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I can still remember when I was 6 years old, the hottest gaming console was the family computer; I could can hear my then-little friend screaming at me for taking the "spread" ammunition in Contra. Aside from the hundreds of hours spent in front of our then-black and white coloured TV, we formulated many strategies on how to beat the different stages as well as learned from some of our friends the "thirty lives" cheat on Contra.

Later on, I found out that it was called the Konami Code (up up down down left right left right B A B A select start). Aside from Contra, the forever-classic Super Mario Brothers was our favourite. If I can't have Mario, I won't let my friend play (enough said). After which the Super NES and many others followed the claim to be the ultimate gaming console. The last gaming console I had was the Playstation 1. Armed with my Final Fantasy 7, it made most of my childhood a happy (and geeky) one.

At throughout my college years, I was thinking of buying a Playstation again. Just as I was about to spend my hard-earned money, I saw some guys playing at a computer shop a computer game that was quite funny, some little animated characters hacking and slashing monsters that look like jelly droplets.

The game was Ragnarok, an MMORPG (Massive Multi-player Online Role Playing Game). After a few hours trying to figure out what I was seeing, I didn't realise I was already hooked.

Without going over-technical, MMORPGs work in conjunction with the internet. People all over the world that are connected to the internet can install the game, log on to a server and that server would allow you to play against other people logged on at the same time that you're on. Definitely, more challenging than a console, plus it takes up a lot more time (since it has no end... EVER).

Ever since, I've never seen another kid play a gaming console as seriously as we did way back in the day. Today, in the world of 1s and 0s, MMORPG is king, and the gaming console seems to be a "retro" way of enjoying and passing your time.

The gaming console industry is trying it's best to fight the threat of current web-based gaming technologies. But I fear they're not succeeding. MMORPGs play on the ego of individuals, giving them a sense of power over other people, where kids can call grownups "noobs (newbies)". How many Marios can give that sense of power to a person?

Although I do play MMOs, I just play it as my pastime. But, I still want the good old days of consoles being the pastime of choice. But as of now, MMORPGs are killing my console dreams.

With this blog, I endeavour to introduce any beginners to two free tools - Google Analytics and Yahoo ! Web Analytics - that can be used to analyse the statistics of your website.

Google Analytics is the enterprise-class web analytics solution that gives you rich insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness.

Google Analytics can track visitors from all referrers, including search engines, display advertising, pay-per-click networks, email marketing and digital collateral such as links within PDF documents.

Yahoo! Web Analytics is a highly customisable, enterprise-level website analytics system designed to help website businesses increase sales and visitor satisfaction, reduce marketing costs and gain new insight on online customers.

Web analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of internet data for purposes of understanding and optimising web usage.

Now you track how many visitor visits your site, average time on site, % change in a day, week, month or a year in which help you to determine when to improve your business strategy.

Attention programmers; a new open source programming language called Go has been launched by none other than those innovators at Google. Why?

Because no significant language has come to the fore in the last decade, while many changes have occurred on the web during that time. Google are known to prefer Python and Javascript, therefore Go is expected to resemble a combination of both, as well as its own flavour.

The video below is a one-hour long Google introduction on Go Programming Language:

Please click here for an online tutorial for the Go Programming Language!