Google has been slowly rolling out new features in Google Analytics over the past couple weeks – some more visible than others, but all of them pretty powerful.  If you haven’t seen them appear yet, you likely will soon.  I’ll let Google give you the full tour, but these are the highlights:

• Intelligence - this is the biggest, shiniest of all the new features.  We all know there’s a lot of useful, actionable information buried in our Analytics reports, but often don’t have the time to sift through and find them.  The Intelligence reports look through your data for significant trends and deviations from those trends, and tell you what they find, saving you some of the time of hunting for these insights yourself.  It won’t give you all the details, but it will tell you if you get a large spike in search traffic, or if your bounce rate peaks.  You can even set alerts for yourself, so that when you get, for example, a big spike in referring traffic, Analytics will send you an email and let you know you might have some important incoming links.  Don’t pack your bags for vacation yet – you’ll still have to review your data regularly, and analyze it yourself – but this tool will make it a lot easier to keep on top of trends.
• Pivot Tables – If you’re a data geek like me, and you love pivot tables in Excel, you’ll also love them in Google Analytics.  You can find them at the top of most reports with data tables, next to the other views.  This is great for doing a quick slice-and-dice of your data without downloading it for deeper analysis.  (This one has been around a little longer than some of the others, but hasn’t received a lot of attention – I think it’s great.)
• Advanced Filtering – Until now, filtering data in a report was mostly just useful for looking at a particular folder, or file extension, or page title (or else, you had to know a lot about scary-looking regular expressions).  Now, instead of filtering only on the primary dimension of the report, you can filter on any dimension or metric that’s visible.  Want to look at pages that got 100-200 visits, with an average time on site over 1 minute?  Want to find pages with the highest bounce rate that had more than one visitor?  Advanced filtering will be your friend.
• Goals - Goals have been around for a long time, but until recently, you could only have 4 of them.  Now, you can have up to 20, and Google has added some additional metrics that you can use for goals (like time on site).  Very handy.
• Custom Variables – This feature requires some custom coding, but soon you’ll be able to tag visitors, visits, and pageviews with identifying data.  For example, you could tag your news articles by category, and then see aggregate data about the categories in your reports.  This feature is still on the way, but should have a wide range of uses.

Just a few things that could make your life a little easier.

The future is here, and its name is Wave.

Not really… but the much anticipated Google Wave has arrived in “preview” mode. When Google says “preview,” they mean “we can’t call it beta yet”, and it’s available through a limited number of invitations to people who are willing to deal with lots of bugs in order to get an early peek at this tool.

The idea behind Wave is that email has been around, mostly unchanged, for a long time – so Wave purports to be what email would have been if it were developed using today’s technology and for today’s web user. Not everyone feels that Google’s description of Wave is accurate, however. Daniel Tenner blogged recently that Wave is not communications 2.0 at all, saying:

“Is Wave the next Twitter? Nope. Is it the next Facebook? Nope. Is it going to replace Instant Messengers? Possibly, in some circumstances, but not any time soon.. I believe this is partly Google’s fault: they released Wave to geeks and hackers and social media folks first. But Wave is not a geek/hacker tool, or a social media tool, it’s a corporate tool that solves work problems (more on that later). On the other hand, they never claimed it would be a Facebook replacement or a Twitter killer.”

Confused yet? Check out a new collaborative user manual, read Lifehacker’s introduction, or Google’s hefty hour-long demo (below), and you’ll have a good idea of what it’s all about.

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For as long as I can remember, our PM team has debated internally the value of the PMP certification for project managers. For many big corporations and the government, it is a key qualification for project managers. As a comparatively small company, this is not a prerequisite for our PMs. In fact, we generally prefer our PMs to have evolved into the position organically over time.

Why you ask?

From my experience, good project management is more a function of personality type and experience than a taught skill set. Sure, there are tactics and techniques that can be learned from a classroom and in books – but those are not what make a project manager successful. A good project manager has those skills, but more importantly, is detail oriented; able to keep a handle on a nearly unlimited set of discrete tasks; can manage diverse groups of people, ranging from internal teams to clients to vendors; and have the intestinal fortitude to tackle tough issues immediately head on.

None of that can be taught. It is a product of going through the meat grinder and having a personality that fits the job. My bias is routed in experience with other organizations’ PMP certified project managers – PMs who routinely struggle to make all of the pieces work together while simultaneously massaging the egos and personalities of the various parties involved to make them work in unison. Don’t get me wrong – I see value in the knowledge required for the PMP certification. I just think it is a toolset that needs to be employed by someone with a specific set of skills – otherwise it is ineffective.

Testing a Web site is a pretty big, and not often inexpensive, task. Cara already posted about some inexpensive tools for user-testing wireframes. But for your design, there’s an opportunity to go even lower-budget than that.

To do testing truly on the cheap, there is a new tool called fivesecondtest.com. It’s a way to test designs in five seconds or less. You upload your design, and then you can either invite specific users to test it, or you can open your test to the entire 5 second community. You have the option of creating memory tests or click tests. And as the name suggests, a tester looks at the design for five seconds, letting you know what items stand out on the page.

Of course, this is a very simplified approach. There is no task-based testing. As the site states, the tool is meant to “help you easily identify the most prominent elements of your user interfaces.” Nothing more, nothing less. And if you open up your design to the entire five second community, you’re likely not getting results from an average-joe user, but usability and design experts.

There are some paid plans that allow you to do some more sophisticated testing. But if you’re budget is beyond tight, it may be worthwhile to just upload an image and see what the testers say.

We hear it all the time. “Yeah, there’s an app for that.” It seems that, for every task you want to do, there’s a digital application that goes along with it, from organizing your recipes to promoting world peace.

If you have ever tried to coordinate your web team and client stakeholders, you know that often, email just doesn’t cut it. Emails get lost, deleted, lose their history trail, and can be disjointed. So when trying to get web teams and their clients to collaborate, what is the killer app that helps get everyone together?

The answer…none (at least, none that I’ve seen). No one single application is perfect at fostering true collaboration from the inception of a project through to completion. A good tool used by creative designer and client to cement the vision for a Web site is probably not the same tool that will help a QA tester communicate bugs and issues to the core tech team.

We at Beaconfire use a few tools for different phases of a project. Here are some examples of how Beaconfire uses some of its tools to foster collaboration.

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Much has changed since humanity acknowledged the word knowledge and started to classify the various subject matters into categories and taxonomies of learned disciplines.
The definition of knowledge is outside the scope of this article because of simple reasons. I am not as qualified as the university professors, or librarians who pour their blood, toil, trouble, and tears into the understanding of knowledge and wisdom.

What I do know about is what knowledge is online. Since Sir Tim Berners-Lee (Yes. He was knighted.) created the World Wide Web to link documents together on the then nascent Internet, knowledge became more than monolithic documents or books that were linked loosely via citations and references. Instead of specifying in APA, MLA, Chicago, or Turabian style where the source of a particular knowledge was, one could directly link it using something called “HyperText”, or what some know as “Hyper Text Markup Language”. Today, all websites that you see online are built with a combination of HTML, some JavaScript, and possibly some Flash or Java.
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