Performancing Metrics, a great free service for bloggers to analyse how people are reading their stuff, is currently too expensive to maintain, and Performancing are considering taking it open source:

The biggest pull on company resources is Metrics. Our pro-grade blog analytics service. It currently has around 16,000 registered blogs using it, and though it’s cool, it’s not producing.

There is no other blog analytics program out there that can scale as Metrics was built to. I remember MeasureMap showing signs of buckling under just a few hundred users but it takes a lot of bandwidth, and 3 very high grade servers to run the current system.

At this stage, and in the current climate of “free” everything, I’m neither prepared to put ads on it nor charge for it — What’d I’d like to do, is to give Metrics to the community by making it Open Source, or sell Metrics to a company with more financial resources that could continue to develop it, and benefit from the usebase.

Good news I guess if it works out, though I like the current set up myself. What other free stats packages, other than Google Analytics, are there – just in case Metrics disappears?

[tags]performancing, metrics, open source[/tags]

From TechCrunch:

Google Takes Out Ajax Spreadsheet iRows

A popular Hebrew blog is reporting that the two founders of Israeli startup iRows have been hired by Google. Along with ZohoSheet and NumSum, iRows is one of a few online Ajax spreadsheets that competes with Google’s own Excel-clone. The blog reports that the founders will retain the intellectual property in iRows, but that the site will be shut down.

If this is accurate, the deal is a mirror of the Google-Gtalkr deal from May 2006, where the founders, brothers Wes and Dudley Carr, joined Google and agreed to close the site down.

This is a shame. iRows was one of the best online spreadsheets out there. Now there are fewer choices for people, and that’s bad.

[tags]irows, google, techcrunch[/tags]

Out on a walk today, the ground all covered with leaves. Thought it would make a nice wallpaper for my PC desktop – and it does – and cropped a bit for this blog’s header.

Will leave it up for a bit before returning to my rotating header, which this will be a part of.

One of the frustrations of my job is when I am searching the web for information on what other councils are up to in my field. The trouble is that, by and large, I only really want to find results from the websites of local authorities in the UK.

So, using Google Coop, I’ve created my own. The main difficulty I had was tracking down the websites of every council in the country, but once that was done (and I have saved the list in about five different locations, just in case), it was all downhill.

I’ve called it LGSearch. Hopefully others will find it useful too.

[tags]local government, search, lgsearch, google coop, cse[/tags]

Nick Bradbury has announced the new release candidate of FeedDemon 2.1. It certainly feels more robust than the previous beta version.

One of the more noticable changes is that the little bank of button that let you do stuff with a post, like email it to a pal, or bookmark the post in del.icio.us, now appears at the bottom of the post in question. All of this means that when you have read a post you don’t need to scroll to the top again to perform an action on it. Nice one!

Ben, in the comments, wrote:

But they already have Google Notebook (http://www.google.com/notebook) which I always thought of as a WYSIWYG wiki.

JotSpot certainly fits in with their suite of web services though.

I think the last point is the key. I don’t think the Googleised version of JotSpot (Gspot?) will be intended as a service to the everyday web user in the way that, say, the toolbar, desktop search and notes are. Instead, it will be the glue that sticks all their ‘enterprise’ (by which I mean services a small to medium business could use) services together – Docs, Spreadsheet, Gmail, Calendar, Reader, Blogger, Base, Page Creator.

What Google is currently lacking with all the services above is a common platform, or a base, from which they can all be launched. For instance, they really need to sort out a single Google ‘drive’ where all files, whether blogger posts, Gmail attachments, docs, spreadhseets, Picasa photos or whatever, are stored under a user name. JotSpot could act very well as a file manager for all of this as well as providing the collaborative space to link them all together with multiple users, with shared files across a certain group, for example.

So, you could have a small business with a number of home based employees, each with certain access to certain files, along with a wiki-based intranet (effectively) which would act as a communication tool as well as a base for project management and the like. All files could be accessible to all employees wherever they are based, wherever they log in.

And that would be pretty cool. Of course, companies like Zoho are already providing something very similar. But they don’t have the Google brand to break through in the way an integrated Google system could.

Technorati tags: google, jotspot