Matt Cutts of Google stated at PubCon:

“There are some things in our infrastructure that can be perceived as a sandbox.”

So…. yes, the Google sandbox does exist to some extent, but is probably not as widespread as thought.

Matt Cutts of Google stated at PubCon that the data collected from Google Analytics will probably not be utilized to improve search results. I speculated on this in an earlier post. He also commented on privacy implications, ” In my mind that is not at all a concern, and if anything changes in that regard in the future I will certainly post about it. I don’t think it needs to be a concern at all”

I asked Matt if the primary purpose of Google Analytics was to market adwords. He said it wasn’t the primary reason for the service but it is a great side benefit.

I will be at Webmasterworld’s PubCon in Las Vegas the rest of the week. The Editor of WebProNews Mike McDonald will be there as well. Look for extensive coverage of PubCon at WebProNews.com.

I will also be blogging my comments here.

Google has said they will have a big announcement … rumors are swirling … but it is most likely Adwords or Adsense related. As was pointed out 3 of the 4 Google speakers at the event are part of the Adwords/Adsense team…

Matt Cutts Software Engineer, Google Inc.
Kim Malone Online Sales & Operations, AdSense, Google
Emily White Adwords support manager, Google Inc.
Gokul Rajaram Group Product Manager, Google Adsense, Google Inc.

The big news today is that Google has made Urchin free and renamed it Google Analytics. This could be a serious blow to competitors such as WebTrends, although I doubt Google will initially offer a free package that competes on an enterprise level. In terms of basic pageview and visitor tracking I see Google dominating the market in short order … significantly impacting the market share of services such as Site Meter.

However, more interesting to me is how Google could utilize this new data. For instance, Google could add pageview and unique visitor data to its search algorithm in order to more accurately determine site popularity and “Web Attention”. This would be more reliable than PageRank because it can’t be SEO’ed to artificially inflate a sites popularity. Linking information is nothing compared to the real data Google will have on websites utilizing Google Analytics. If sites utilize this service in en masse this could be a revolutionary change to their search algorithm.

Sounds like another concept for Google to patent!

It looks like a hiccup developed in the Google Analytics launch. When checking your stats Google is providing an error message:

Currently Undergoing Maintenance

Google Analytics reporting is currently undergoing maintenance and will be available shortly. Your site traffic is being logged and you will be able to see the data after system maintenance has concluded.

I’m sure Google will get it worked out but this is unusual for Google. Most of their products such as Gmail were launched without a major hitch. I suspect that Google underestimated the quick utilization of the service by high traffic sites. It hasn’t affected the entire Google server farm because their search is still lightning fast.

Update: Google has changed their error message as follows:

We’re upgrading accounts. Please come back later.

Thanks for stopping by. We are currently migrating existing customers to the newly improved Google Analytics service. This process will be completed later this afternoon. Please come back then to sign up for Google Analytics.

Is anyone else seeing these messages?

There are thousands of blogs started everyday all with varying missions. Most are created because … it’s the thing to do. CEO’s, entrepreneurs and other business professionals are joining the blogosphere because they don’t want to be left out. That’s certainly one of the reasons I started this blog.

But is that a good reason? Of course not! That’s why I’m ending this blog immediately after this post. (just kidding)

That brings me to my point, why write a business oriented blog? It’s something I will admit I didn’t explore long enough before I started this blog just last Friday.

It is commonly thought that business blogs are about building authority for the blog writer. For instance, over the last couple of years Steve Rubel - a marketing strategist for the PR firm CooperKatz & Company has become Steve Rubel, PR guru and blogger. Steve has parlayed his new status into significant notoriety.

Well, if notoriety is your motivation I think your blog is doomed. Starting a business blog should be about the reader, not the writer. It should be about providing readers with information and ideas that are useful and unique. I think Steve has done this well.

Business blogs are really not much different than other business publications. Provide the reader with timely information and unique perspective which comes from your personal and business experiences and you will be offering your readers something worth reading.

