According to WebMastersWorld Forum there is a Google PageRank update happening right now.

If you’re interested in your own site’s rank a good link to check your PageRank on all the Google Servers is: http://livepr.raketforskning.com/?u=www.digitalpoint.com

While MSN is using their video service for showing live concerts, Google has taken a different road for alternative uses for Google Video. Steve Brandt of Google Watch recently posted that the University of California (Berkeley) will be offering over 250 hours of college material free over Google Video.

This could have a snowball affect if other institutions start following the path of Berkeley. Personally, I think this in an excellent idea because it will allow anyone to take the initiative to receive education from top level colleges/universities.

“Visitors will find a half-dozen Berkeley courses in their entirety, including “Physics for Future Presidents,” “Integrative Biology,” and “Search Engines: Technology, Society and Business,” featuring a lecture by Google co-founder Sergey Brin.”

Source:
http://news.com.com/Google+Video+plays+school/2100-1032_3-6120021.html

Ever want to watch live concerts such as Beyonce or Madonna but were simply too slow to get tickets? Well here’s something that may interest you: With its new partnership with Control Room, MSN will be launching a new service which allows users to watch live concerts on MSN Video.

John Legend will be kick starting the MSN Video service with a concert on October 2nd.

“The production deal is for 36 live-music events, according to a report on The Wall Street Journal’s Web site. As part of the agreement, Microsoft will also be able to stream Control Room shows to other platforms, such as Xbox Live, MSN Messenger and Microsoft Windows Media Player.”

I’ve heard that the contract is 3 years long and I think we’ll find out very quickly how successful it will be.

Source: Market Watch

Look out Seattle, Google Transit has now added King County Metro Transit routes to it’s free trip planning service. On Monday night, King County was one of five new areas added, the other 4 included to Pittsburgh, Tampa Florida, Eugene Oregon and Honolulu.

“The addition of King County Metro Transit may give the Internet search giant a bigger role in the daily lives of people in the Seattle area, home to Google rival Microsoft Corp. But that wasn’t a factor in the decision…”

I am not completely convinced that this wasn’t a factor and I bet Microsoft is playing close attention to Google’s plans. Maybe we’ll see a “Microsoft Metro” expansion pack in the upcoming Office 2007 release

Google Transit Trip Planner enables you to enter the specifics of your trip—where you’re starting, where you’re ending up, what time of day you’d like to leave and/or arrive—then uses all available public transportation schedules and information to plot out the most efficient possible step-by-step itinerary.

Source: http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/286471_google26.html

Last week Alex Iskold wrote an interesting post comparing various bookmarking sites. This is something I have been looking for a while because it would allow me to make a better decision as to what bookmarks to include below each post. Alex’s study compared 9 sites: Blinklist, Blogmarks, Del.icio.us, Diigo, Furl, Ma.gnolia, Shadows, Simpy and Stumble upon.

“The social bookmarking market is dominated by del.icio.us and StumbleUpon. These leaders split the market, as they bring orthogonal approaches to bookmarking – del.icio.us builds a hierarchy for people to browse (it does related relationships, etc.), while StumbleUpon is more of a random discovery system.”

A few things I would like to see added to this test include things like: A ranking system based on the results, DIGG, the use of API data where ever possible (i.e.: Del.icio.us) and maybe some type of rating system for the features lists.

I would also love to see a similar test done for Feed Readers: Google, My Yahoo, MSN, News Gator, etc…

I purchased the domain: http://www.manojknows.com about 3 years ago. It was strictly for comedic purposes based upon a Q&A type setup. However, this past weekend I recently did an update which included a redesign and a new function for the website. ManojKnows.com will be a place where I host some of my favorites sites to read and in the near future some useful tools for SEO/Blog Stats.

I am currently looking for suggestions on tools (preferably using APIs and ASP.Net – C#).

On Thursday, September 21st I had the pleasure of interviewing Google Analytics’ Senior Manager Brett Crosby. So here’s how the conversation went:

[Manoj]: Can you start by talking a little bit about your professional background.

[Brett]: When we were acquired by Google I was VP of marketing at Urchin, I was also one of the co-founders of Urchin Software. We had been developing the software for about 10 years prior to that, both software and web based version. Once we were acquired I became the senior manager of Google Analytics.

[Manoj]: Are you guys continuing the support for Urchin or are you pushing for everyone to change over to Google Analytics?

[Brett]: We are still supporting Urchin Software and are planning to release another software version (the version that runs on your own server vs. on demand). Currently there has been a lag on the software version of Urchin but we are trying hard to push out a new release. However, I am a huge believer in the ASP/On Demand model because of the vast amounts of features and updates we’re able to build into it. With Software versions there are problems with legacy and relying on customers to manually update.

