Adobe's Acquisition of Omniture

Being a user of the Omniture Insight (formerly Visual Sciences) product this purchase does resonate a bit with me.  Especially considering the uncertainty that goes along with an acquisition such as this with the product I use.  The Omniture Insight product is an upgraded and re-branded version of Visual Sciences, a powerful application to perform deep dive analysis.

From all I have read from the pundits and bloggers Adobe is acquiring Omniture to be able to provide a one-stop shop to build, maintain, and monitor your website.  Site Catalyst is great for providing that metrics dashboard which companies require, but the question is "what will Adobe do with Insight?"

If Insight is raking in money then one can assume it won't get touched.  The next question is whether Adobe will even spend any money or effort upgrading the product.  It will have to get re-branded with Adobe's stamp, but how far will they go?

Some other speculation milling about is that Adobe could sell the Insight piece to one a company such as Oracle or Microsoft because those companies have been hot for the Visual Sciences piece for a bit now.  This may be their opportunity to make Adobe an offer they cannot refuse for this piece.  Insight's strengths do not lie in its automated reporting and dashboard display capabilities.  It seems as though Adobe would be more interested in the Site Catalyst piece.  But, then again cash is king and if Insight is raking in the dough, then I am sure Adobe will keep that piece.

No matter how all this turns out, it should be an interesting few months as things shake out.

Google's Tools

This is stating the obvious to much of the masses, but Google's offering of tools is vast and great.  Most people are familiar with the insight Google Analytics provides and there is are also Adwords, Adsense, and Web Toolkit to name just a few. 

The one tool I am trying to get familiar with are the Webmaster Tools.  I have my site setup and verified and crawled by Google.  But, my site is still not indexed.  Most recently I tried adding my URL manually to Google to no avail at this point.  

I have read that at times it takes weeks even months to get your site indexed in Google and others say it is best to have your site linked on sites that already popular.  So, now I have a new challenge; learn the best methods for linking my website and what other techniques can I employ to get my website indexed by Google and people coming to my website.  

Managing The Edge Podcasts

One of my major reasons to start a blog is to learn and practice how to run a website and I figure a blog is a cheap and easy place to start.  It is also a place where I can journal my quest for learning the web in a much deeper fashion than I already do.  This will also serve as a place to practice using all the great tools available (especially Google’s)  to optimize and monitor a website.

In this quest for getting a deeper understanding for the web, I ran across a series of podcasts called Managing the Edge with hosts Doug Mitchell of createWOWmedia and Andy Brudtkuhl of 48web. These guyes produce a new podcast on a weekly basis and now have 24 podcasts available to download (as of typing this post) where they have in-depth discussions of aspects of running a successful website such as optimization, pay per click advertsing, and using Twitter for business.

I have been listening for about six months and have listened to most of the podcasts now. All of podcasts have been informative, but in my opinion the podcast really started to get good around the 19th episode discussing Local Search Optimization.  In this episode Andy and Doug go in-depth about how to make your business visible in the most relevant searches within Google along with Google’s Local Business Center.  I have read books and read blog posts regarding this same thing and they are not as simplified and in-depth as this podcast.  Very impressive.

This is just one example, but the podcast is getting progressively getting better and now they are bringing in guest experts to enhance the podcast and infuse knowledge and expertise of the topic.  The most recent podcast (The Best PayPerClick and AdWords Podcast You’ll Ever Listen To) is a great example of how they have evolved and a must listen if you are interested in learning about PPC campaigns and Google AdWords.  I have listened multiple times now just to make sure I get all the nuggets from that podcast.

I realize this is not the only source of information on running websites, but I feel it is the best I have run across.  Check it out when you have a chance, I am sure there is something that you do not already have a firm grasp on.