"By installing Offline Gmail, you’re able to use the normal Gmail interface to read and write mail, search, and organize, even when there’s no internet connection," explains Gmail software engineer Aaron Whyte. "And Flaky Connection mode speeds up Gmail when your connection is slow or unreliable."

"Since we first launched in Labs, we’ve heard from a lot of you who tried Offline Gmail, and your feedback helped us make a lot of improvements," adds Whyte.

Google recently added a couple of new features for offline Gmail. These are an option to choose which messages get downloaded for offline use, and the ability to send attachments while offline.

"Offline Gmail has proven particularly useful for business and schools making the switch to Google Apps from traditional desktop mail clients — they’re used to being able to access their mail whether or not they’re online, and Offline Gmail brings this functionality right to the browser," says Whyte.

To utilize the offline feature in Gmail, just turn it on and adjust your offline settings from the "offline" tab in Gmail’s settings.

Related Articles:

> Gmail Aims to Save Embarrassment Yet Again

> Gmail Gets a New Label Feature

> Google Adds Google Docs Previews to Gmail

Website Optimizer is a tool from Google that allows users to perform simple A/B and multivariate testing on websites to see what works and what doesn’t. WebProNews discussed the tool at length earlier this year. Here is a webinar video that will familiarize you with it as well:

"Website Optimizer handles splitting a website’s traffic, serving different variations, and crunching the numbers to find statistical significance," Google says. "Creating experiments with Website Optimizer usually involves a lot of back and forth between your website and the Website Optimizer interface. Using the API, you can integrate Website Optimizer into your platform. In short, you can create and launch experiments from whatever tool you use to edit your site."

The API is an extension of the Google Analytics API, and is part of Google Analytics Labs. Being a labs feature means that it may not be perfect, and users may experience some bugs.

Google says that developers should look at the Google Analytics Data API Protocol document for general information about the GA feeds. The sections on Quota Policy, Audience, Getting Started, and Authentication are relevant to the Website Optimizer API.

Consumer electronics like video game consoles, computers and Mp3 players are popular items this holiday season with the Gen-Y crowd. Fifty-four percent indicated them as the gifts they want most, versus 52 percent in 2006.

Desktop and laptop computers are popular holiday gift items, with Apple and HP as the specific brands at the top of Gen-Y wish lists. Gaming systems trail computers, with the Nintendo Wii being a first choice, followed by the Xbox 360 and then the PlayStation 3. Other popular electronic items include iPods as the most popular Mp3 player, Canon digital camera and iPhones as the most sought after cell phone.

Amazon.com and eBay will see a large amount of Gen-Y Internet traffic, as they will be the two most popular online shopping destinations this holiday season. As a demographic, Gen-Y shoppers are organized and believe in Black Friday with the majority beginning to shop just after Thanksgiving.

"Gen-Y proves time and time again to be the bellwether for up-and-coming consumer trends," said Murtaza Hussain, chief executive officer at Peanut Labs.

"Their choices this holiday season will not only affect their direct spend, but also directly influence the overall family holiday spend. These results should prove intriguing for companies like Apple, HP, Nintendo or Amazon, who top Gen-Y’s list this year."

It’s difficult to look at your competitors without leaving tracks. It can be a challenge, but is extremely important to manage your own reputation. This panel will look at a number of issues surrounding competitive intelligence being probed by the competition and probing the competition yourself.

Moderator:

• Jake Baillie

Speakers:

• Jake Baillie, Managing Director, STN Labs
• Andy Beal, Internet Marketing Consultant, Marketing Pilgrim LLC
• Larry Mersman, Vice President, Trellian

First up is famed Marketing Pilgrim, Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim LLC. Andy wants to discus tools for spying on your competition (Sounds great!).

