At this point there really isn't much of a debate; using Google's CDN to load jQuery isn't likely to benefit the majority of your first-time visitors. You're almost certainly better off bundling jQuery up with the rest of your site's JavaScript and making sure you're serving long-lived cache-controlling headers with it.

I didn't bother posting this to Google's support mailing lists, because their support is so terrible that everyone knows it's a waste of time. This posting probably won't accomplish anything either, but at least I'll feel like someone heard me.

I did google around a bit to see if anyone had mentioned the problem, but I didn't see any matching results. Please let me know if I'm totally crazy and this problem doesn't really exist; but test carefully, as leftover cookies might be letting you see the site anyway.

Update 2010/09/09: Aha, not quite as scary as I was worried it might be: when I clear my Firefox cookies, it lets me access Google Groups without signing in. That suggests that it's actually old Google login credentials that are the problem; they cause it to jump to the login screen instead of just letting you through. Still a bug in Google Groups, but at least it means Chrome's private browsing seems to be okay after all.

Analysts often consider an aggregated view of their visitors when assessing reports in Google Analytics. Every visitor is assumed to be of the same type. Looking at the information in an aggregated form is not nearly as useful as assessing the data for individual audience segments. The ability to segment these visitors is extremely important if the website owner wishes to optimise their site for user experience and conversions. Different types of visitors - whether new, returning, organic, paid, and so on - behave differently and have vastly different expectations. The ability to understand what each of them wants and how to cater for them is important towards building a successful online presence.

Google Analytics makes it easy to segment your audience with advanced segments. There are a number of predefined advanced segments (e.g. new visitors, paid search visitors) that you can take advantage of immediately. More useful, however, is the ability to create custom advanced segments tailored to your own specific needs.

You want your Google Analytics account to serve as a solid tool for your website measurement, analysis, and optimization. After all, you are taking important business decisions that will affect your online performance, based on that data. Can you afford to rely on partial, inaccurate or otherwise misaligned data? You must have your tool properly setup to meet your website goals and your tracking needs.
Below I provide my tips on common technical configurations that you should check. A default implementation will provide you with information regarding your visitors. However, the techniques below provide you with the level of data accuracy and insight so that the tool will serve its ultimate purpose: improve conversion rates.

Recently, at the GAUGE conference, I talked about Google Analytics custom reports and dashboards. During the dashboards section of the talk I walked the group through the process of setting upa dashboard. As an example I created a dashboard for a fictional ecommerce website.
After the talk someone came up to me and asked if I could share more details on the dashboard. So here they are!
My goal with this dashboard is deep-dive on the mobile segment of the business: to focus on the business objectives (conversions), key actions that could lead to conversions AND ancillary data about the mobile experience. This will give us a wide range of metrics that provides a deep understanding of the mobile experience.

Last month, an anonymous blogger popped up on WordPress and Twitter, aiming a giant flamethrower at Mac-friendly writers like John Gruber, Marco Arment and MG Siegler. As he unleashed wave after wave of spittle-flecked rage at “Apple puppets” and “Cupertino douchebags,” I was reminded again of John Gabriel’s theory about the effects of online anonymity.



Out of curiosity, I tried to see who the mystery blogger was.

He was using all the ordinary precautions for hiding his identity — hiding personal info in the domain record, using a different IP address from his other sites, and scrubbing any shared resources from his WordPress install.

Nonetheless, I found his other blog in under a minute — a thoughtful site about technology and local politics, detailing his full name, employer, photo, and family information. He worked for the local government, and if exposed, his anonymous blog could have cost him his job.

I didn’t identify him publicly, but let him quietly know that he wasn’t as anonymous as he thought he was. He stopped blogging that evening, and deleted the blog a week later.

So, how did I do it? The unlucky blogger slipped up and was ratted out by an unlikely source: Google Analytics.

Critical, drop-everything bugs become daily affairs, and the sense of confidence in the engineering strength of the structure begins to erode. This leads to low morale, burnout, and less internal cooperation for fear of taking on too many bugs.

Of course I enjoyed my time on Wave like no other time in my career. It was equal parts frustration, joy, defeat and passion. I don't regret a single moment of being associated with it. It remains a wonderful attempt at creating something unique, exciting and incomparably bold. Nor do I want to ascribe blame to anyone on the team or Google at large. I just want to point that even the smartest, most motivated and talented people in the world--with a track record of delivering success--are alone not sufficient to overcome complexity that creeps up on you. Maybe we should have known better, but we didn't.

In the end, the man-month as a scalable unit of work is hubris worthy of a Greek tragedy.

Information that is synced
On Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard), only contacts in the My Contacts group in Gmail are synced. On Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard), all Gmail contacts are synced.

The following information is included when syncing to Gmail:

People's names and job titles
Company names
Email and postal addresses
Phone numbers
IM names, including the type of service
Notes
Photos (on Mac OS X 10.6 only)

Brief summary of what follows: Google is dropping an automatic-translation tool, because overuse by spam-bloggers is flooding the internet with sloppily translated text, which in turn is making computerized translation even sloppier.

This post will tell you what a delegate is, how to get rid of it if you need to, and how to get your ical and iphone to be properly in sync with multiple top level calendars

I just had a look at the top keywords for the last 7 days. not surprisingly there are lots of entries for ‘ical delegates’, ‘google calendar’ + ‘delegates’, ‘what are ical delegates’ etc. so, I had a look at the stuff I did with google calendar, syncing it to your mac’s ical and thought the explination was a little poor.

