Google Analytics now provides a new Asynchronous Tracking Code snippet as an alternate way to track your website! Think of the asynchronous tracking code snippet as a script that uses a "separate lane" to handle part of the processing of your webpage. As the number of cars (or in this case, scripts on your webpage) increases, the asynchronous tracker uses this lane to reduce webpage load time.

(Cross-posted with the Google Code Blog ) I'm excited to announce that registration for Google I/O is now open at code.google.com/io . Our third annual developer conference will return to Moscone West in San Francisco on May 19-20, 2010. We expect thousands of web, mobile and enterprise developers to be in attendance.

It being Friday and just for fun... On CNN Money this morning, I heard the mayor of Athens, GA commenting on wages and bonuses. And he said something about breaking down your annual salary to how much you earn per minute and see how much you're worth. He said "per minute I'm worth the price of a pound of Bananas." So if a city mayor is worth the price of a pound of Bananas, how much is a professional SEO/SEM worth, I thought. Any takers?

Game developers - or at least the game developers who attend the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco - are likely to hold Google and Android in much higher regard after March 9th and 10th. Google's announced that it will give away quite a lot of Android devices on those dates. Google's employed this strategy to build hype before. You may remember, for example, that the 4,000 or so people who attended Google I/O received HTC Magics free of charge.

Digg Founder Kevin Rose did an interview with The UK's Telegraph, and revealed that Digg has some big and "drastic" plans for redesigning the Digg experience. A couple of quotes from the piece : "We're making some drastic changes, but they're much-needed drastic changes," he told The Telegraph. "People are going to be shocked at some of the directions we're taking. You have to be comfortable with completely tearing down and throwing away a bunch of ideas." .

If you followed @googlewmc on Twitter you would already know about this , but I recently recreated my "State of the Index" talk from PubCon in November 2009. Here's the video of the talk below: And here are the slides if you'd like to follow along: The talk is almost half an hour, so I hope you enjoy it and learn something new!

Toy maker Mattel said today it is set to roll out a new product in the fall called "Puppy Tweets" that will allow dogs to send tweets to their own Twitter account. Puppy Tweets is a plastic tag with a sound and motion sensor that attaches to a dog collar and connects to a USB receiver in a computer. The pet owner creates a Twitter account for the dog and then can receive tweets on a smartphone or desktop.

In a bid to make search results more relevant , Google is introducing two new features which were actually based from two of its experiemental products - Google Squared and Rich Snippets. These two new features are - highlighting of answers in search results and Rich Snippets for events. Answer highlighting allows users to get the information they need quickly just by bolding out the likely answers to their questions for search results with factual answers.

Latest data from comScore are showing familiar trends in the global search market once again, except for one peculiar point.  Interestingly, while Google retains its lead among the search properties worldwide, Microsoft's search market share seemed to be growing by leaps and bounds. Of course, Yahoo still got the lowest percentage change in search market for 2009 among these three major search engines.

Image by SESConferenceSeries via Flickr comScore has just released a study on growth in the global search market in 2009 . The study revealed that the U.S. remains the largest search market worldwide, while Google Sites retains a commanding position in the global search market. More than 131 billion searches were conducted worldwide in December 2009, a 46-percent increase in the past year. This number represents more than 4 billion searches per day, 175 million per hour,