In creating a CD of photos for an aunt today, I reached into my CD area to get a case to send it in, brushing by my spool of CD backups.
ooh, scary. How long has it been since I made a CD backup of my email? Of my web server? Of all my business documents?

Yikes- it has been far too long for me. How about you?

How big of a hit would your business take if you lost your email, your documents, your quickbooks or invoicing materials? Seriously weigh that against the time it may take (an hour? two?) that it may take to make a weekly - at least monthly - backup of these things.

I’m making my backups now. Why don’t you start one right now too?

Well, it seems news of Google Analytics broke this morning and that broke Google Analytics.
Google has a note posted stating:

Google Analytics has experienced extremely strong demand, and as a result, we have temporarily limited the number of new signups as we increase capacity. In the meantime, please submit your name and email address and we will notify you as soon as we are ready to add new accounts. Thank you for your patience.

I guess that just goes to show you that even Google can be caught a little unprepared.
Right now I’m curious about their beta strategies. Some things Google works on- like Google Local - seem to be in beta forever (Google Local just recently stopped showing “beta”). GMail is still in beta after more than a year, but I never found Google Analytics in beta. Interesting.
Something new in beta that I forgot to mention in yesterday’s post is Google Base. Watch for some future posts from me on Google Base.

I never intended to have so much news about Google that it would need its own section, but days after my latest Google-related entry, there are two new pieces of news.
First, I come across “Google Analytics” while working on a Google Adwords campaign for a customer. They announced “New Google Analytics tells you how visitors found your site and how they interact with it. ” Now, tracking visitors who come to your site is nothing new. Savvy webmasters have analyzed server logs for years, to find out what pages on their site were popular, where visitors come from, etc. Most web hosts give you access to these logs, but only some give you access to software that breaks it down into charts and graphs.
With Google Analytics, Google takes it one step further and gives you the ability to customize these reports with filters and tracking for specific ads and referral sources.
And of course, with Google, the best part is that its Free.
Check it out at http://www.google.com/analytics/index.html

I’ll write more on this later once I have a chance to play around with it. I’m sure there are more uses and possible repercussions to be found.

Looks like they’re trying to catch up with Skype, but you know you know those Google engineers are eating their wheaties. Check out Google Talk.

Just in time for Christmas… okay, this one needs some work (lots of outdated materials), but Google Catalog has me pretty excited. I am a confirmed internet-only shopper, especially around the holidays, so anything that makes it so I don’t have to keep a 4 foot stack of mail order catalogs is an amazing thing.

The newest of the bunch is Google Video. Amateur film makers everywhere are salivating over this one… I bet music isn’t far behind.

1. Google Earth Type in an address and zoom in from space. This one has a lot of countries and governments nervous about being used by evil-doers.
2. Google Toolbar. Translate foreign language pages at a touch of a button, block popups, and Spellcheck your forum posts among other things. Also shows the PageRank of the page you’re visiting.
3. Picasa Picasa is free photo editing software from Google that helps you organize the pictures on your PC.
4. Google Local If you’re a business and you’re not listed- what are you waiting for?
5. Blogger Not sure you can handle running your own Blog? Google not only makes it FR-E-E but it doesn’t get easier than this. Try it out.
6. Gmail Are you still using Hotmail or Yahoo? GMail kicked it into high gear and now the rest are trying to catch up.