One huge Googler panel, seriously. With Jessica Ewing, Venessa Fox, Shashi Seth, Adam Lasnik, Paul Botto and Amanda. Hope it is not boring... ;-)
The Googlers joke around about starting late. Vanessa offered to dance on the table. Adam recommended pizza and joked about more things. Adam is the mod of this panel, I assume.
Vanessa Fox from Webmaster Central is up first. She said she will talk for a few minutes, because they have a whole lunch about Webmaster Central. Amanda is the assistant, she is doing the demo. The show off the help section, and a Google Group, and a blog. They then log into sitemaps... She explains the main page, error pages and stats pages.
Paul Botto to talk about Google Analytics from Urchin. He is going to give a 30 min presentation in 10 minutes. Its a free hosted web analytics service, 80+ reports. It is for all types of sites, e-commerce, lead generation and brand awareness. Its more than a technical to now a web marketing tool. You can track all marketing efforts, not just Google stuff. You can also identify problem areas on your site. Funnel visualization reports and product merchandising. You can also analyze the results across two data ranges, to see if you improved or not. Analytics is integrated with AdWords, automatically. You can compare organic versus paid keywords. He continues to go over all the features, but he obviously doesnt have enough time to capture all those features in this 10 minute presentation. He talks about the Website Optimizer BETA that allows multivariate testing. They are hiring account execs and analysts.
Shashi Seth for Google Custom Search (i.e. COOP). He shows off what it is, all explained at Google.com/Coop/. You pick a "slice of the index," you define the sites you want or the patterns you want to include in your custom search engine. A requirement is that the pages need to be first in Google's index, if not, then go to Google Sitemaps. He then talks about creating "refinements" those Google labels at the top of Google search results for medical related searches. You also have the ability to change the rankings of various URLs, you define it in general but not on a url by url or query or query basis.
Jessica Ewing from Google Gadgets is last up. Google Gadgets uses RSS Feeds, and you'l want a gadget she said. Gadget is a box that lives on the web, and you can put anything you want inside of it. It is basically an iframe. No rules about what goes in a gadget, do whatever you want. RSS feeds are used for content owners to get content out, the limitations are that RSS are read only, there are formatting rules, and it is not completely customizable by the end user, but a gadget has preferences the user can control. Create gadgets to get new users, more traffic, and they are really easy to create. Currently there are 2,390 gadgets out there.
These posts may have spelling and grammar issues. These are session notes, written quickly and posted immediately after the session has been completed. Please excuse any grammar or spelling issues with session posts.