[Manoj]: I like the ASP model too because of the simplicity of the implementation.

[Brett]: Exactly, this is a big reason why the market took off as it did and now people are starting to switch over to this version. There are often times where the Marketing and IT departments have different objectives and with the ASP model Marketers are easily able to install the code and implement goals/conversion funnels.

[Manoj]: Will you guys be coming out with a guide/book for helping with custom implementations? This is something I have been asked before by other people.

[Brett]: Hopefully we don’t need a book on how to implement (chuckles…) because we’re trying to make it as easy as possible. We could potentially write a book and their have been conversations about that, however, the book would be more based on what you can do with data rather than how to set it up. We do have the conversion university resource where people can go and learn more about the analytics data. There is a whole world with what you can do with the data which we are constantly updating but I am not sure if we’ll come out with a book at this time. That being said other people have written books on Google Analytics.

[Manoj]: How many users do you currently have on Google Analytics, do you know an approximate number?

[Brett]: I do know the number, however I don’t think it’s a number we’re disclosing at this time even though it may have been leaked at a couple places.

[Manoj]: Alright…you must have noticed a huge increase when you made the sign up instantaneous?

[Brett]: Good Questions, to both of those questions…when we first launched we noticed a lot of people interested in the product, specifically because it provided more than just the number of page views, rather it also showed marketing numbers and goals. As you know, the demand was so much greater than we realized because we increased the size of the market several times over in a matter of a couple days. Therefore we had to turn off the system for new accounts and put an invitation model in place. Since then we have completely re-opened and yes we have seen a big surge in the accounts and we have added further scalability to handle them.

[Manoj]: What is your goal with Google Analytics, perhaps a target you want to reach?

[Brett]: Funny, I was just thinking about this myself, how I would be satisfied with my career. I haven’t really come up with anything concrete yet, but one of my general goals is to get more and more people to use this data in order to make actionable decisions. More specifically one of my goals (and my entire team’s) is the opportunity to bring the market up to speed by using analytics to make decisions for their website. This was not the case a little while back where only a small percentage of users had access to this type of data. It’s an industry wide challenge to get the right information to the right people at the right time so this is something we’re taking serious considerations into.

[Manoj]: I think what you’ve essentially done is made it so that there is no reason for someone with a website not to have analytics in place because it’s so easy.

[Brett]: This is what some of our intentions were when we released the product. One of the goals even at the executive level at Google is to improve the web one website at a time through the creation of better user experiences.

[Manoj]: Can you talk a little bit about the Future of the Web Analytics Industry or any Trends you foresee.

[Brett]:Sure, some of the trends we are seeing are pretty interesting. One of the things we noticed is companies such as Career Builder using Web Analytics to help experiment with various promotions in order to determine how well their offline marketing is working. This is not a brand new concept but we’re seeing a lot more of this.

The second big thing I noticed is companies using the Internet to promote what would have been TV advertisements and then using web analytics to understand the level of visitor interactions on their websites. (Brett gives an example of Carls Junior Restaurant Ads being run only once on TV. Carls Junior later allows users the ability to see the same ad on their website). The brand interaction users were getting online were much greater than what they would ever see from TV.

One other Trend worth mentioning is online agencies who are responsible for driving traffic being paid based on the success of their conversions and driving traffic and through to the websites.

[Manoj]: Do you have any new features or reports that you expect to release in the future?

[Brett]: We are always try to come out with new updates, things we recently added include paid placement position and adgroups in the adword reports. This allows users to see their most profitable paid position and with this knowledge they can bid for a given position.

[Manoj]: How do you guys intend on handling the implementation of AJAX on websites?

[Brett]: Great Question, although my thoughts are proprietary to Google, we did purchase a company called MeasureMap a little while back and one of the founders of Measure Map: Jeff Veen has written a book on AJAX/Web design. Jeff and his team are highly versed in AJAX so therefore we definitely have some thoughts on how to handle it.

[Manoj]: Going to end it with something fun: Please tell us the top 5 things you enjoy most working at Google.

[Brett]:
- The Food (easiest one), it’s outstanding and chefs are magicians
- The people are tremendous at Google. So many smart and bright people make it very humbling. This makes you more inclined to get things done rather than dictating.
- How seriously people take the user experience/user trust issue and how hard they work not to jeopordize any of those things.
- Lack of rigorous hierarchy, the freedom to work on project you want to work on. Access to Larry, Sergey and Eric whenever we want (and we do meet with them monthly/quarterly)
- 20% time is another great thing which really helps promote imagination and creativity.

Well that was it, Thank you to Brett for doing this, he was a very down to earth guy and this made for a very smooth experience.