Two weeks ago, Google Analytics added a new feature that lets you compare your site’s traffic with average data for other similar sites. To make this feature possible, you need to enable data sharing with the benchmarking service. “Google will remove all identifiable information about your website, then combine that data with hundreds of other anonymous sites in comparable industries and report them in an aggregate form.” There’s also an option to enable data sharing with other Google services that will allow a better integration between Analytics, AdWords and other services.

Well, this past weekend I decided to have a look what the hype is about and enabled Benchmarking for this blog.

When data sharing is enable you can instantaneous go look at the comparison between your blog and a certain category.

By default it selects the category “All sites of similar size”, but you are able to select a category/sub categories of which you want your site to be measured against.

When you’ve selected your category you are now able to view a comparison to all sites within that category.  At the moment I think it is abit hazy to what sites are really in these categories etc.

When the graphs show, it will show two lines, one which is the data for your site/blog and the other is for the category you’ve selected, the average.

As you can see the trends along the lines are almost the same, but obviously my site’s trafic is way lower that the other in “my category”.

Obviosly you can view different kind of statistics as you normally can, different views from different angles of your site traffic data.

I would actually have liked if the other sites were identifiable so to compare yourself truly to another site, but obviously that will have other major impacts.

general impression …. looks good ‘n fancy, and one can see the power for this but for me personally at the moment gives me no real value as ‘just a blog’ poster.

written by Arné

As usual Google is digging into their current user base and launching more and more new features which I reckon is slowly starting to take over almost each area of social networks on the internet, or some areas that is.

They’re latest new features is almost a Twitter/Friendster feature within Google Reader is with

1. Sharing of bookmarklets, share anything(any content) with your friends you find, just drag and drop to toolbar and it’s instantaniously shared.
2. Share items with a note, Share content/web pages with your own notes attached.

Read more here

Now I just wonder what else Google has planned and at what point in their strategy will they be taking over the world.

written by Arné

When installing my development machine(installing MySQL 4.x) I usually run into this error on installation and especially when using the GUI tools like MySQL Administrator and trying to connect via PHP:

Client does not support authentication protocol requested by server; consider upgrading MySQL client

What I usually do is just set the database to use old passwords in the startup parameters or do the following SQL for the relevant user.

SET PASSWORD FOR 'some_user‘@’some_host‘ = OLD_PASSWORD(’newpwd‘);

Wonder if anyone else is also getting this problem alot.

written by Arné

Last night I decided that It’s been quite a while since I’ve done some PHP or basic web development and decided to at last look into what Joomla Templates are all about. I’ve been working with other CMS(Content Management System) frameworks lately like the enterprise solution WSS(1|2) and MOSS 07, but always have had this love for open source and the LAMP implementation. Obviously Joomla and WSS/MOSS are in totally different categories, Joomla is excellent for personal and small business use and better for public facing internet sites, where I see WSS/MOSS for intranet and intranet collaboration although it can easily be an open site as well, at a cost that is.

Anyways, to get back to the Joomla Templates and how they work etc. I quickly did a Google search to find out where to begin and how to learn exactly what goes on behind the scenes when one selects a template, where are the files stored and how it is made to be easily moved from one implementation to another.

The first Google ResultI found gave me a tutorial on Joomla’s site and I started going through this tutorial as I saw it as the most authoritative as it was on the Joomla domain.

You can almost call this tutorial a CSS tutorial instead of the Joomla tutorial. At the end of the tutorial I knew how to create my own templates and the basic functionality of it. But more importantly, I learnt so much about neat CSS tricks to get simple stuff done in really cool ways.

I suggest taking 45 minutes and just reading through the whole tutorial, you could maybe learn something, I certainly did.

written by Arné

I found the following YouTube video, where Eric Schmidt and Douglas Merrill talk about how they are using the same applications which are available to everyone else in the world internally to store all their documents, handle collaboration and use it for all internal running of the company.

Could this be something that could grow bigger and maybe into other enterprises and companies ?

I see it as it is all right that they use it for themselves, as they are in control of the servers and data, but for a 3rd party company I still see the risk of an external company being in control of your data. What do you reckon ? Will Google Apps be feasible for large corporates out there ? It could work for small startups though …

written by Arné