SPDY (pronounced "speedy") is a research project in TCP-based application-level protocol for transporting web content. It is proposed by Google as a replacement for HTTP.
The goal of SPDY is to reduce web page load time.[1] This is achieved by prioritizing and multiplexing the transfer of several files so that only one connection per client is required.[2][3] All transmissions are SSL encrypted and gzip compressed by design (in contrast to HTTP, the headers are compressed too). Moreover, servers may hint or even push content instead of awaiting individual requests for each resource of a web page.[4]
Google Chrome utilizes SPDY[5][6] when communicating with Google services, such as Google Search, Gmail, Chrome sync and when serving Google's ads.

I decided a couple of weeks ago that I wanted to build an app, most likely a web app. Being a premature optimizer by nature, my first order of business (after deciding I need to learn to draw) was to find the absolute fastest way to serve up a web page. The Google home page is the fastest-loading page I know of, so I thought a good place to start would be to figure out how they do it and then replicate their strategy.

The full story of my search is below, but the short version is that to match Google's page load times you have to cheat on the tcp slow-start algorithm. It appears that stretching the parameters a little bit is fairly common, but Google and Microsoft push it a lot further than most. This may well be common knowledge in web development circles, but it was news to me.

Automated website crawlers are powerful tools to help crawl and index content on the web. As a webmaster, you may wish to guide them towards your useful content and away from irrelevant content. The methods described in these documents are the de-facto web-wide standards to control crawling and indexing of web-based content. They consist of the robots.txt file to control crawling, as well as the robots meta tag and X-Robots-Tag HTTP header element to control indexing. The robots.txt standard predates Google and is the accepted method of controlling crawling of a website.
This document represents the current usage of the robots.txt web-crawler control directives as well as indexing directives as they are used at Google. These directives are generally supported by all major web-crawlers and search engines.

Choosing GAE as the platform four our project is a mistake which cost I estimate in about 15000€. Considering it's been my money, it is a "bit" painful.
GAE is not exactly comparable to Amazon, Rackspace or any of this hosting services, because it is a PaaS (Platform as a Service) rather than just a cluster of machines. This means that you just use the platform and gain scalability, high availability and all those things we want for our websites, without any other software architecture. Cool, isn't it.
You do not pay until you get a lot of traffic to your site so it sounds very appealing for a small startup. I read about this in a book called "The web success startup guide" by Bob Walsh.
So yes, everything looked cool and we decided to go with this platform a couple of months ago.
It supports Python and Django (without the ORM) which we love so we tried it out. We made a spike, kind of 'hello world' and it was easy and nice to deploy.
When we started developing features we started realizing the hard limitations imposed but the platform:

you may have noticed there are two ways of
filtering results in web search via our web interface (aka google.com).  One
is by modifying the CGI arguments, such as as_qdr=d.  The other is by
modifying your query, such as "ben site:google.com".  Our API accepts all of
the valid query modifiers, but the only CGI arguments we accept are in our
documentation.  Thus, why an API search for
"Google%20daterange=2450958-2450968" works, but searching "Google" with
&as_qdr=d does not.

Demo and tutorial on how to use the Google AJAX Feed API.
DEMO
On load, the "feed control" below will be populated by the Digg and TechCrunch feeds. Update the feed control by specifying the URL of a valid feed in the form and pressing "Get it!" A tutorial on how to implement this is lower on the page.

Configuring your network settings to use Google Public DNS
When you use Google Public DNS, you are changing your DNS "switchboard" operator from your ISP to Google Public DNS.
In most cases, the IP addresses used by your ISP's domain name servers are automatically set by your ISP via the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP). To use Google Public DNS, you need to explicitly change the DNS settings in your operating system or device to use the Google Public DNS IP addresses. The procedure for changing your DNS settings varies according to operating system and version (Windows, Mac or Linux) or the device (computer, phone, or router). We give general procedures here that might not apply for your OS or device; please consult your vendor documentation for authoritative information.

You cannot currently transfer profiles or account data from one Analytics account to another Analytics account. 

En variant av att använda Googles Gmail som IMAP.

Intressant experiment på ett forum där AdSense-annonser bara visades på var 10:e sida för att se om det gav bättre betalt.

En översikt över avancerade sökmöjligheter hos Google.

En dissektion av Google Maps som använder avancerad webbteknik för att leverera sitt resultat.

Ett tillägg till Firefox för att ge förbättrade sökresultatssidor på sökmotorer. Ger miniatyrbild och annat smått och gott.

Jag testar Google Video Search. Uppenbarligen var Dee Snider med i ett avsnitt av Drew Carey. Måste ha.

En artikel från "all in the " om XMLHttpRequest. Snygg sajt dessutom.

Chris Justus, Server Side Guy, har dissikerat Google Suggest ordenligt. Det är imponerade teknik bakom det.

En Slashdot-tråd om hur Google Suggest fungerar. Väldigt smart och innovativt!

En intressant artikel om hur Google hanterar den ofantliga mängd data de har. Hur de hanterar det faktum att i varje av deras stora (upp till 2000 PC-datorer) cluster får man räkna med att en dator går sönder varje dag.

Kolla din PageRank!

Här finns koden och infon om hur man lägger till Google på sin egen sida.