Taken in Hampton Court Palace Gardens – View Large
1/200 sec at f4.5, ISO 100

Over the past couple days I’ve been discovering a couple new additions and changes to Google Analytics which I wasn’t aware of which I’ll mention below;

Annotations

Perhaps the biggest update I’ve noticed; you can now annotate graphs in Google Analytics so you can note anything which may have happened at that time, such as website downtime which could have affected your stats – so in 6 months time when you go back to look at your stats, you can be reminded of why there is a blip the graph.

Simply click on a date on the graph, and a pop-up box appears where you can now Create a new annotation. Couldn’t  be simpler!

This could be very useful for people who often analyise old statistics, and what’s even better – you can make the annotations private, or if you are on a shared account (for example for work purposes), you can share the annotation with everyone else who has an account so all your collegues can also see the information.

Asynchronous Tracking

A new method of tracking stats on your site has also been released which optimises how your browser loads the Google ga.js file, minimising any negative impact on user experience and allowing you to have the tracking code higher on your webpage.

More info can be found over at Google about this one and how to implement it here

Mobile Visitors

Secondly, under ‘Visitors’, Google have now seperated out the stats of visitors who use mobile devices. Quite handy if you want to analyise mobile visitors on their own without other browsers affecting the results.

Network Location

Last but not least, a very minor tweak but deserves a mention – a couple weeks ago the ‘Network Location’ section (which I seem to alway use!) was renamed ‘Service Providers’ – nothing more than just a name change!

The other day I recieved Dane Sander’s book “Fast Track Photographer” for free through the post after winning it in a twitter contest where he was giving away 500 copies. Who is Dane Sanders I here you ask? Well he’s a professional wedding photographer living in Southern California who is also a regular speaker for Adobe and Pictage as well as having been featured in many professional photography magazines.

The excerpt for the book states;

“Fast Track Photographer gives you powerful tools for discovering your core strengths and a foolproof plan for maximizing them in the flat new world we live in. If you want to build a recession-proof, competition proof photo business in the 21st Century, you need to throw out the old rule book. You need to get on the Fast Track.”

Even though I am not a wedding photographer, and have never taken any photos at one, I still look forward to reading the book as I can hopefully apply what it discusses to other situations.

If you want to find out more about Dane Sanders you can visit his site, or follow him on twitter here.

Last weekend saw the Autosport International motorshow make its way to the NEC in Birmingham which was packed full of motorsport-goodness. From rally cars to the entire 2009 F1 lineup, there was certainly plenty to do, especially when the show was also being graced by several big name motorsport celebrities including Martin Brundle, Richard Nobel and current F1 World Champion Jenson Button.

Check out some of the photos which I took below;

Following a few tweets back a forth with a couple of people it became apparent that there was no one place where someone could view all the Knowledge Transfer Networks (KTN’s) on Twitter.

What’s a KTN I hear you say? Well, they are government funded networks (there’s quite a few of them!), where groups of industry professionals can get together to discuss and share knowledge and keep up to date on what everyone’s doing, and what’s happening within their profession.

Anyway!, to put a stop to there being no single repository of their Twitter activities I’ve set up a Twitter list to do bring them all together - now you can find and follow to all the KTN’s at once by heading over to my Twitter list here: http://twitter.com/lloydengland/ktns

If you know of any other KTN’s which arn’t on my list, please do let me know.

*Note – This is not an official list by any means, and was solely created by me to benefit others with no involvement from any official party.