Skype recently announced an early preview of Skypecasts - with which you can host live, moderated conversations with up to 100 people from anywhere in the world.

Skypecasts enable people to discuss shared interests — anything from classic cars and cooking, to home design and computer support. Skypecasts are moderated by the ‘host’ who is able to mute, eject or pass the virtual microphone to participants when they wish to speak. Hosting or participating in a Skypecast is completely free.

Update: I joined the The Ricardo Gonzalez Show LIVE!!! just now and surprisingly the audio quality was very good even on my crappy cable connection. It was fun listening to the guys talking even though Skype booted me in the end (must’ve been my connection).

In the beginning Google acquired the San Diego based Urchin-Software Corporation, a company that offered enterprise-class Web Analytics, and then they lowered the monthly subscription cost from $495 to only $199. This alone caused the industry to get a little jumpy, to say the least. Well, now they’ve got good reason to be jumpy, because Google are now offering the newly branded Google Analytics to everyone for free.

So what exactly is Web Analytics and how can it help you?

Firstly, the term Analytics can be defined as: The process of gathering and analyzing information electronically then displaying it in a way which allows a company to track business trends (putting it simply of course). Web Analytics is a set of sophisticated tools that works on the same principle, they are used to analyse, report and track your web site visitors.

But how does Google Analytics differ from other competitors?

Not much really, except that this isn’t going to cost you thousands of pounds every year and it’s available to anyone with a web site, it also provides tightly intergrated AdWords support and remember this is enterprise-class Analytics, not your standard control panel weblog analysing software. This is the same product that companies up until now were paying thousands of dollars for each year.

Google Analytics -

Google Analytics offers a host of compelling features and benefits for everyone from senior executives and advertising and marketing professionals to site owners and content developers.

Learn how visitors interact with your website and identify the navigational bottlenecks that keep them from completing your conversion goals. Find out how profitable your keywords are across search engines and campaigns. Pinpoint where your best customers come from and which markets are most profitable to you. Google Analytics gives you this and more through easy-to-understand visually enhanced reports.

Learn how Google Analytics features can help you start increasing ROI and better understand your visitors.

Learn more. »

We live in a time of instantaneous communication where people are demanding replies to their online correspondence within hours or even minutes, and they don’t want to be hanging on for a reply much longer than a day in most cases. Failure to keep up with the demands of your visitors will send them looking for quicker correspondence elsewhere, most likely straight to your competitors.

Help Center Live is a very powerful communications tool for your web site, which includes Live Help, Support Tickets (an osTicket module) and unlimited FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions). You can use this free product to communicate with your visitors through the use of a real-time live help system (messenger style chat), canned messages, support tickets and unlimited FAQ topics. You can also monitor their footsteps throughout your site during their visit and initiate chat sessions, collect visitor information (referring url, number of visits, ip address etc), auto-assign tickets and transfer chat sessions to other Live Help operators.

This product can be downloaded ‘FREE’ from www.helpcenterlive.com, you can also try their online demo.

It also comes as part of the pre-installed scripts on our hosting package. Why not give the Help Center Live a go here, just click the live help link, top left, and drop us a note, or if a support representative is online have a chat. We don’t mind and you wont be bothering us

One important aspect of running a site is to know your visitors. If you know your users, you can find out what they’re looking for, and how they came to your site. You should check your logs regularly to track any changes in the behavior of the people who visit your site, and also to see which areas of the world they’re from. This can help in many ways.

For example, if you write about hockey and focus on Canadian hockey, you may find that most of the people come to your site by typing the word “hockey” in search engines, and that they’re from France. You can then start writing about hockey in France also, to cater to those people too if you wish and thus convert them into loyal readers.

One such tool for mapping out your users visually through their geographic location is gVisit. Gvisit [not owned by Google, by the way] uses Google Maps to plot a diagram of the last 10 people who visited your site, and which part of the world they probably came from. You can then zoom down to their probable exact location, down to their street map and name. The general information of their geographic location [such as their continent] will help you a lot in knowing what types of users your site is attracting.

We have recently upgraded our contact form with intouch. Until that moment I was totally oblivious of this technology called AJAX, short for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML which isn’t really a technology of its own but a method of pulling in several existing technologies (Javascript, XML, XHTML, CSS, DOM, you name it) together to create better user interactivity. If this still sounds strange to you, don’t worry, I’m still having a hard time figuring it out myself. To give a more solid example, look at Gmail and Flickr. They use AJAX from the day I was born (well maybe not that long but they’re the first ones implementing it on the web). Anyway to cut a long summary short, this is the life purpose of AJAX:

Obviously, if we were designing the Web from scratch for applications, we wouldn’t make users wait around. Once an interface is loaded, why should the user interaction come to a halt every time the application needs something from the server? In fact, why should the user see the application go to the server at all?

Those are the wise words of Jesse James Garrett from adaptive path regarding our new friend AJAX.

Understand it? Maybe not. Why don’t you leave us a note and see what I’m talking about in real time. No page refreshing, no waiting. That is AJAX!

Podcasting is a portmanteau word combining the words Broadcasting and iPod. The term Podcasting is misleading in a way, because to listen to a Podcast you don’t need an iPod and you certainly don’t need one to broadcast either.

Let’s say for example that I wanted to broadcast this blog in the format of a radio-show, so you could listen to this blog instead of reading it. First I’d need a microphone and some recording software (windows comes with a simple voice recorder as standard). Then I’d sit myself down, grab my coffee and get totally wired (very important), then when i’m ready start recording the show. When that’s done it’s time to convert my recording into an Internet ready media format, such as MP3 or WMA for example. Then the final step is to simply upload the file to my web server for everyone to download onto their portable players, or simply stream over the internet on their computer.

You may also choose to get fancy and add some jingles or other cool effects into your Podcast. The more professional and friendly your Podcast sounds, the more likely people are to download the next broadcast.

Obviously podcasting will consume a great deal more bandwidth than your standard text based blog, so make sure you check with your webspace provider about storage and bandwidth limitations.

Trying to install the Apache server on your home computer can bring you close to tears at the best of times (yes, I’ve been there!). So imagine how much more frustrating it can get when trying to install and integrate PHP, MySQL or Perl as well. The good people at Apache Friends heard our cries for help and came to the rescue with XAMPP.

XAMPP is an easy to install Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP and Perl. XAMPP is FREE and really very easy to install and to use - just download, extract and start. There are currently four XAMPP distributions available, Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and Solaris. Each distribution comes with additional extras, like phpMyAdmin, FTP server, OpenSSL and Mail Transport etc.

You are advised against using XAMPP in a production environment and only an insane person would use the Windows distribution in a production environment anyway. Use it for building and testing your site offline and always consult a professional if in doubt.