If you haven’t noticed yet, Google added a new feature to its Analytics program called, “Intelligence.” Intelligence is a new reporting feature that will generate alerts to specific actions, for example: you can create automatic alerts of significant changes in the data patterns of your site metrics and dimensions over daily, weekly and monthly periods. For instance, Intelligence could call-out a large surge in visits from a particular referral site, or let you know about bounce rates of visitors from a specific geographic region.
Instead of you having to monitor reports and comb through data, Analytics Intelligence alerts you to the most significant information to pay attention to, saving you time and providing traffic insights that could affect your business.
Custom Alerts make it possible for you to tell Google Analytics what to watch for. You can set daily, weekly, and monthly triggers on different dimensions & metrics, and be notified by email, or right in the user interface when the changes actually occur.
Check out this YouTube video Google put together that will explain Intelligence in more detail.
Does this sound familiar…you run into a cool news story or a new web app, but you don’t have time to read it at that moment? Before you know it you have six browser windows open, some with a dozen tabs. This happens to me all the time, but before I can get back to reading…my computer restarts after some downloads, or it crashes—loosing all of those open windows before I had a chance to peruse.
Let’s say you’re working with a graphic designer or web developer and they send you an .EPS file (Adobe format, i.e. Photoshop, Illustrator, etc. ) of your logo or some other file and you don’t have any Adobe programs on your computer…what do you do? Or, let’s say all of your music is in .WAV format and you need it into mp3 for the web? Or, perhaps you have some sort of video you can’t watch…what do you do? Well, there is a great answer to that question…file conversion. Zamzar is an easy-to-use website application that will allow you to convert nearly any file into another supporting one. Best of all…it’s free!
There is no question Adobe Flash (previously MacroMedia) can do some amazing things. Flash is the very essence of “rich media,” and has always had that “coolness” factor. However, from an online marketing perspective, Flash and other rich media apps like AJAX have mostly been invisible to the search engine spider bots—thus websites coded in RIAs (Rich Interactive Application) have had a difficult time generating any search engine traffic, let alone even getting indexed by the major search engines. That all seems to be changing according to an article from News.com.
Web based images have always been a challenge for web developers from an online marketing perspective as they reveal little data for the spider bots to gather information from. Well, this is all about to change thanks to Google and other search engines developing image processing technologies…in other words, “image searches” are being revolutionized. ‘Search’ as we know it is about to change…drastically.
Imagine this…the new search engine spider bots will be able to analyze the pixels in an image and tell you not only what or whom the image is of, but exactly where and when it was taken. This is some powerful stuff. Watch the video below from RJ Pittman a product management director with Google.
There are new search engines popping up all over the place…some have real potential as they serve vertical or niche needs…such as images. Here is a pretty “cool” new search engine that indexes and displays differently than most. Cuil.com
You’ve probably seen screen shots of a website or other document in a video or PowerPoint presentation before—and, probably even on occasion have needed to perform this feat yourself. Well, there is the down and dirty way to accomplish this task…you can hit the function key on your PC, then the PRT SC button, then paste in a Word doc, however that method has some severe limitations.
There are also some specialized software apps that will assist you in the area of creating screenshots and thumbnail images…some are free, some are not. CNET has a list of many to choose from…one of the more popular free versions is ScreenHunter, which both CNET and users rank very high. If you need to create a lot of screen shots and thumbnail images, you may opt for Snagit, which I find to be an outstanding product. It does cost $49, but you might find the added functionality work the price of admission. Snagit does offer the product Free-to-Try for 30 days and is also ranked very high by CNET and users.
If you’re interested in learning more about Snagit, here is a helpful video.
This is a very cool idea/service in which you can create a magazine layout of your favorite RSS feeds. You select the feeds and how often you want the system to generate a PDF magazine file for you…daily, weekly, monthly, etc. Tabbloid is the tool to check out.
There is a motivating factor behind Tabbloid…it’s owned by HP, so I’m thinking their objective is to get you to print more. This is the type of out-of-box thinking that companies need to do to generate more demand for their products. Just think how much more ink and paper HP can sell by creating a product/service like this? It’s a Purple Cow idea if I’ve ever seen one.
Here’s a cool web-based app…Turn your Blog into a Podcast and download to your I-Pod…now you can listen to your favorite Blog rather than reading it. Online publishers are starting to use a service from Odiogo.com that will enable users to listen to their favorite Blogs rather than reading them…can you say, “Multitasking?”
