There hasn’t been a terrible amount of news going on since I was late on posting cribbed content last week and didn’t get it up until the 2nd, so this is going to be light.  Tonight is the company holiday party at my husband’s company and it’s a reminder that there won’t be a holiday party for us since we’re spread out across the Western US.  Oh well… maybe we’ll collectively knock off early some day and go to our respective favorite pubs to have a drink!

• Google Reader changed their look this week.  It’s not a huge change, but it does feel slightly cleaner, so I like it.
• Contests are all over the place in anticipation for the holidays.  Market Leverage is sponsoring a contest across several blogs where they’re giving away an iPod Nano and HD Flip Mino per blog and entering all the entries across the blogs into a grand prize drawing for an Amazon Kindle, a MarketLeverage gift card, and some other assorted swag.
• For you creative types out there, this is an awesome tutorial by Photoshop Hero on making a scrap of notebook paper.
• Google opened up Friend Connect for everyone.  Yes, ANOTHER way to connect with people.  The world of social media was so much simpler when it was just MySpace, wasn’t it?

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Today’s highlighted free tool is perhaps an obvious one. One of the easiest things you can do to keep up to date on changes within your industry is to subscribe to news feeds and blog feeds. One of the best free readers out there is Google Reader.

The three column format is pretty clean and easy to navigate. On the left column is the main navigation with all your feeds. As seen, the ones that are bold are the ones with new content. From the home page you also get a summary of all the new content from all your feeds, so you can read from there to catch up on the latest news.I like Google Reader because it has a lot of potential to also be a social tool. There are sharing capabilities. Just click the “Share” icon underneath a blog post and anyone on your Google friends list can see the blog posts. It’s a brilliant and unobtrusive way to share. Since it’s Google as well, when you want to email a blog post to someone it opens an integrated Gmail window right there… which since I use Gmail personally I love.

Google Reader also has the ability to group feeds, which is a great asset to have. I use Reader for both work related feeds that I keep up on and some fun feeds, so having different folders helps me focus on the work ones while at work and leave the fun ones aside to check on my break or when I get home. You can also alter the order in which the folders are displayed in the left column, so you can easily prioritize which feeds are the most important to check on.

This is another great feature… there doesn’t necessarily need to be a feed for you to subscribe to! Bookmarklets seem to be all the rage lately, but I’m pretty sure that Google was among the first to bring this out. It’s a great tool when you find yourself checking websites like a mad woman.All in all, a great, and best of all, FREE tool to use to keep your ear to the ground within your industry!

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I finally signed up for Google Analytics. I know… I know… there’s no excuse in taking so long to sign up for such a great tool when it’s free. But I’d been using another stat counting site and didn’t see any reason to switch.

Okay you drug it out of me with that look… I didn’t know it was free either.

Of course, this has highly elevated Google in my mind. Despite my abandonment of AdSense from this blog, I really do love Google and all the great services they’ve offered me. Gmail is my best friend and confidant. Blogger has replaced the little keyed notebook I kept under my pillow. And Reader is my daily paper… with news, comics, and human interest.

So far the interface is a breeze to navigate. Everything is very big and represented visually, which is great for a person like me. I only have to click around and see exactly what I want – visitors, where they come from, what they’re doing. Since this is a blog, mostly reserved to the home page and not a lot of pages to navigate through, some of the more advanced features (like bounce rate) are lost on my use.

My favorite feature so far has got to be the Traffic Sources. Basically it’s a little bit of reassurance that all this time I’ve been spending on Entrecard, Digg, and StumbleUpon isn’t all for not. I’m not getting staggering numbers of people visiting the blog, but it’s super helpful to know where those people are coming from. I could easily redirect my efforts or try something new, and that helps a lot. I love to make the best use of my time possible (maybe I’m weird that way) so this helps me to weed out activities that are a total waste of time (like Furl & Reddit, I see…).

I’m not usually a super analytical person. I never have been. But Gooogle Analytics presents it in a way that is really easy for me to see the cause & effect relationships of what I’ve been doing to promote this little monkey here. Because honestly it’s not that fun writing when you don’t think anyone is reading .

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