Update: My project was accepted, and I setup a blog concerning SoC 2006. Enjoy!

Another one of Google's excellent ideas. Continuing from last years Summer of Code, Google is giving a lot to the open source community by sponsoring projects. They're inviting applications from students beginning May 1st to participate in a variety of exciting open source projects. You're even free to propose your own ideas!

Here's how it works. All the open source organisations have until April 31st to apply for the post of a "Mentor Organisation". All the biggies are already part of it: GCC, GNOME, KDE, Apache Software Foundation, Python, PHP, FreeBSD, Mono … the list goes on and is growing by the minute. I expect at-least 60 organisations to participate this time. On May 1st Google opens registration to students and will accept proposals from them until May 8th. After that the selection procedure begins. The mentor organisations will filter out suitable candidates and inform Google about the students they'd like to work with. Every accepted student will be assigned a mentor and the coding starts 23rd May!

Google is offering $5000 as a stipend for every accepted project. $4500 goes to the student and $500 to the mentoring organisation. But that's only if you successfully complete your project!

Last time, Google accepted around 400 students last year and they say the number will be greater this time. Lots of help available from SoC 2005 veterans on how to write proposals. Check out:

http://google.wikia.com/wiki/Summer_of_Code
http://summerofcode.xwiki.com/xwiki/bin/view/Main/WebHome

http://natulte.net/pub/soc-thoughts.html

And don't forget to read Google's FAQs

http://code.google.com/soc/studentfaq.html
http://code.google.com/soc/mentorfaq.html

I didn't know about the program last year, but I'm definitely going to apply this time! Hopefully something to do with PHP or GNOME, I haven't quite decided on my proposal yet. I wish everyone all the best and hope that all of us have a great time this summer!

I was lucky enough to recieve an invitation code for Google’s new Analytics service. Ironically, my application for a Google AdSense account has been rejected several times. Anyway, first impressions on Analytics were stunning. Just like how we felt when GMail was released.

Google really puts a lot thought into its services. Analytics is no different from Google’s other innovative services and blows the competition away. Actually, I’m not even sure there is any other free alternative to Google Analytics.

For those of you who don’t know what Google Analytics is, it is the most comprehensive and detailed analysis of vistors to your site. It will generate a wide variety of reports on visitors to your site, which will obviously help the marketing manager and the webmaster in attracting more traffic. Examples of reports are mapped geographical locations of your vistors, entry and exit points of your web site, and page-by-page analysis. The most fascinating reports to me, however, were the webmaster reports that gives me details on the broswers my visitors use, their screen resolution, whether or not they have Java enabled and even their operating system!

The service also has a section called “Conversion University” which gives tips on how to make your visitors click on advertisements (i.e. convert them!) and on how to utilise the information provided by the service to maximise your website effectiveness.

Once again, go Google!

The executive summary report
The Browser – Platform combo report