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Google has launched a new Website Optimizer Technology Partner (WOTEP) program to go along with its Website Optimizer Tool. The Website Optimizer is designed to help organizations increase traffic and turn more visitors into customers. Web Content Management provider Clickability has decided to take advantage of this new technology and is now a partner in the program.

Early bird registration is going on from now until July 1st for the 4th international jboye08 conference, a meeting of global gurus in Aarhus, Denmark. The conference brings together IT practitioners from all over the world in order to share and learn in an open environment. It is described as intense, with discussions, demos and interaction from the attendees.

Alexa has been around since the dawn of Web time, well pretty much. This organization has seen it all.

Alexa was caught in the maelstrom of the greatest boom and bust since the Depression… and survived. The group enjoyed exceptional growth in a totally new business and technological environment, followed by a long and languid fall from eminence. It innovated like crazy, and its innovations reshaped the landscape of the Web. And it was subject to one of the Web’s first huge, headline-grabbing takeovers.

Latterly, Alexa has faced stinging criticism over its traffic measurement model, and has responded by going back to the drawing-board with a new model and a fresh attempt to resurrect itself as a relevant Web player.

The Alexa story is part cautionary tale, part glorious legend. This is that story in 26 letters.

Intranet search is appalling because people don't want their content to get found, and the organization does not value the importance of finding.

Quantcast this week launches a service which enables searching of websites according to key readership demographics. The new facility enables marketers to enter a list of demographic parameters, and returns a list of websites whose readership matches those criteria. As an example, if a marketer is targeting black male readers, over 40, with an income over $60,000, then Quantcast’s new service serves up a list of websites which attracts that audience, and also tells you whether or not the site accepts advertising.

Better yet, the service is free. Just sign up and target away.

What's the typical audience composition for a Technology blog? We didn't know, so we vowed that we would move mountains to find out. But several months with a shovel in the Sierra Nevadas produced little in the way of usable data. And so we moved on to Plan B, and sought out the services of the Quantcast website metrics gathering service.

Not only do many websites have unreliable metrics; they're usually measuring the wrong things.

(Via David S. on Babbledog)

Xefer has created an intriguing mashup using data from the Twitter API, a Yahoo! Pipe to some basic transformation, and the Google Chart API to display results:

To get your own, just replace with your twitter username to the end of this url: “>http://www.xefer.com/twitter/

As Xefer writes in the blog post describing the project:

Google Analytics is one of the most popular web analytics tools in use today; partly because it’s free, partly because it’s fairly straightforward to use. Now Google ratcheting up the analytics game with their latest feature set in the analytics tool shed: Google Analytics for Bloggers.

It's a rare organization that does not track at least a minimum set of web analytics for their customer facing websites. The problem is rarely that there's no data. Rather it's what to do with that information once you have it in your hands. More often than not, it's under utilized and probably finds it's home in that virtual pile on your desktop.

It doesn't have to be that way. There's an upcoming Webinar co-hosted by Bridgeline Software and the Gilbane Group that will show you how to better use your analytics data to make decisions and improve the customer experience, and in the end improve your bottom line.

Even since the Web descended down from the heavens (through a series of pipes and tubes, of course), we web folks have been obsessed with gathering, analyzing and spouting our wisdoms about metrics. By far the most popular metric these days is the length of time spent looking, reading or otherwise examining the screen in front of us.

It is to be accepted and otherwise unquestioned that the longer the time a user spends on a page, the better. So you can imagine the relief of online newspaper publishers when they learned of the results from data collected by Nielsen Online in March 2008.

Hot Banana is a web content management system (Web CMS) with a heavy emphasis placed on web marketing and content optimization, but with a full range of core content management capabilities which attract customers with a broad range of needs.

The CMS is a part of and integrated with the Lyris suite of marketing solutions, most notably with EmailLabs.

The Lyris marketing suite -- following a slew of takeovers of top players in core marketing technologie -- has now been formally packaged into Lyris HQ, which is comprised of Hot Banana, EmailLabs (email marketing), ClickTracks (analytics), EmailAdvisor (email campaign analysis and toolset) and BidHero (bid-management).