Google Analytics and Website Optimiser move up from Beta level

Google’s two offerings, Google Website Optimiser and Google Analytics, have both dropped their Beta label, and have both moved up from their ‘testing’ phases. There are 27 languages in which Google Website Optimiser is available.

The language options include English (Australia, UK & U.S.), French, German, Finnish, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil & Portugal), Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Tagalog, Thai, Turkish, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Spanish and Swedish. Formerly a feature within the Google AdWords advertising service, this free site-testing tool is now accessible through its own web site (http://www.google.com/websiteoptimizer) as well.

Google Website Optimiser helps improve user experience on the Web by showing its users what their visitors want to see. Rather than debating or guessing how a webpage might look best, users can continually test different combinations of web site ingredients, such as images and text, to see which one yields the most sales, sign-ups, leads or other goals.
An official note to Google Website Optimiser mentioned:

One can then Learn what changes will drive the most conversions. Its intuitive reports will enable even the mathematically-challenged to easily and quickly identify as well as implement the best combination.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee terms the semantic web an extension of current technology

According to Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who is credited as being the inventor of the phenomenon of world wide web, the semantic web is not a separate web. “It’s just an extension of the current one,” stated Berners-Lee. “Information is provided well-defined meaning - better enabling computers & people to work in cooperation,” he stated, and added it could well be taken one step further by pulling digital photo-image albums into the mix, tallying pictures of outings with spending peaks on the bank statement. This would be akin to a behind-the-scenes, seamless process. Web users would only get to see the end result, rather than how it was arrived at.

He also explained how the semantic web could help people to track their finances. Explaining the mechanism, he alluded to an online bank statement & a personal calendar, in which simply by dragging & dropping the information - from the calendar on to the statement – one could identify the periods of high expenditure.

There’s another benefit of ‘semantic’ web. Most existing search engines are largely not able to ‘read’ some of the information that’s found on the Internet, which might be very relevant to a particular search query like photos or videos, since they haven’t been well tagged with consistent ‘metadata’ (the labels, which inform computers what a particular piece of data means).

To overcome this problem, the idea of the intelligent and sensible ‘semantic’ web is gaining a lot of pushing and backing from forward-looking technology start-ups apart from established companies.

Weighing pros and cons of the new intelligent web

The spirit of openness, which the semantic web builds, is probably anathema to several major technology organisations, who till this point have zealously guarded their respective platforms and software and may be unwilling to break down those barriers for the benefit of consumers.

On a positive side, it’s likely that most leading search engines will treat the semantic web as a tool that adds value to what they’re already doing. If another search platform/product can come up with a service, which is more useful as well as more compelling than the one provided by the search engine giant Google, users will surely follow; so will advertisers and, along with them, the licence to make money.

However, technology commentator Paul Miller mentions, “Moving towards a semantic web does not necessarily mean ripping up the Internet and starting again. In spite of the hype, not everything about it has to be paradigm shifting & revolutionary. Many of the benefits will merely come as existing systems tend to become more open & as existing data moves a bit more freely, purposefully.”

Nova Spivack is an Internet visionary who has invested time, money and energy into turning the semantic web into a reality. His web site twine.com, a virtual network that is currently in beta testing, is designed to enable users to discover, organise & share information, as well as form new connections.

Spivack believes that services like Twine will hold the key to enabling users to make sense of the new intelligent web, by providing the tools which could well turn semantic web content into a useful, personalised information repository.