1. DomainTools.com: Gives a great deal of background information. It tells whether the site is listed in Yahoo Directory, Open Directory, registration details, etc. It also gives information about other sites in the same IP.
2. ranks.nl/tools/spider.html: Great tool as it breaks up keyword density into 2, 3 and 4 word combos.
3. sitexplorer.search.yahoo.com: Yahoo! places the most important backlinks at the top of the list.
4. seomoz.org/tools: Great way to find out about competition’s page strength. Gives information on how many times they have been in del.icio.us/digg etc.
5. SoloSEO.com/tools/indexRank.html: This is great to find how many pages Google has indexed in the last year and how far they have grown.
6. copernic.com: Use to track site changes. Anytime your competition has an update you will be aware.
7. Technorati.com: Find out about the kind of feedback people are giving about your competition.
8. google.com/alerts: Use this to alert yourself on competition activities.
9. searchanalytics.compete.com: Lets you know which keywords are bringing in significant traffic to your site.
10. touchgraph.com: Show you competition’s link clusters. Know where the important links are coming from.
11. google.brand.edgar-online.com: Shows you your competitor’s SEC filings.
12. seekingalpha.com/transcripts: View transcripts.
13. google.com/patents: Information on your competition’s patents.
14. Oodle.com: Shows whether your competition is hiring or not.

Keep a track on your competition’s employee blogs. Especially if the company has no inkling about the blog. Who knows what you could stumble upon.

Next up is Larry Mersman, Vice President of Trellian.

Competitive intelligence can mean many things depending on the channel we are dealing with. For the most part, it is the gathering of information about your competitors.

Sources of information:

• Articles
• Blogs
• Online articles
• Internet Service Provider
• User Panels (User Installed Software)
• Website Search Patterns/History

How to find your competition?

• HitWise
• CoMScore
• Use search engines
• Find out who is bidding on your keywords

How did your competition get there?

• Referring Domains/Backlinks. Who is sending them traffic?
• Keyword Data: What keywords are actually being clicked on to get the user to your competition?
• Where is traffic coming from? search engines, banner ads, blogs, etc.

Final points:

• Knowing which keywords are performing best for your competitor will help you understand their strengths and weaknesses
• Know the performance of both paid and unpaid keywords (helps in optimizing your site around proven data, possibly streamline your spending and increase your ROI)
• Many companies will optimize their website around kws they think they will be found under, or where the end user will find a link to their site

Finally, it’s the users who make the choices that drive the traffic and the money to your site.

Last speaker is Jake Baillie, Managing Director, STN Labs. The best webmasters already investigate their competition. Search engine optimization is a game. Know more than your competition and you will win. Most novice webmasters have no idea. Use this to your advantage.

Mistakes made by novice webmasters:

• Put sensitive data on their web servers
• Use competitive research tools from their own company Ips

WHOIS (www.whois.sc) my competition:

• Designed in the 80s
• WHOIS was originally intended to be contact point for technical issues
• Evolved to be the “legal documentation” of internet domains
• Forge-abe with very little technical knowledge or even anonymized

Regional IP Databases:

• Use nslookup to find the IP address of the domain
• Plug the IP into a regional database IP and see what company that IP is registered to. Worst case scenario, you’ll find the ISP

Social Engineering Targets:

• ISP employees
• Spouses, significant others of employees or ex-employees.
• Marketing departments/sales people
• PR firms

Next, Jake has a script on how to get information out of people!

The Script:

• Introduce yourself as someone you’re not.
• Be friendly. People love friendly people. Never become confrontational
• If you don’t get what you want the first time, hang up and call back to talk to someone else.

Allinanchor:

• Use it to return webpages linked to with that target term
• Good for discovering networks
• Google the links: Search Facebook, follow people on Twitter, search MySpace etc
• You can pretty much tell an SEO’d site these days by a visual link inspection
• Keep an eye on unnatural traffic
• Users who come in to your website after using allinanchor are not your target visitors
• Those who come 20 times in 2 minutes through the same cache aren’t your target visitors
• People from whois.sc are competitors

Tracking and Logging:

• Track their referrer and do something cool with competitors via mod-rewrite:
• Send all incoming traffic from that specific referrer to a porn site.
• Serve them a 403 access forbidden message.
• Make them think the site is down.

Defence against social engineering:

• Instruct your employees not to talk to no one about your site.
• Find a trustworthy ISP – most intelligence is gathered at this point.
• Tell your Significant other to not take business calls at home.

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This post tells a personal tale of getting involved with Microsoft at the beginning of adCenter’s deployment to the paid search marketing world along with some good examples of unique adCenter features and why Mel thinks it’s great working for Microsoft.

My first day at Microsoft began at 4am on 11th July 2005 as I got up in St Margaret’s, South West London, in order to get the Eurostar to Paris to witness the launch of the adCenter Pilot in France.

