Since Google's Caffeine search index announcement, all the buzz around search indexing has been about page load speed. In a May 26, 2010 report Google released some interested stats on some key factors that play into page load speed.

Key takeaways from the data:

• Average web page transfers 320 KB of data.
• Most websites could reduce their HTTP requests by combining JavaScript and CSS files respectively.
• The average page has almost 44 resources, 30 of which are images.

Some of the metric data does have a yep factor; though it's not all that suprising. The era of "cloud computing" lends a lot to the gets per post and hosts per request.  Just keep in mind, reduction of some of the reported metrix data could improve your web page's page download speed.

The data in the report is based upon a sample size of 4.2 billion pages. Yes, that is billion. We are talking about Google's search index.

As reported by StatCounter, IE6 has fallen below 5% market share in the U.S. and Europe for the first time EVER. This is great news for the whole of internet users that seek a truly interactive and robust experience on the Internet. With the news of IE6 being used by this few of people, more web developers may follow in the mold of YouTube and withdraw support for IE6.

StatCounter's numbers are based on a data set of 15 billion page views for May 2010 collected from the StatCounter network of over three million websites. These numbers show IE6 slipping from 11.5% to 4.7% in a 12 month period.

For now, Norlight Professional Services will continue to support IE6, but that may be changing in the future if IE6 keeps falling out of the market.

If you would be interested in discussing how Norlight Professional Services can assist you with a website redesign, SEO, usability improvements, or a custom application please contact us: nps@norlight.com; on Twitter @nps_norlight; facebook.com/nps.norlight.

Google's December 7th Annotations announcement certainly excited a lot of Google Analytics users. And so now you have checked you Google Analytics website profile only to not find the much anticipated "Create Annotation" link.

Well not to worry! As with most feature rollouts from Google, the Annotations enhancement is being slowly added to Google Analytics user profiles. According to Google, your wait should be over by mid January, 2010.

From the December 7th announcement:

Annotations is rolling out a bit slower than planned due to the holidays. New features within Google Analytics are launched on a phased roll out due to the volume of accounts, and the demands of testing as we activate the new feature. Usually this process takes from a few days to a few weeks, depending on the feature. Annotations is being activated to an additional 10% of accounts each week and will be pushed live to all accounts by mid January.

A brief video about Google Analytics Annotations

Since their creation YouTube brand channels have continued to grow in popularity and importance in brand management. Today, YouTube announced that they are integrating Google Analytics with YouTube brand channels.

What this means for you as a brand channel partner of advertiser is the more in depth look at performance. The Google Analytics reports will be available on your channel as if it was a part of your own site.

"Brand channel owners can track metrics such as how long visitors stay, repeat visits, bounce rate, and page views per visitor. For those who want to tailor their videos to a specific audience, Google Analytics also provides data about where viewers are located geographically and what languages they speak."

Visit http://bit.ly/11W0uw to learn more about integrating Google Analytics with your YouTube brand channel.