When Google acquired Urchin, the tool commanded a hefty $400/month price. They reduced the price to $199/month – better, but still out of reach for many webmasters.

As a free service, it is limited to 5 million pageviews if you are not a adwords customer – otherwise, all limits are off (for now). If you have a site you want to instrument, go to Google Analytics and sign up. I did – service is a little slow, but what I did see looks promising.

Happy Tracking!

The 50k view of this manifesto describes a 2.0 company core competencies as:

• Services, not packaged software, with cost-effective scalability
• Control over unique, hard-to-recreate data sources that get richer as more people use them
• Trusting users as co-developers
• Harnessing collective intelligence
• Leveraging the long tail through customer self-service
• Software above the level of a single device
• Lightweight user interfaces, development models & business models

Throughout the post, the term “long tail” is frequently used. In this context the origin of this phrase can be attributed to Chris Andersons article in Wired Magazine. While the article is focused on the entertainment industry – Anderson describes how the persistance of the net can work to the advantage of niche market players by leveraging the different distribution and sales channel opportunities the internet creates.

In Web 2.0, these channels of opportunity are more numerous than what Anderson describes – blogs, RSS feeds and contextual tagging is just the tip of the iceburg. Understanding, uncovering and exploiting these channels requires the core competencies mindset described above – so take a hard look at those project plans and see if they fit in the tired or wired category.

A few vocal members in these online marketing communities argue that these customers just don’t get it, posting customer email threads, bemoaning how unskilled these customers are, etc.

Well – if you look at these sites, you see that many of the images that they use to reference these ebooks look just like a physical book – actually, a book with a customized cover. Its no wonder the customer expected a book when the site shows a book – even if the site copy states electronic book.

And if you are targeting a niche market, it is wrong to expect that since they are online they understand how to download, save and possibily install something.

Yes – it is more profitable to sell bits – an electronic book costs next to nothing to distribute. But digital doesn’t work for everyone, so the solution isn’t bits or atoms – its both. Offering a digital and physical version of the product meets the needs of all users, increases customer satisfaction and reduces chargebacks.

The intro made a compelling argument how atoms would ultimately give way to bits, forever changing the way we acquire, access and utilize products and information. Being a member of PC Magazine, this was extremely important to me – it foretold the death of the publishing industry, no?

Given this backdrop, it seems that the death of atoms [at least for publishers] may be a little premature – even today. Looking at the most recent PC magazine and Maximum PC issues, it seems that Adsense has gone atomic.

Google took out full page ads in both of these publications and resold the space to adsense customers, allowing these companies to gain a foothold into publications at a fraction of the cost. Publish.com did a writeup on it, complete with interviews with the adsense participants. The ads can be viewed online as well.

I remember talking about this very strategy many years ago at a PC Magazine editors day dinner with some industry ad execs in Boston. Bridging the gap – I mentioned – between online banner ads and magazine ad space from an online perspective seemed an exciting proposition and a unique position unmet by existing ad networks. I got polite nods and a few ahhs from it, but nothing materialized.

That is, until now. Chalk another one up for Google.

While that change caused many sites to be dropped from search results, many came back in a few months – prompting a never ending stream of conspiracy theories and chicken little warnings about an impending change – my site is falling!

But – I digress. According to Google PageRank is more than alive and kicking – in their own words “PageRank continues to provide the basis for all of our web search tools”. Techies may want to read some whitepapers on the topic – Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brins stanford paper is a good place to start.

So understanding Pagerank and monitoring your sites PR ranking is a good idea. How do you find your rank? Best way is from the google toolbar – install it in your browser and accept the advanced functions version (different terms for firefox and internet explorer users – but you get the picture). Once pagerank is installed, surf to a popular page (anonymous surfing online perhaps?) and look at the bar. As I write this, netcloak.com has a PageRank of 5 – which could change as time progresses. Yahoo.com has a PageRank of 9 and a lot more traffic than netcloak – so it ranks higher.

There are other browser toolbars that report pagerank – Quirk has a firefox extension that reports PageRank and Alexa rank – another site popularity ranking system. Alexa has come under fire of privacy / spyware advocates – but it does provide another useful view of the surfing cosmos. Quirk has a anonymous mode that uses anonymizer.net – but there is a slight delay in retrieving the ranks and if anonymizer is overtaxed / offline no ranking is reported. Another nit – the pagerank results in quirk are sometimes different than the pagerank results from the google bar – in one situation, quirk incorrectly reported a site as unranked (meaning that the site was removed from google) while google reported otherwise. So if you’re trading pagerank stories, make sure that your using the same source – otherwise, you may be in for a shock [no more chicken little links ] . Quirk is at version 1.11 right now, so one can’t be too critical of the tool just yet – besides, it provides a lot of other good info in a small amount of screen space.

Does Pagerank matter? It seems to matter to Google – perhaps less than before flordia, but important nevertheless. PageRank may not be the end all metric, but it is one to watch – and its better to have some information that nothing at all.

Of interest to me is the folding of MSN into the platforms group. It’s no secret that MS and Google are not the best of friends, and for all the api / standardization efforts that Microsoft has issued over the years, very few internet centric MS APIs have gained any traction. (passport, anyone?)

While I welcome the release of APIs on the net, I can’t help but wonder if it is a case of “too little, too late”. If a more advanced MSN search API was available, it would be nice – but all the traffic is elsewhere. I believe that sea change would be necessary for people to choose MSN over google, but playing the platform card and providing advanced APIs to leverage that platform is Microsofts strong suit.

All I can say is – let the games begin.

Jim Galley

The size I’m referring to is pagecount.

Been working on the google rankings and noticed some interesting trends. You can work hard to create compelling content, optimize the page for a keyword, and then get pushed down the rank when someone creates a page (or buys a page) on a site that has lots of pre-existing pages. Example? take a look at my page about anonymous surfing tip Pretty good page, but it gets trumped by an ad site by a person who just created one ad page. The site has 403,000 pages – way too many for me to generate! – so I’ll have to work a little harder.

Ultimately, the ad will drop, but the cache will remain – leaving me to fight against a ghost.

So – while many tout that content is king, besides links, pagesize seems to be the ruler in the low end game.

Oh, on another point – be careful when registering domains @ godaddy – There are quite a few horror stories about godaddy reclaiming your domain whenever a spam complaint is made & then charging a $199 dollar fee to get it back. Here’s an example here.

If you have a domain there, I’d suggest you move it.

Now, if only my other banned site http://popknowledge.com/ would be released… but it needs content first.

Yes, it does take time to get listed – but the site has been through several google dances now & still remains off the radar. Since it was banned prior to my ownership, all the advice surrounding how to get relisted is related to finding what you did bad, asking forgiveness and waiting for the next few google refreshes.

Emails to Google give automated replies – perhaps someone will see it there (nothing yet). I’d hate to kill a good domain name based on history…