With all the Google watching and speculation that goes on, I’m surprised noone saw this coming. (Or if they did, I didn’t hear about it…)

Well Google have now released Google Analytics – a free website statistics tool that webmasters can install on their site to monitor and track visitors. This looks very cool but I’ve only just installed it on my site so I don’t have any data yet to look at. The reporst look quite good and utilise flash for some swish effects. There’s a definite focus on your Adsense earnings too, but you don’t need Adsense to run these on your site.

I’ll compare the findings to my existing tracking software provided by statcounter.com over the next couple of weeks. Shouldn’t be too long before Microsoft and Yahoo to follow suit… (yawn)?

For those that haven’t been following this, you really should be – this is turning into a major story! It all started with a post on Mark Russinovich’s blog, and it just keeps gaining momentum. I’ll update this post wih the latest news…

Suzi Turner from ZDNet provides a good summary of the whole situation, I suggest you read it.

UPDATE: Sony to be sued – http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20051110-5549.html

NEW UPDATE: Anti-Spyware companies will detect and remove the Sony rootkit code!

NEXT UPDATE: Win for the public – Sony will cease production of all CDs with the rootkit software – this is great news.

NEXT UPDATE: VICTORY! Sony agrees to recall all infected CD’s and replace them with unprotected copies. They also post a link on their front page to a press release explaining this.

Mark Rusinovich’s latest post: http://www.sysinternals.com/blog/2005/11/victory.html

Sony’s home page: http://www.sonybmg.com/

Sony’s press release: http://blog.sonymusic.com/sonybmg/111505.html

There’s a bit of a boring trend in the internet world at the moment. It seems that Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo have given up on coming up with new ideas, and instead just keep copying each other with every new product that gets released. It started with each company trying to outdo each other with their search engines and since then there’s been online maps, online books, online advertising, etc, etc… And now it’s the personalised home pages – this is something that Yahoo has had for a long time with their My Yahoo pages, and MSN has had a personalised page for a while now too. But since Google brought out their swishy home page, with drag and drop content, live feeds, and inbox view, now Microsoft is jumping on the bandwagon by copying Google’s page – even the layout and controls are eerily similar.

The problem with these three companies, is that the press will jump through hoops to report on the smallest announcement each one has to offer. The events get super-hyped and then become a super-let down too. Look at the Google/Open Office announcement, and more recently the Microsoft Windows Live announcement. Windows Live is a good example of the other current trend that every new product has to have the word Beta stapled to it. That apart Microsoft launched a home page/web portal that didn’t work in Firefox and hardly worked in IE. I like the way that gadgets can be developed to put on the home page, but all the ones I’ve tested haven’t worked yet.

For those in the know (Scoble calls them influentials) there are heaps of other, smaller companies that offer the same products as the big guns, but these often go unnoticed. A great example of such a company is Netvibes (www.netvibes.com) – these guys do a personalised home page that in some respects is heaps better than any of the others. It has some amazing Ajax at work to make the whole usability exprerience really pleasing. I would seriously recommend that everyone looks at Netvibes (and have a read through their blog too,) I think you’ll agree that it’s a clear winner!

If you want to find about all of the other cool companies doing cool stuff on the net have a read through TechCrunch, Memeorandum, Tecnorati, etc…

A funny thing happened yesterday, I was using Google Images to search for photos of something and I decided to type in my name for fun to see what came up. As I was browsing through the results I spotted a few thumbnails of photos that I had posted on the excellent openphoto.net website and then on the second page I noticed one of my photos with a URL in Croatia. I clicked on the link and true enough, the site was using a photo of mine that I taken in Namibia of a cheetah. They had printed my name beneath the photo with a copyright symbol so that was all good – I was just impressed that they were using it. I guess this makes me a world famous photographer?

I blogged recently about copy protection on CD’s doing more harm than good and Mark Rusinovich has proved this again by discovering a rootkit that is installed when playing some Sony Music’s CD’s on your computer.

You can read Mark’s findings on his blog (http://www.sysinternals.com/Blog/) and doing a google search on the subject reveals how widely this news has spread. This is bad news for Sony and further reinforces my opinion that these sorts of copy protection techniques only harm honest users of music and do nothing to prevent wide-spread piracy.