Most often, even successful websites can be improved to increase performance. Let alone their less successful brethren. How do you improve your already functioning website smartly?

Microsoft has been running in beta in some foreign markets a website called MSN Reporter that copies many features from the popular Digg website. On MSN Reporter, users share and rate news, rating them up or down with giant “Kicken!” and “Dumpen!” buttons (translated as “Kick it” and “Dump it”).

AdaptiveBlue’s name may imply change, but Union Square Ventures likes the company the way it is. That’s what I infer, anyway, from the venture capital firm’s decision to fund AdaptiveBlue. But the amount of money involved remains unknown, so it’s hard to say exactly how fond Union Square Ventures is of its new friend.

I lived to see this day come to bear .. Myspace sending SPAM "member" emails, to an email address, that doesn’t exist (bliggy[at]bliggs.com), on one of my domains.

All the headers are legit, and the "member" email is sent to a "confirmed email". Go figure guys.

The home field advantage paid off: according to the latest data from comScore, the BBC website receives more visitors than Google News in the UK. For that matter, Yahoo News also ranked higher than Google News, by a margin of about 900,000 people.

Woe is Google, huh? In terms of numbers, it’s not even close to the top of the news site pile, and in terms of brand name, it has some less-than-distinguished company.

Yuri thinks so and wrote a post last week entitled Create a small business website on a small budget to tell you what you need to think about if you want to get it done.

Here’s the basic checklist of what you should be doing:

* research your customers
* research your keywords
* plan your website
* get a content management system
* get a website template
* improve template usability
* make the template accessible

When Apple unveiled its new iPhone last month – you remember, when the Internet went into a collective paroxysm, speaking in tongues and falling into ecstatic prostration at Steve Jobs feet – many of us observers said, "hey, wait a minute. Didn’t LG just win a prize for a phone just like that?"

WebSideStory’s Digital Marketing University (DMU) is just around the corner in March – and I’m going to be teaching two classes this time. I’ll be doing a hands-on class on Functionalism – which I hope would be useful to almost any web analytics practitioner.

In addition, I’ll be doing a class on advanced Visitor Segmentation in Visual Science. That’s obviously a deep-dive class – and it should be a lot of fun.

Webmasterworld recently had a good thread about signs of low quality websites. The less a person knows about your topic the more likely they are to rely on general signs of quality (or lack of) when consider if they should link at your site or not.

Winter time brings plenty of concerns about the weather. The Weather Channel has a little widget to add to blogs, showing the weather for the location picked by the site publisher.

When people visit a website, they have their own goals for that. To reach the goal, they need to click on URLs to get to other pages and read text only to click further.

A couple of months ago one of my readers asked me to build a stock quote class that would automatically update the quote.

Despite Microsoft’s best efforts, Vista isn’t yet breaking any sales records. According to some reports, the launch of the new operating system didn’t even draw a midnight crowd. People are curious about Windows Vista, though – data from Hitwise reveals that searches for the term are up 53%. I had a cynical reaction when I saw LeeAnn Prescott’s headline: "What kind of ‘start date’ does that 53% reflect?" My cynicism abated once I’d digested the second sentence of her piece.

Those of you based in the UK (and probably some of you who aren’t) may have noticed some recent changes on the BBC website, in particular the update to the audio and video player which now uses Windows Media Player as well as Real Player (it used to be just Real).

Back in the days, to get into the search engines you only had to submit a site to them and it’d show up in the results (or you could just get listed in the Yahoo directory).

Once done with creating and improving a website, you can very well spend your time on improving your online business.

Google’s made one more step into India, but it’s done so in an uncharacteristically quiet manner. Rather than buy out another company, or at least throw up a new research center, the search engine giant merely contributed an “undisclosed amount” to a seed investment firm known as Seedfund.

Well, I just finished delivering a presentation for the Madison, Wisconsin Advertising Federation.

Like anyone else, I find Steve Job’s product launch presentations to be mesmerizing.

One of the simplest things a webmaster, who is running a web metrics package to track site statistics, can do to boost micro-conversions (clicked links, clicked ads, etc.) and macro-conversions (sales) is to start a master log of changes.

Right now search relevancy algorithms are heavily tied to overall authority, but given enough time publishers and search marketers will undermine that measure of relevancy the same way that keyword density and raw PageRank died off.