As the train trundled through the Paris countryside, I pondered what the next few months would hold. Had I made a mistake by jacking in my account director role at 24/7 Real Media? What would it be like working in one of the most well known companies in the world? Were all the interviews I went through going to be worth it?

When I logged into adCenter for the very first time later that afternoon I was, shall we say, distinctly underwhelmed. I thought to myself, “What have they been doing?”, and more importantly “what on earth am I doing here?!”

That evening our team was given a pep talk from our head of service operations:

“The next few months is not going to be easy. As we work both internally, and with our customers, to scale the product and onboard all our advertisers, have the courage to make difficult decisions, even if you make some mistakes. People rarely get anything right 1st time, and you never learn unless you go back over what you’ve done, and see if you could have done it any better.”

Those words settled me a great deal, and I realised it was game on!

We all had a challenge on our hands, to grow adCenter from its bare bones in partnership with both the development team in Redmond, and our advertisers dotted around the globe.

Every time we took on a new person in London in preparation for the UK launch in August 2006, they would utter after their first few days – “But I just thought you’d be a bit further along by now!”

That was the point! The paid search team was, to all intents and purposes, a start up, a brand new business for Microsoft. As with all new businesses, there’s always a period of learning, growth and, more often than not, growing pain! Once every one of my new colleagues got that, they knew they had an opportunity to shape the business using whatever skill or competency they’d been hired for.

The guys I work with, the adCenter Community Team, have a great role. Our mission is support advertisers, large or small, through the adCenter Blog and education programs, like the soon to be released adExcellence Program.

The reason why the team was set up was, when we came to market, one of the top two asks from advertisers was “great service please!” So we’re all over the search marketing forums, answering questions, providing tips, pointing people in the right direction and gathering feedback, feedback on adCenter that goes right back to the dev team who then act on it.

You’ll also find us at all the major conferences too, SMX, SES and PubCon among others, talking to delegates, chatting to the speakers, recruiting for betas, listening to ideas and problems, because you know what? It’s not about us or this Evil Empire I keep hearing about, it’s about you – The Advertisers, advertisers, advertisers!

The second big request from our customers was for more insight. Who is clicking on my ad? Who is searching for my brand term? Can you give me better targeting options? Microsoft adCenter’s demographic tools answered those questions and so did our adCenter Labs team.

These tools use Passport, or Windows Live ID data, to assess a searchers age and gender when they type in a keyword into Live Search. Within adCenter you can, for any given Ad Group, up-weight your bids by between 10% and 100% for your target demographic and so serve an ad that is likely to be more relevant to that user.

For example if you sell financial services products to people about to retire, what’s the point in wasting expensive clicks on users under 50 years-old? By up-weighting your bids by say 50% for searchers aged 50-plus, you’re more likely to rank higher for customers more likely to convert.

It doesn’t mean you exclude the other demographics though. This is just a great way of getting a better ranking for those customers you know will be more likely to convert, and advertisers that have utilized this functionality have seen dramatic reductions in cost per acquisition of up to 76%.

Microsoft adCenter Labs is the quickest place to see all this awesome innovation in action. Check out the demos for tools to help with Paid Search, Contextual Advertising, Audience Intelligence and Emerging Media.

So not content with simply building a product that would do what others did before; the product team took the opportunity to push the boundaries, using existing Microsoft properties and research to give advertisers that extra edge and better ROI.

For me, those are the three things that I love about working at Microsoft:

1. We get encouraged to make decisions, learn from any mistakes, and grow into our roles.
2. We’re encouraged to get out there and meet our customers, find out their needs, work with them to help them get the best out of their campaigns, or do the best for their clients and not live in a bubble too far removed from reality.
3. And we get to innovate, working with some of the coolest gadgets, gizmos and widgets. Cross-pollinating technologies to build the beginnings of a great eco-system for advertisers to tap into our rich and diverse audience around the world.

The last couple of releases of adCenter have shown we’ve been listening, that we are agile and that we put the needs of our advertisers first, and in turn we’ve received great feedback from them.

If, for one second, I thought that we didn’t have our customer’s interests central to everything we do, I probably wouldn’t stick around.

But I know that’s not going to happen..

