Google Analytics has began to open up room for new accounts, they have seemed to expand their services and improved in some ways and Google hasn’t hesitated to put its invite only policy into works to limit accounts. Here is an excerpt from their status update page…

We’ve added enough capacity that we are re-opening signups on an invitation basis. Many of our users who previously submitted their email address to us will be receiving an invite shortly.

As you may know, we experienced extraordinarily strong demand shortly after we launched last November. To ensure a high quality user experience for existing customers, we had to temporarily disable new signups. We have been working diligently to add more capacity that we can both enhance performance for existing users and re-open signups to a limited number of new users.

Since we launched, we’ve improved the freshness of report data so that our existing customers can see reports that are as recent as 3 hours ago. We’ve also re-enabled the addition of new profiles so that all of our existing customers can track additional sites using Google Analytics.

Currently, we don’t have enough capacity yet to re-open signups for everyone who wants an account. Not everyone who previously sent us an email address received an invite. We will continue to send out additional invites as we add more capacity. If you haven’t submitted your email address to us, please do so on our signup form.

Thanks for your patience and for your interest in Google Analytics.

-The Google Analytics Team.
Link…

Feel free to sign up for an account but know that you will be prompted to enter an invitational code from an existing member, like so…

Thanks to John Scott from v7 Network, I have found Neat-O and neat it definitely is. The tool checks anchor text within your incoming links and gives you an opportunity to compare your own anchor text to the ones from the sites that are above you in the SERPs. What a clean and excellent coded tool, probably one of the best ever created. Don’t worry if it takes some time to load. If you want to get to the nitty gritty of what it takes to get to the top of Google, start playing around with it and then get ready to do some real work :)

When I read the posts about what to name your pages, I sometimes shiver looking at how narrow minded search engine optimizers can be. I do understand that short term speaking it’s a good idea to have a url with keyword1-keyword2.html in order to get ranked faster.
But let’s look at this from another angle:
As time goes by, it becomes less and less important what you name your url. When you search Google for just about any keyterm, you will see some pages such as http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0735713308/104-8582268-4551954?v=glance&n=283155 or even worse, which go against everything that you are being told to do in the search engine forums.

So why exactly do those pages rank above the ones following the advice that is usually given?

Very simple: they have old, incoming links. Time tells who is relevant and who isn’t. On-site optimization is a short term solution. What matters is your content, who links to you and then the other factors which have little to do with seo. One of those is branding. If you are in it for the long run, my advice is to use a url that looks good in the browser rather than hiding the domain name within 1 mile of clutter.
What looks better:

http://www.domain.com/real-estate-marketing.html or http://www.domain.com/rem ?
Or how about http://www.domain.com/realestatemarketing

I believe that if your site is the site you are planning to do business with for the next few years, use a url that will help you brand your business.
Just like picking out a domain name, these days it’s mainly the spammers who use the keyword1-kw2-kw3.com ones vs. a short and memorable one that you can tell someone over the phone or use in a radio commercial. Let’s get real for a minute: search engine optimizers are not always the most creative individuals nor do they necessarily pay attention to the big picture. I know what Matt Cutts is saying about the dashes vs. underscores issue, but is Matt really your web development consultant or just the voice of Google passing on what works right now?

Don’t get me wrong: I can only encourage you to read his blog. I do! But when it comes to creating your own site:
The decisions are yours. You own the site. Google wants your help indexing sites faster and easier, but it is your business you should worry about.
Sooner or later it shouldn’t make a difference what the url is made out of. That opinion I have formed watching the trend of the past few years. When the dust settles and everything is game, don’t be stuck with something that could look a lot better. Find your own style, stick with it, and be the best at it that you can possibly be!

Check out this cool spin on image searching; Flickr.com has come out with its experimental image search service named Retrievr. Basically you sketch a picture that you are looking for and it tries to give you similar results, although not really accurate still it’s cool…

I tried to sketch an eye and this is what I got…

You can play with it here…

Google is attempting to cash in on Apple’s idea of selling TV shows online by releasing their very own “video market”. Google has signed a deal with CBS, the NBA, ITN and various other cable networks to begin allowing users to “watch lots of high quality video on the web”. Although Apple’s iTunes allows users to download various TV shows from ABC and other networks, Google’s Video Market will be the first ever of its kind as it will allow users to watch various shows on the web instead of downloading them.

Here’s some info on what you can expect:

There will be thousands of titles for sale in the Google Video Store with more titles added everyday. The list of content producers will also include a broad range of entertainment and educational partners including among others, Blue Highways TV, CareTALK, Fashion TV, Here! TV, HDNet, Hilarious Picks, Image Entertainment, iWatchNow.com, Kantola Productions, MediaZone, Plum TV, Porchlight Entertainment, SOFA Entertainment, Teen Kids, Trinity Broadcasting Network, WGBH, Wheels TV, and Wilderness Film India Ltd.

Google Video will also feature NBA games from this season and some of the greatest individual performances in NBA history. Marking the first time NBA fans can purchase full NBA contests on the Web, each NBA game for the rest of this season, including the NBA Playoffs and The Finals, will be available to fans in its entirety 24 hours after the contest’s conclusion. In addition, the highest scoring games of several of the NBA’s best players will be available including Kobe Bryant’s 62 point performance in three quarters vs. Dallas last month.

Also it looks like Google is sticking it out to Apple as it will take away a part of their loyal iPod video base as it will allow iPod users to “download and watch any non-copy-protected content from Google Video, and even get it specially optimized for playback”.

