Rise of defcon

Dear reader,

It’s getting hectic again at work so blogging will become a secondary priority for a while. This means that I will be returning to my usual pace with new blog posts.

In the meantime, why not try the 4hoursearch.com that showed the world you could get better search results than Cuil with just 4 hours of coding by using Yahoo!’s BOSS platform.

Former Google engineers challenge ex-employer with ‘Cuil’ search engine

Dear Reader,

Yesterday a brand new search engine saw daylight. Cuil has a fresh GUI and a new type of search listing. Because of being used to how search engines show results at present, it might be a challenge for new users to get to know this search engine’s way. But so far I think the GUI is quite user-friendly and looks nice. Time shall tell if this attempt will be able to challenge the search engine giant.

Go ahead and try out Cuil!

Sleipnir riding on Nipponese soil

Dear Reader,

3 posts on one day is too much, but I couldn’t help after reading this news. The Japanese company Fenrir [sic] has released a new version of their web browser Sleipnir [2x sic] 2.7, a browser they hope to challenge Firefox with. Sleipnir is based on the Trident core also used by Internet Explorer, but it allows the user to change the core to Gekko (used by Firefox) on the fly. This should help in giving a better user experience.

I have no previous experience with this browser, but I guess I’ll have to spend some time with it, if for nothing else, the name of it (and the company) are just not possible to bypass.

Go download:
http://www.fenrir-inc.com/other/sleipnir/

For anyone with an inner linguistic fixation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleipnir
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fenrir

Headliner: Google

Dear Reader,

Google is in the headlines right now. Earlier today I trackbacked TechCrunch’s article about the rumour of Google acquiring Digg. Later on I found Google Operating System’s contrasting article on the same subject.

Another thing I found out about today is Google’s new article repository, Knol. A bit Wikipedia-like endeavour for creating articles but with the exception that the writers of articles are clearly shown on each article or haven been given the credit for written articles. Read more about and test Knol here.

Google offers $200 million for Digg?

Digg

Dear Reader,

TechCrunch has released news about Google looking to buy Digg for $200 million. There had been rumours on this already in March this year. Interestingly Google has been experimenting with Digg-like features in their search lately.

Web Strategy 1: Web Analytics

Dear reader,

I thought I’d start an irregularly written series of postings dealing with various aspects of web strategy. This first blog post handles with web analytics - a subject that absolutely no-one in the field of web can bypass. Here goes.

Web Analytics

Analytics in the realm of web generally answers to the need: “We want to know what our visitors are doing in our web services”. It measures the visitors online behaviour and seeks to enable a company’s web team to make educated guesses on the analytics reports, and thus improve the service, drive new leads in, analyze and improve Return on Investment (ROI), etc.

There exists an expression “half of the marketing budget is wasted, but we don’t know which half”, which is not entirely true anymore when it comes to web marketing. Web analytics makes the gathering of information and success rate possible based on a company’s set needs and goals.

With most analytics tools it is possible to apply or define filters (e.g. one might want to filter out their own company’s visitors from the general visitor metrics) and goals (“I want to know how many visitors came from Google and ended up buying our product”). With most tools it is also possible to investigate visitors’ navigation paths in a visualized manner. Other information of interest include e.g. the visitors browser and platform information, screen resolution, company name (can be sought by ip number), etc. Some of the analytics applications are more information rich than others - the tool to use should always be decided after defining the metrics and process.

A good analytics solution gathers information on different aspects of the visit, including:

• Content analysis
  • Top Content
  • Enter page, Exit page
• Visitor / Visit analysis
  • Path analysis
  • New visitors
  • Returning  visitors
  • Read pages per visit
  • Duration of visit
• Traffic (source) analysis
  • Search engines
  • Directories
  • Keywords
  • Links
  • Direct
• Technical analysis
  • Browsers
  • Platforms
  • Screen resolution, etc

Other good traits in an analytics solution are:

• Customizable dashboards
• Automatic and customizable reports e.g. by e-mail
• Export to different formats (pdf, XML, Excel)
• Integration to Customer Relationship Management software (CRM)
• Integration to marketing tools such as Google AdWords
• Lightweight user rights management (eventually you’ll want others to just see the reports but not mess up the dashboards, for example)
• Visually pleasing and accurate graphs, pies, etc.
• Comparison to history data
• Benchmarking or anonymous comparison between similar sites
• Realtime monitoring
• Fast reports
• User friendly GUI

How ever feature rich the application is, bear in mind that you should only acquire an analytics application that suits your  business needs, matches with your budget and so on. If there are no inhouse resources or know-how (as often is the case) I heartily suggest using a professional consultant company to help define the needs and processes for your business.

The definition phase

Before buying any analytics software, one should always first define: 

• Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to be followed (i.e. the needs of information to be followed continuously)
• The process of what happens when a certain metric’s set threshold is exceeded
• Who does what when a certain metric is succeeded (i.e. who ‘owns’ each metric)
• Whether to use log based or page tagging analytics software, or both

Different analytics solutions

The main difference between analytics applications is how they actually measure the visits and hits. There are log based analytics tools (often called log analyzers or log parsing tools) and tag based tools (often called page tagging tools).

