Say goodbye to ad-filled free visitor logging services for your blog/business site - Google today announced ‘Analytics’, a service which monitors your site’s visitors, search keywords and more.

Yes, Google might well now know everything about you bar what you had for breakfast (it knows I had cereals, but just can’t quite work out which one yet), but it’s free, and it looks damn good. It’s down for maintenence at the moment, but apparently it’s back later. Try it out.

Google has launched a beta version of it’s new online RSS reader, Google Reader. You can import and export subscriptions via OMPL, and the good thing about it is that you can read your news from anywhere with a net connection.

I was upset to read today that Ricky Gervais’ prostate cancer ad has been earmarked for post-watershed transmission. Media Guardian tells us: “In the ad Gervais plays a doctor who sticks his finger up the backside of a patient - a “digital rectal examination” to check for the cancer, which kills 10,000 men in the UK every year. The RACC has told the Prostate Cancer Charity that the advert’s “squish” noise must be removed and has recommended that it be broadcast only after 9pm and before 6am.”

A comedy squish noise - what’s that compared to the swearing, the violence, the graphic scenes now shown on TV even in the middle of the day? As Gervais says in the MG interview, the main reason a lot of people die of cancer is that they don’t get regular checkups. Surely if the advert is going to do anything to change that, it must be shown in primetime hours.

The decision of the RACC is totally diabolical, short-sighted and pretty draconian.

To coincide with the announcement that Google will team up with NASA to aid the space programme, I can exclusively reveal a few other ideas Google are toying with:

• A tasty Google McSearch from McDonalds
• A stunning pair of Levi’s jeans with the Google logo emblazened on the front
• Google and Hedges - multicoloured, cuddly cigarettes fresh from the heart of Western America!
• A fresh tasting Coca Googla, with even more sugar, because they’re so damn cuddly.

Now this is quite lovely I must say. NewsMap, developed by Marcos Weskamp, is a bright and breezy Flash news displayer, which aggregates news from Google News sources. Here’s the official blurb:

Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator. A treemap visualization algorithm helps display the enormous amount of information gathered by the aggregator. Treemaps are traditionally space-constrained visualizations of information. Newsmap’s objective takes that goal a step further and provides a tool to divide information into quickly recognizable bands which, when presented together, reveal underlying patterns in news reporting across cultures and within news segments in constant change around the globe.

The concept is admirable, and very interesting, and even if you just want to see some news presented in a different way, it’s a good visit.

NewsMap

I’m sure you’ve visited this site before, but if you haven’t, then that’s the exact reason I’m posting this. Because you should do.

The Internet Archive is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public.

20,000 live music recordings, 40 billion web pages (look, it’s the BBC site in ‘97), almost 20,000 movies of one sort or another, and over 20,000 audio recordings.

Plus it’s had a nice little redesign by the looks of it.

PubSub offers visitors the chance to view stats on how strong a weblog or news source is by comparing incoming and outgoing links. Not quite sure how it works, but all I know is that last month, this blog was in the top 40,000, and now it’s under 100,00th. Time to start posting more methinks.

On an average day PubSub processes thousands of entries per minute from feeds and other sources. We’ve captured some interesting insights from that data about individual sites and the syndicated web, and PubStats is the place where we share the results.

As apology for a distinct lack of posts recently, here’s an amusing yet interesting tip from Tricks of the Trade:

If you get up in the middle of the night to grab a glass of water, there’s a simple way to avoid stubbing toes on the way back to bed. Close one eye just before you you turn on the light or open the fridge door, and keep it closed the whole time the light is on.

When you turn the lights off, open both eyes. The eye you kept closed will still be dilated, and allow you to see in the dark.

Apologies for the lack of posts recently, but to tempt you back here’s a list by John Camm of today’s modern rules of advertising, where we apparently live in a world of fictional cliches.

1. Men are obsessed with sex but will forego sex in order to watch football or drink beer.
2. Women are locked in a constant battle with their weight/body shape/hairstyle.
3. Career success is entirely based on your ability to impress your boss.
4. Mums are often harassed but NEVER depressed/unable to cope.
5. Any act of male stupidity (e.g. walking across a clean floor in muddy boots, putting the dog in the dishwasher, etc.) will be met with a wry smile, not genuine annoyance/anger.
6. Married men will flirt with other, younger women but NEVER act upon it.
7. Anyone with a scientific career will have a bad haircut and dreadful clothes.
8. If you work for the emergency services, you are a better person than the general population.
9. Elderly relatives NEVER suffer from senile dementia.
10. Scandinavians are, without exception, blonde and beautiful.
11. Women have jobs they never do in real life, e.g. dockworker (who looks like a model).
12. Children will not eat fruit or vegetables. Ever.
13. Both men and women find driving deeply pleasurable, never boring or stressful.
14. Men are inherently lazy/slobbish; women are the reverse.
15. Chocolate, however, will cause women to immediately fall into the languor of the opium eater.
16. High Street bank staff are (A) friends of the customers, and (B) of slightly above-average attractiveness (only if female).
17. Modern men own a cat.
18. Hot beverages have miraculous rejuvenating effects.
19. Professional people have strangely trivial preoccupations, e.g. a female barrister who is morbidly obsessed with finding a healthy snack bar.
20. All women (except stay-at-home housewives) have interesting and enjoyable careers.
21. Any over-the-counter medical product will work instantly and 100% effectively.
22. Children know more than adults.
23. Women never merely hop in and out of the shower, instead preferring to act out some sort of soapy Dance of the Seven Veils.
24. School is a happy experience for all children.
25. Tortilla chips are the most exciting experience any group of young people can experience.
26. Playing bingo is THE number one pastime among 18-25 year old British women.

(via BBC)

OK, here’s a really clever idea for you: how many people do you think search for “rand theft auto san andreas” on eBay? It’s either not many at all, and the world is partially sane, or loads, and life is not worth living any more.

Fat Fingers is a service which automatically finds spelling mistakes of the search term you enter, and redirects you to a page containing mis-spelt eBay results.

You can find some real bargains, as mis-typed items are obviously going to have less traffic. Or they did until now.

Fat Fingers (cheers to Lifehacker)