mailing list. I finally got out there today to ride it for the first time and it’s great fun. Nothing too technical, but a perfect conditioning ride when you don’t want to drive anywhere and you’ve only got an hour. From my house in the Mission, this whole loop was 7 miles and 1200 feet of climbing. 1.6 miles of it were on the trails.

There’s a handy map available from natureinthecity.org, which I’ve excerpted here:

My route was Fairy Gates Trail -> North Ridge Trail (to the Rotary Native Plant Garden) -> South Ridge -> Historic Trail -> Woodland Canyon Trail -> Fairy Gates and back out to the road. I tried to tack on Belgrave trail but chickened out after it seemed to deadend. The map suggests it continues down a steep techy section to Belgrave Ave, and I’ll have to explore that on the next outing.

I also look forward to doubling back and doing some of the trails in reverse. Some of the switchbacky stuff on North Ridge in particular would be really fun to descend from the Rotary Native Plant Garden. Also, I’d love to try the more primitive section of Woodland Canyon trail down to Edgewood Ave.

Riding this stuff makes me motivated to get out and help take care these trails on one of the upcoming Mt. Sutro Stewards volunteer days. What an unbelievable amenity! Take a look at this video from one of their volunteer days:

Here’s a photo of a section of the Historic Trail on Mt. Sutro’s west face. It’s clearly gotten some TLC from the stewards. Thanks much and I hope to see you out there soon.

Hat tip to my brother Alex for passing on these tips from the Director of the Vermont Association of Travel Professionals:

Due to the large number of manufacturers of GPS, and the fact that users do not always update their maps, correcting or adding information can be a difficult task. However, to begin to properly update an address on a variety of GPS mapping products, here is a list of the major GPS providers and links to their update pages:

Tele Atlas provides the source data to companies such as Google, TomTom, and several automobile manufacturers. You can provide feedback on their maps at: http://mapinsight.teleatlas.com/mapfeedback/index.php

NAVTEQ is similar to Tele Atlas and map feedback can be reported at: http://mapreporter.navteq.com/

Garmin manufactures GPS devices and map errors can be reported at: http://www8.garmin.com/cartography/mapSource/errorForm.jsp

Rand McNally offers online mapping and print mapping options. To report map errors go to http://www.randmcnally.com/rmc/company/cmpContactUs.jsp?cmty=0
(Click on “Feedback about online maps, driving directions, and trip planning”)

Google Maps provides online maps and directions. Errors can be reported at: http://www.google.com/local/add

MapQuest also provides online maps and directions. Errors can be reported at: http://help.mapquest.com/jive/mqdataerror.jspa

I’m doing some experiments about how to run web site experiments (meta-experiments?) most efficiently and ran across this nice, super-basic screencast of how to use Google Website Optimizer.

I’m running an experiment now in an alternative/homebrew experimentation tool and seeing how that goes. Next up, trying out GWO.

I was going to title this post “Replace your PMs with productplanner.com” but that didn’t feel quite right ;). this site has just saved a huge amount of time for every web site PM, particularly those who are trying to understand which “genes” from the web 2.0 gene pool have proven themselves already, so they can “natural-select” them into a subsequent generation that they’re planning. It’s a library of user flows with tips and tricks about how to measure them. You can tweak an existing best practice and easily adapt it into your site. Check out Tagged’s viral loop for instance.

Kudos to Hiten and the kissmetrics team for building this. Bravo!

My friends know I’m a fan of using the scientific method to improve web sites: iterate fast, disprove invalid assumptions quickly, etc. I believe making web products that work great for the people who use them and the people who fund them is like being a Tin Pan Alley songwriter: crank out 100 songs a week and maybe one of them is a hit. Replace “songs” with “hypotheses about what’ll work for a web site” (for conversion, user acquisition, etc) and that’s what I mean. The Tin Pan Alley guys instrumented their experiments via their old grey whistle test (sidebar: that happens to be the title of one of my all-time favorite DVDs). Web product peeps have other, more scientific options available. Having just spent a long time at Yahoo! (which had its own internal analytics stuff), I hadn’t been as versed on the market, so I sent out a quick request to some friends on facebook and twitter to see what suggestions they might have about alternatives to Google Analytics and Omniture, and got some helpful responses. I promised I’d aggregate them into a blog post, and then talk about which ones seemed to be the best for what I want to do with them. For starters, here’s the list of recommendations I got:

Haveamint

Core Metrics

Kiss Metrics

WebSideStory (now owned by Omniture)

WebTrends

ClickTracks

Adchemy (not really analytics, but in the realm of user acquisition)

Sometrics

Kontagent

Hat tip to Monifa, Joe, Rob, Andrew, and Hiten for the leads. Thanks!

More to come in a later post.