Most experts think that the most accurate results can be achieved by utilizing best of both. This of course requires careful definition, know-how and resources. Some of the analytics applications are able to utilize both tags and logs. The essential differences between these two measuring methods are:

Log analyzers

Log analyzers, as their name suggests, create their reports from web server logs. This means that:

• Search engine spiders or crawlers get logged as well (unless delibe-rately filtered out of the results)
• It is a bit more easy to measure downloaded files
• In a multi-server farm, there are multiple log files that the solution should be able to combine
• If acquiring a log based solution, one already has the history data as-suming old web server log files are available
• Log analyzers cannot be seen e.g. by competitors from page source (as opposed to page tagging)

Page tagging solutions

Page tagging analytics software are inherently different from log analyzers. Some of the features of page tagging are:

• One has to embed a couple of rows of JavaScript in the end of each page (the tag itself)
• Page tagging analysis reports are usually read from the vendors web service (e.g. Google Analytics). This might be a showstopper for some security aware (or phobic) companies
• Page tagging is often used in conjunction with cookies, meaning that it will provide more accurate results and can, to some extent, recognize old visitors more easily
• If a visitor has blocked JavaScript and / or cookies, their visit will not be logged by the analytics software
• The same can apply if the user exits the page without letting it load completely, because the JavaScript tag is usually put at the bottom of the source code (just before the closing </body> tag)
• Page tagging is currently thought to be more accurate measuring method by most experts

There are numerous web analytics software out there ranging from free of charge to pricy applications and from log parsing analyzers to page tagging software (see differences above). Some of the most prominent web analytics solutions are:

• Google Analytics 
• Omniture (multiple products available) 
• Webtrends (multiple products available)
• IndexTools 
• Unica
• Clicky
• Snoobi

New features coming up in iGoogle!

Dear reader,

Google is going to enhance its iGoogle service by integrating functionalities from Google Reader, Gmail, Chat, etc. into iGoogle’s soon renewed GUI. This is currently tested by a bunch of lucky few.

Check out the Google Operating System blog along with instructions on how to be able to test it yourself!! Magnificient!

Live search regains its share with Live Cashback

Dear Reader,

Microsoft Live Cashback

After launching the new Live Cashback feature on Live search, Microsoft has regained its previously lost share in the search engine market. Live Cashback, as Techcrunch put it, goes straight for Google’s throat by moving from CPC (cost-per-click) to CPA (cost-per-action), meaning that a lot of the revenue is given back to users! As speculated on Techcrunch, this is both desperate and brilliant tactics.

Links:

Read more about Cashback on Microsoft Live
Read more at Techcrunch blog article 1 and article 2
Try out Microsoft Live

The future of Google search - new functionality on its way

Dear Reader,

Google

Lately Google has been experimenting with very Digg and Wikia-like new search functionality. The research, according to Techcrunch, has actually started already a year ago. There seems to be only a handful of lucky test drivers at the time being.

The new search under testing consist e.g. of the ability to rate search engine results with ‘thumb down’ / ‘thumb up’ rating system as well as enables user comments on each result with similar rating system for each comment. The comments can be later edited as well as the ratings.

It is also possible to go and look at all the other commentators profiles and see the comments they have made on search results (provided they have commented while being logged in with their Google Account). If one isn’t logged in, the ‘user name’ on each comment will show as Unknown.

One can also remove results from the personal view or move results from latter result pages to the first one! I’ll make an educated  guess: this probably adds up somewhere deep on a Google server and in time can reduce or add the target site’s search engine ranking..?

Check the video on Techcrunch explaining some of the new features: 
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/16/is-this-the-future-of-search/

Future Audio Workshop Circle

Dear reader,

Just recently I bought a nice new VSTi software synthesizer called Circle by Future Audio Workshop that I would like my readers to know about.

I’ve now meddled with the synth a few evenings and think that so far it has one of the most user friendly GUIs I’ve ever seen in a VSTi software synth! (actually, to be precise, it also comes as standalone, AU, RTAS versions.)

Assigning LFOs (Low Frequency Oscillator) or envelopes to affect practically anything is made easy with a drag and drop function of colour coded circles around the interface.

Each LFO, envelope, sequencer etc. has its own colour coded circle that you can drag on almost any function. This makes e.g. morphing from one waveform to another extremely easy, especially so as Circle comes with a good number of oven-ready waveforms, even exotic ones.

Some of the key features are:

• 4 Oscillators (Analog / Wavetable)
• 1 Noise Oscillator, 1 Feedback Oscillator
• Other modules can be changed and include different modulators and effects
• A Native Instruments like sound ‘tagging’ function
• An excellent sound bank folder function to keep the sounds in order
• ‘Drag and drop’ assign different modulators to different targets
• Vista enabled

There are a couple of things they could have done better or that I’d hope to see in a future update:

• No ‘Next’ and ‘Previous’ buttons for quickly going through presets (with this synth even the usually default FL Studio next/prev buttons aren’t present)
• Either I’m just plain stupid or there seems to be a small bug in the sequencer. If I assign it to affect the coarse knob of the oscillators, it seems to raise the tune by one step at the end of the sequencer steps even if the sequencer is playing a flat note line. If I make changes to the sequencer steps, they seem to be in tune
• I’d love the interface to float so that I could drag and drop different ‘modules’ (LFO’s, Oscillators, etc) and change their place
• I’d also love to be able to alter the order of different effects and modulators

Future Audio Workshop Circle comes packed with a big bunch of preset sounds. For $199 / 149 € it is definitely worth the money.

Links:

• Download Circle demo
• Download Circle reference guide (pdf)