For more information on this click here.

Well it looks like Microsoft has taken up the motto “if we can’t beat them, copy them,” the beta version of their Explorer 7.0 looks very much like their free and heavily popular competitor FireFox from the tabbed browsing to the corner search, check it out for yourself…

Click here for a full size image…

Well I believe the teams are forming, it seems to be Google and FireFox vs. Microsoft and Yahoo, stay tuned to see what happens…

I know that many webmaster rely on PayPal to process most and sometimes all of there online orders, making at an extremely vital part of their business, and many webmasters heavily dependent on PayPal might get a heart attack if they were told that there account was suspended. See I had received an e-mail a few days ago telling me my account had been suspended until I were to provide them with some information regarding my account, they provided a link which read “Click here to activate your account,” when clicked the link takes you to a page identical to the PayPal log in page. I new this was suspicious because I had received an e-mail like this before but it was poorly made and was e-mailed from an unrelated domain, so I had deleted with out checking with PayPal but this e-mail claimed to be from info@paypal.com and was very nicely made so I thought maybe I should call PayPal and ask them what was going on. When I called the first thing I heard a machine tell me was that PayPal never requests info via e-mail, and told me to send any e-mails that did to spoof@paypal.com, so I did.
Read on …

If you’re interested in recapping the tech buzz from 05, vbRad has written an article that you’ll love! He lists out what he believed are the top 10 over hyped stories of the tech world in 05 with great insight. Here’s a part of the article that describes his view on the browser battle currently going on between Internet Explorer and Firefox.

7. Firefox will take over the world
When Firefox 1.0 came out, I predicted that by the end of 2005 Firefox would garner at least 15% of the worldwide market share. I based that on the following thought: probably 5% of the computer users are techies. Then another 10% of the users are in sphere of influence of the individual techie (i.e. provides family/friends with tech support). Various pundits and zealots even went as far as proclaiming the end of Internet Explorer. Well neither prediction occurred. You know why? Because people are mostly driven by inertia. IE’s shenanigans are not an annoyance big enough to most people that they will actively go out and find a replacement (or would even know how). Most people (who aren’t computer experts/hobbyists) are just happy that the damn thing works at all. The whole situation reminds me of an old “In Living Color” sketch, where Damon Wayans is the Apathy Man - a super hero with all the powers that a superego usually has, but with no motivation to use them. Despite being an unquestionably better browser, Firefox basically failed to catch on among the people that are just home users and make up the vast majority of browser consumers. Still, I would like it if Firefox got a larger market share, simply because it is a better browser and better products should win in the marketplace.

If your interested in reading more click here.

There is a new trademark violation lawsuit cooking and this time it’s not about using trademarked keywords. Believe it or not, it’s about a subdomain url from blogspot.com. A blogger account is using the name Jews for Jesus in the assigned blogspot subdomain name and is critical of what the organization is doing and what it stands for. I find this very interesting since it is likely to have an impact on online activities in general. There are company names and names of organizations used all the time and very freely on forums, blogs and even regular sites without too much hinderance other than the occasional Seize and Desist letters which webmasters, bloggers, forum owners and domain name holders seem to get from time to time .
I think that the outcome of this lawsuit is going to stop a lot of blog posts in general if “Jews for Jesus” wins. I personally do believe that “Jews for Jesus” has a right to their subdomain name, but am worried that their victory could also do harm to the freedom we have enjoyed in being able to speak our minds and share experiences with products, services and whatever else we like to share.

The complaint had been filed Dec. 21, 2005. We will keep you posted.

Most of the time a web designer’s job doesn’t end at making a site look good, the site must be compatible with much more then the loosely-interpreted IE, there are several browsers out there that are widely used by the public, even though IE is responsible for over 65% of them you could be loosing 35% of your potential visitors and thus dollars, yens, or what ever because of sheer ignorance.

Web site compatibility includes much more then the type of browser, there is also Flash versions and existence and Java enabling that needs to be considered, and not to mention the OSs. Yeah, I know that is a lot of stuff to keep in mind and if you do the probability math you probabily would come up with a number in the thousands for different tests you would have to do to check for perfect compatibility, which even W3C can’t guarantee. Well no need for that, now there is a new beta search engine/tool which will provide you with a screen shot of your site in all kinds of different browsers not to mention many different versions of each browser, java compatibility, different screen resolutions, and with different versions of Flash.

Behold, the beta BrowserShots.org is a project that is focusing on helping web designers do just that.

So you ask how does this work, see when you visit BrowserShots.org you can simply type in your site’s URL and your job will be added to the queue then different members of the BrowserShots community will use a program which easily makes a screenshot of your site in their browser and uploads the gif image and all the configurations of their browser to the database where it is stored for your viewing…

The good things about these program/tool is it is free unlike some other browser compatibility services, and not to mention much more extensive in it’s tests of all variables that effect a website; checking for browser type, engine, language, JavaScript, Java, Flash, hardware, and OS. The only bad thing is if the que is longer then 24 hours the job is cancelled, if you are to impatient to see what your site looks like you can check out some of the screen shots made for ThirdSquare.com below – note the screen shots do come full size you just have to click on the pick from this area.

Here is ThirdSquare.com in Firefox 1.0.4

And here it is in Konqueror 3.3, see the tool already proofed useful we would have never known about this background problem in Konquerorif it wasn’t for this tool.

If you would like to see the rest of them go here.

Ok, guys have fun…