Meryl Streep won the Oscar for Sophie’s Choice, a film that hinges on (spoiler alert) a woman having to choose which of her children will live and which will die. Microsoft is for that kind of choice. In a blog post later copied to GovLoop, Microsoft’s Dan Kasun lays it out. “Choice has been one of Microsoft’s strongest messages for years,” ... [
Once again, Google has bought something only to open source it. This time it’s ReMail, first acquired, then put on Google Code as open source under the Apache 2.0 license. (It previously did the same thing with DocVerse.) ReMail was more efficient in terms of system resources than Apple’s own mail.app, it offered full text searching, and it had other neat ... [
Apple’s suit against HTC could end one of two ways. Either Apple becomes the next SCO, which ran itself aground claiming rights to Linux, or it becomes the next Microsoft, which is prospering while claiming to own Linux. The answer depends on how hard Apple presses its case. You can get a clue by looking at who Apple has sued. While ... [
The low-hanging fruit in the renewable energy business still lies with efficiency. Cutting your energy use without crimping your lifestyle gives you a faster payback than turning into Ed Begley Jr. It’s still good to be a little Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) on energy use, even if your politics are to the right of Rush Limbaugh, because there’s money in saving, ... [
The 311 service has been a “red headed stepchild” for American cities practically since it was launched in the mid-1990s as a phone service. (Picture from Moonbattery, a conservative blog.) The idea was to make 311 the 911 for non-emergency calls. A burning building call 911, a burning question call 311. But that charge was so broad that most cities did ... [
In all the talk about New York financier Paul Singer’s plan to go all Gordon Gecko on Novell, one word has not been mentioned nearly enough. Microsoft. Microsoft needs a viable Novell, and Novell’s Linux business was on the verge of becoming viable when Singer’s Elliott Associates swooped in with an offer to break up the company, seize its cash, split ... [
Dries Buytaert of Drupal and Acquia is warning that Software as a Service is becoming a threat to open source and that clouds could create the same vendor lock-in customers sought to avoid with open source. (This is Dries at last year’s Drupalcon in Paris, in a close-up of a photo by Pedro Lozano. From buytaert.net.) Even where SaaS companies let ... [
That first step is interoperability. Getting proprietary gear to work together, to transform reports among proprietary standards, is the first step on the road to an open world. The HIMSS show takes that step every year with what it calls its Interoperability Showcase. At this year’s show in Atlanta it occupied the whole end of one hall of the Georgia World ... [
The announcement by Twitter that it is switching to Cassandra for its database lookups puts new attention on a project that has yet to reach Version 1.0. Cassandra had been underway long before Oracle bought Sun and mySQL. Facebook first launched it in 2008 to power their inbox search feature. It was released on Google Code in 2008 and became an ... [
Today Matt Asay urges government buyers to support open source, open data and open standards. Why? Because it’s better. Because it promotes competition. Because it gives government flexibility. But after watching government on every level, in various countries, for over half my lifetime, I can tell you the last thing any government wants is to make a decision its successor can ... [
Since I began writing this blog in 2005 I have watched open source move from a fringe idea to something embraced by the IT mainstream. But there are still extremists out there who want to destroy open source. Some of their names may surprise you. What they have done is retreat into a group where they seek not to be identified. ... [
No. Matt Asay hits the nail on the head. In full “knock this board off my shoulder mode,” the Ubuntu COO dares Microsoft to sue Canonical, or Google, or someone else over its Linux claims who might fight back. To torture my recent analogy (analogies can’t fight back), Microsoft isn’t Neville Chamberlain. It’s the guy on the other side of the ... [
In response to my piece yesterday, my Italian friend Roberto Galoppini referenced a piece he did last August called the Open Source Innovation Backbone. Packaged software companies may just use open source to build a common base on which they can innovate. Or they may copy a proprietary product, competing against it together in order to drive out a competitor’s monopoly ... [
Open source may become the default position of customers, but it is still not the first option when a market is new. This is a point open source executives like Matt Asay continue to struggle with, one that closed-source advocates continue to hammer on. (Picture from the Breakthrough Institute.) Open source is shared freeloading. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. ... [
Another day, another Microsoft patent deal. This time with Amazon. And more whining from Linux advocates that this is a “Microsoft tax” aimed at making Linux users pay Microsoft for the open source operating system. I have thought that too. But let me play devil’s advocate a moment, using as my text Marshall Phelps’ Burning the Ships. Isn’t Microsoft just buying ... [There are so many SEO and Analytic Tools in the marketplace it’s hard to keep up with them all. Some are free, others are licensed, and others are sold on a subscription basis. Most of these tools offer some sort of free component to get you interested. For example, this morning I ran across a company from Sydney called Get Sticky that offers a SEO product with a Keyword and Website Analyzer for free to get you interested.
Last week I finished a week long free trial of Hubspot’s Inbound Marketing SEO software. This is a paid subscription based software solution. The approach taken by Hubspot is to provide the user with all the tools they need to do their job all in one place. So for example you can do keyword and site analysis all from the same place. A particularly nice feature they have from a social media perspective is a dashboard that searches social media sites based on your keywords and then provides links suggesting that perhaps you should comment on them. That’s a timesaver and useful feature to be sure.
After finishing the Hubspot trial, I thought I’d take a look at Google Analytics again for comparison purposes. I haven’t looked at Google Analytics since about 05 or 06, other than a small peek at SES conferences. It’s come a long way since then.
As you can imagine, there is a certain amount of functionality centered around Google Adwords but it’s not overdone. Google recognizes that in order for users to be successful with Adwords they will need to be successful with all of their web efforts, paid or not. Their tool does a good job of tracking and analyzing your traffic, visitors, visits, pageviews, navigation, etc, so you can see what is resonating with people and what is not. You can set goals to track achievement as well as track advertisement whether it’s email, Adwords, other PPC, and even TV and Radio. If they have the data they will track ROI metrics for you. Pretty nice.
Google Analytics is not as integrated or comprehensive as tools like Hubspot, but for a free tool it really offers quite a bit. Like all things worth doing, it does take some work to get it all set up and then even more works to really tune website and search performance. This is an ongoing activity and what SEO and Web Analysis are all about.
A nice aspect I like about Google Analytics is it allows me to work collaboratively with clients. For example, I can set up an account for them and integrate it into their website which many of the less technical marketing folks would have trouble doing either because of the technical challenges or just the amount of time required. I can then give them login privilages where they can review and analyze the report data and make changes to their site and see the effects . . . . flow, navigation, keywords, etc.
If you’d like me to set your site up on Google Analytics or even do some training, please contact me here.
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1 Google Analytics Keeps Growing | Emerging Open Source Markets- SFWEBDESIGN.com // Jul 10, 2009 at 2:51 pm
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