Have I done that with my first posts in this blog? I think I’m still working on it … It’s not easy being a blogger!

The tabloid style tech news site The Register wrote an over the top article yesterday slamming Google. The story is so strange that it’s funny.

“Google covers up its relative lack of innovation with a bunch of touchy-feely tripe. It really slathers on the tripe. Big time. Just huge mounds of tripe. Like more tripe that you’ve ever seen. Trust me, I know tripe. Love the stuff.

Most of you people scamper about trying to gobble up as much of this tripe as possible. If there was a line for Google herpes, you’d pull down your pants and rub all up against the STDoogle. “Mmmmm, Google Herpes,” you might say.”

And the writer Otto Z. Stern continues dishing tripe …

“Apparently, a domination fetish runs deep within geek culture. You want to be dominated but still gripe about it. Well, I’ll dominate you all for $1 per click with a plunger and tub of lard, and I’ll even do it in the Creative Commons.”

I didn’t bother to include Otto’s plan to fly a skycar over the Googleplex …. you will have to read his article for that. For Otto’s sake I hope this article was meant as a parody. Either way it’s funny!

Is it just me or do blog search engines deliver horrible results? Possibly someone out there can point me to a blog search engine that doesn’t include so many spammy blogs in their database. Technorati is certainly not there yet. Clearly, some sort of blog value ranking would help.

However, that’s not the worst of it. As much as 50% of Technorati’s search results point to foreign language posts! If I wanted results in Spanish I wouldn’t have searched from their english language website. I searched for the term Google Adwords and 10 out of the first 20 search results were from blog posts in a foreign tongue!

Here are a few more search examples:

technorati - 6 of the top 20 results were non-english
france - 9 of the top 20 results were non-english
laptop - 7 of the top 20 results were non-english
php - 13 of the top 20 results were either non-english or giberish
blog - 8 of the top 20 results were non-english

This is a problem you would think could be solved rather easily. Why doesn’t Technorati create foreign language versions of its search engine? I’m sure there is a market for it. It makes zero sense to include non-english blogs in its main database.

Update: Technorati founder David Sifry corrects me below regarding the fact that Technorati does have foreign language search engines and does in fact offer a way to filter non-english results out.

However, why doesn’t Technorati make english only results the default when you go to their site. Most major general search engines such as Google and Yahoo don’t require you to change a setting after the first result in order to make the results all english.

But at least Technorati does indeed have a solution to remove those foreign language results!

I was searching Google and Technorati looking for podcasts that were live or recorded at the Portable Media Expo in Ontario, California. The Portable Media Expo is the first major conference focused on podcasting.

The list below is not comprehensive …

- PodcastPickle.com
- Podcasting Underground
- New Media Musings
- Radio Leo (KFI Radio podcast)
- Accident Hash

- Podcrawl
- TechPodcasts.com
- Learn Out Loud
- Dr. Floyd

Additionally, I ran across some photos of the event which you can view here.

Today I launched my blog … WebProBlog. It’s focus is on eBusiness strategies and trends from my perspective as CEO of iEntry, Inc. and as a early internet entrepreneur. Frequent topics will include internet advertising, email marketing, search engines, eBusiness strategies and commentary on news we cover at WebProNews.

We have been involved with blogs for quite a while here at iEntry. I guess it’s about time I jumped into the blogger mix myself. What really inspired me were the re-publishing relationships we started approximately 1 year ago. This has been a feature that has been very popular with our WebProNews readers.

So I would like to thank our original blog re-publishing partners for the inspiration to start blogging … Steve Rubel, Jason Dowdell, Andy Beal, Jeremy Zawodny, Neville Hobson, Robert Scoble, Kevin Dugan, Fredrik Wackå, Jeremy Pepper, Ross Mayfield, Jennifer Rice, Brian Carroll, Nick Wilson, Darren Rowse, Nathan Weinberg, Wayne Hurlbert, Cory Kleinschmidt - Andrew Goodman, Mike Manuel and Shel Holtz.