It seems after the compatibility issues people have had, the UAC control in vista appeared to be the cause the most frustration. For me its not been an issue, I am happy to have the extra security there and to have peace of mind. The one remaining piece in the jigsaw for me has been Last.fm’s Audioscrobbler, their client for use in their social music network. (This is not the place for an intro but if you have music running through your veins or an ipod plugged into your ear as you read this, you should sign up or at least take a look.) Unfortunately, the Last.fm client on Vista required admin rights when doing most most things which was quite frustrating.

Fix

Well I am pleased to say that after doing a lot of searching, the latest version (from 1.3.2) does actually fix this. If you haven’t updated, hit help and check for updates to download the latest version or download the package from here.

It is worth noting though that if you are still getting the UAC control popping up you may have set the app to run with admin rights which it no longer requires. Right click on the shortcut, click ‘properties’, the ‘compatibility’ tab and untick the “Run as Administrator” check box.

I went for reasonably priced laptop from Dell (yes, I know, no Mac Fan boy here yet). My logic was that while the sky is almost the limit regarding spec and price, I was unsure of how much i was going to actually use it. So, I found a great deal through the Dell Outlet store on Ebay, as recommended by Jeff a work colleague and I am very happy with the result.

The laptop is a quick dual core with a gig of Ram and a hard disk that suits my work related needs. Significantly through I managed to find one with the 1440 x 900 True Life resolution which was essential really for my web design which is the primary use. While its a fantastic screen, amazing quality, unfortunately it highlights the shortcomings of my desktop screen. Vista though, which I really like generally (its on my main desktop PC) was a head ache with the wireless networking and I have a network ‘engineering’ background.

Its well worth the effort and the money though!

Its amazing he looks so healthy, great news for him and his family. More details on the BBC website.

As a quick introduction for those that aren’t aware of it, Feedburner is the stats management package for your RSS feeds, monitoring a great depth of information from subscriber numbers to click through’s to your pages. It re-writes your RSS feed and allows you to add features and customisations adding greater value to both your readers and you as the site marketer or owner.

This clearly is a good deal for all concerned, Feedburner is a relatively established web startup (almost a contradiction) that has raised a little over $10 million dollars in funding and is currently monitoring 422,717 publishers with 721,074 feeds. This works out at roughly $236 a head which in comparison to many social networking sites is pretty high. For Google they are getting the no.1 feed stats management package out there with an established user base and technology.

So what does Google’s acquisition for a reported $100 million mean and how could it effect you as the customer / reader?

• This clearly confirms the value of RSS feeds that many in the web and advertising industry already know. Many net savy readers already read sites through news readers, rarely venturing to the actual site itself and while monetising feeds (as its come to be known) isn’t new this is confirmation that Google clearly sees this as another advertising medium they would like to swallow.
• Google are very unlikely to pull this one out of the open web space like they did with Adaptive Path’s MeasureMap but surely this acquisition will lead the way to integration into Google Analytics. The integration with Adsense and Analytics would seem to make it a likely brethren, ultimately though making web stats a requirement of the feed stats could be a bold move to far though.
• This will be bad news for users who would ‘prefer’ not to use Adsense to monetise their sites as the current ad networks will be inevitably squeezed out in favour of Google based advertising in the future.

Congratulations Feedburner, clear and present evidence of another company making one hell of a profit from flipping their company to one of the biggest out there.

Well, since the acquisition of Measure Map over 12 months ago, it seems the UI team has been working over time on this one. Analytics 2.0, for want of a better expression, appears a major improvement on the original and allows major customisation over the interface allowing you to create views that apply to your business and market. With ‘flexible graphing tool’ allowing you to compare trends over different time periods, reporting appears vastly superior and with increased integration with adwords this looks as though it will be a valuable tool to website owners and marketeers.

A feature that was lacking though, something that PulseRSS has made available, is web stats through RSS; I covered this briefly here but I for one am hoping they have made this valuable feature available.

It seem Google has learnt from the original massive demand for Analytics when originally released though and will be rolling Analytics ‘2.0′ out over the next month to everyone. So if you haven’t had the upgrade yet, in the mean time, check out the feature tour for more information.

Personally my major gripe with Analytics over the last 18 months has been the slow or patchy updating of ‘my’ data. Providing the speed issue has been addressed though then Google really could have another corner of the web covered.

Pulse is a hosted web app that gives you the basic of statistics for your website available as a RSS feed or through their site. Simply sign up and add the JavaScript to the footer of your site’s (x)html to start tracking visits, incoming links and search keywords. Then log in and subscribe to the RSS feed using your favourite reader and check out the stats while reading the headlines and drinking your morning coffee.

With the data available in xml format too, I am just waiting for someone to develop a Wordpress plugin. Stats available in your dashboard would be very handy.

Best of all though….. its FREE and with more features to come it can only become more useful.

From their blog.

Gmail sign-ups are now open worldwide! No more waiting for someone to invite you—just create an account directly at www.gmail.com.

Though still in ‘beta’ I have used Gmail for a long time now with virtually no problems. If you haven’t moved your webmail across from other inferior web email apps, now is the time to do it. Gmail is quite simply excellent.