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Listas provides you with a WYSIWYG which allows you to quickly and easily create/edit lists and share them with others for read or write – in sense a bit like a wiki. Listas reminds a little of cl1p.net – the internet clipboard.

Listas also features a Listas Community Section, in which you can find a number of highlights of the most popular and random items from around the community of public lists such as the most used tags, the hottest lists, and prolific contributors. Within the Listas Community you can also add other users lists or RSS feeds to your own Listas as well as adding users as freinds so you can quickly find them again.

You can even create lists from all the things you find on the web, like search results, wish lists, videos, or all or part of virtually any page with the Listas Toolbar for Internet Explorer.

Now the question is where could Listas progress to – could some kind of Windows Live Spaces intergration be the key?

Check out Microsoft Live Labs Listas at http://listas.labs.live.com plus the LiveSide Listas Page at http://listas.labs.live.com/user/liveside

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Google Transit Graduates, Gets Wrapped Into Maps

Oh, well.  You can’t ask for everything, and in this case, that includes widespread coverage – Google Transit is aware of routes in only ten American states.  Christoph Oehler, a product manager, promises, “We’re still working hard to make Google Transit useful for as many people as possible, and we’ll keep you posted as we add new regions.”

And if you can get past those minor problems, this truly is a positive development.  Google Transit’s departure from Google Labs involves an integration with Google Maps – now, some people will get a clickable option to “Take Public Transit” as they plan routes.  As always, distances and elapsed times are measured, and in some cases, there’s even a driving-versus-transit cost comparison.

So, yes – Google Transit is good, and it’s nice to see it leave Google Labs.  The move may have (slightly) bigger implications, though.

In the past month, we’ve seen both Google Reader and GOOG-411 graduate from Google Labs.  With Google Transit following close behind, it’s hard not to detect a trend.  This may just be a matter of re-labeling – no dramatic changes or upgrades accompanied any of the moves – but it still looks like evidence of Google growing up.

It’s almost enough to make you wonder if the “beta” label will get dropped off Gmail at some point.

I’ll let you count the languages for yourself; Google sort of goes overboard, in my opinion, by listing “English (UK),” but “Chinese (Traditional and Simplified)” probably could have been classified as two separate tongues.  Anyway, the other languages involved are German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, and French.

As for the Google Labs development, Kevin Systrom, a product marketing manager, admits on the Official Google Blog, “It’s a small textual change, but we believe it solidifies our commitment to make reading blogs and news sites easier than ever.”

Also, the Official Google Reader Blog produced a strange sort of breakup letter to announce the adjustment . . .  I’m not at all sure what to make of it.

In any event, these occurrences come not long after Google Reader (finally) gained a search function, and, following a leaked presentation, there’s been a lot of discussion about what else may be in store for the software.

McAfee researcher Vinoo Thomas said on the Avert Labs blog that the spammers now use a couple of ways to get the worm onto someone’s system. In the easiest scenario, a victim on a vulnerable system click the link and triggers an onslaught of browser and application exploits.

If those don’t take hold on a system, the person visiting the fake YouTube page is encouraged to download and launch the attack manually. A screenshot of the scam showed dialog typical for download sites, where the viewer is told to click another link if the download does not begin within a short period of time.

“We expect these spammers to continue to use these types of tactics,” said Dave Marcus, security research and communications manager at McAfee.

The company was profiled in a recent San Francisco Chronicle article, and they’re doing some interesting things (aside from embracing Calvinball, that is).  One project, dubbed GoodTree, is a center for Web, image, and news searches, among other things, and has the motto “Internet for Good” beneath its logo.

Remind you of those folks in Mountain View?

It should – in an older article SFC piece, James Currier, Ooga’s founder, said  “Google is sucking the oxygen out of the system” in reference to the company’s practice of hiring the best people available.  He then added, “You can’t blame them, though.  If I were them, I’d be doing the same thing.”

As for what Currier’s doing now, well . . . it’s hard to say.  Jessica Guyn states that Ooga, which is a “13-employee San Francisco startup,” “currently has five stealth projects under development.”

There’s no breaking news here in respect to those – sorry if you’ve read this far looking for some – but Ooga Labs is definitely a company that bears watching.  As do, by the way, all of the old Calvin and Hobbes comics.