According to a recent article in Book Seller magazine, the Kindle should be announced in the UK during the second week of October -- which means we can all get one for Xmas. Kindle is a great product for reading books and other magazines. It is only a monochrome platform so it will not ideal for many magazines but as noted elsewhere there will almost certainly be other e-book and magazine readers coming.

E-book readers are going to be controversial. Lots of people are going to say they don't want them -- lots of discussion about wanting to feel paper between fingers etc. etc. Similar words were used by many a few years ago about photographic film and prints which has virtually (but not completely) disappeared -- in the same way as there are still some us who listen to vinyl records. However, when paper versions are more expensive and competition makes the e-book readers cheaper, we all know what we are going to be using.

At Wide Area, we have always put key words on articles pages. We have done this more because we can than we thought they were of any particular use. Our CMS has the ability to automatically extract key phrases from articles which we then use to produced related content if required. In the words, we can display a page on a web site with a set of links to other pages which have the same key phrases.

In a recent interview by McKinsey & Company, Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist and professor of information sciences, business, and economics at the University of California, shares his views on the internet economy. He observes that the internet has created an environment that allows for limitless incremental technical innovation, and although this offers business great opportunity for productivity improvement, it has effectively removed the barriers to create and disseminate content.

Without barriers, competition is inevitably fierce, pushing prices down “to something that approximates zero”. Revenue has to be generated elsewhere in the value-chain and our scarcest, and therefore most valuable, resource is attention. Varian refers to psychologist Herb Simon who said “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention” and this, Varian confirms, is the basis upon which Google has built its business.

If you are in the mood for reflection you can read the full interview, but it does put in context the importance of an efficient process by which content is created and its value leveraged –  or optimised – in order to succeed as a business in this environment.

The real cost of website ownership therefore is not the applications and add-ons, but the knowledge and expertise required to realise the opportunity that your content offers – but don’t worry, it’s just a phase we are going through!

The course is divided into a number of sections:

• First Steps
• Interpreting Reports
• Fundamentals
• In-Depth Analysis

Understanding and using Google Analytics to its fullest extent is a key part of any online strategy to optimise ROI, information architecture and PPC campaigns.

There is a lot of information to digest in the course but it will end up with you understanding how your site works and performs in much greater depth.

Having shared calendars via Google Apps has been a boon  - we weren't using MS Exchange previously so sharing calendars wasn't easy. Now everyone in our company can see all the meetings planned and where everyone is going to be.

Except when Google suffers a 4 hour outage in it's service. Hmm. At least they now have a status page for us all to keep an eye on. (Hopefully that won't go down at the same time!)

For instance, a lot of e-commerce sites use postcode lookups to verify your address. In theory this is a great idea but what if your potential customer has mis-remembered their postcode or flat out just can't remember it. Do you really want to stop them from purchasing because of this?

The biggest obstacle you can place in the way of someone purchasing from an e-commerce web site is requiring them to register. As this article on e-commerce from uie.com highlights, this can have a huge impact on sales. If you are an amazon.com you can get away with it to some extent because you have customers returning time after time. If you are selling a single subscription to a magazine, you really just need to get their money from them! They are unlikely to return so making them register first is a big no-no.

Our motto at Wide Area is K.I.S.S - keep it simple, stupid. If you collect their email address during the checkout process you can either auto-register them or sell them on the benefits of registering after they have completed their transaction. It's not quite 'take the money and run' but near as makes no difference.

Take a look around and let us know what you think.