Street View

I've just been playing with "Street View", a new feature from Google Maps. Its very cool. Wish they had it in New Zealand (but given that its not available for the UK or anywhere else yet I imagine it'll be a long time coming).

This is the Street View of the hotel where I stayed in New York last year (Affinia Manhattan on 7th Avenue).

I'd love to see the cameras they must have used to capture all the 3D images (presumably mounted on top of a car/van of some sort). The Intro Video is quite funny too (nice orange suit, dude).

Analytics

With the new website I've just done, and the others I've been playing with, I've been looking for a nice tool to do reporting. I think in the past my web host had the Webalizer tool available for use, which was OK. But its not available any more, so you have to munge through raw access logs.

So I found Google Analytics, which is an online web analysis/reporting tool. You just add some script to the pages you want to monitor, and the data is available online for analysis using some very nice tools. So I've got all my websites in there now, and you can see on a world map where the visitors are coming from, how they got to the site and even map out a sequence of pages that you want them to follow and report on that. Pretty cool. And its free, of course.

Just another in the long list of Google tools I'm now using, I guess. >Brainwashed<

Racing Cars

I've been doing some work for my cousin recently, Dale Williams, who races cars in NZ and would like to drive professionally. I went with him and his family to some of his races, took photos and shot some video, and have put together a website for him:


http://www.dalewilliamsracing.com



He's using the website, plus a promotional DVD I put together for him, to gather sponsors for racing next year. Last year he raced in the NZ Production Racing Series, and won the championship, so he's a pretty good driver.

Its been quite interesting putting all the stuff together for him, as I'm not that big on cars or racing as such, so its been cool doing something new.

I'm thinking about putting the video up on You Tube, but I'm not sure about the rights issues with music etc. Will have to do some digging.