For anyone who missed it, Alistair had an interesting (and popular) post on watchingwebsites.com about how speeding up performance improves online business.   The data was gathered through some experimentation that Alistair helped us run with some Strangeloop customers.  Through the experiments, we were able to draw a direct link between web performance and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) of the business, getting us closer to the holy grail of showing, in business terms, why performance matters.  Alistair presented the data in a joint webinar with Strangeloop in October.

Next tuesday, December 8th, I’ll be revisiting the data and presenting them again at the Velocity Online Conference, which is O’Reilly’s online version of the Velocity Conference.   The online version is also co-chaired by Steve Souders and Jesse Robbins, will run for half the day, and includes some pretty interesting presentations on topics that range from Varnish to SPDY to Steve’s impressive Browserscope initiative.  I’m excited to be a part of it and am looking forward to playing Alistair’s proxy in presenting the data, not to mention listening in on the other presentations.

I encourage all to attend.  And knowing how much Bitcurrent’s inquisitive readers will surely be interested in the event, I got us a bit of a discount too.  Here are all the pertinent details:

• URL: http://en.oreilly.com/velocityfall09
• Cost: $149 (25% off with discount code “velfall09pcd”)
• When: Tuesday, December 8th, 9am-12:40pm PT

Hope to see you there.

While at Velocity in San Jose, Alistair gave a short presentation on “Why elasticity, performance, and analytics will change how Webops is judged“. [PDF here]

I wish I could be at Structure09 today, but the next best thing is their video feed. Kudos to Om and the team for pulling together a fantastic lineup of speakers and panels. Also, if you missed some of the content at Velocity, you can check out a number of recorded sessions on Blip.tv.

Here, through the magic of the Intertubes, is the Structure feed. You should also check out their coverage of the event today on Twitter.

Finally finished the last presentation of this trip, starting with clouds at Enterprise 2.0, then picking on Community Gardeners, then the cloud equation, and now a quick overview of what web operators can glean from the rest of the company.

I got to Velocity this morning, and Jesse asked me if I wanted to get on stage for five minutes to talk before lunch. Given that I’m doing a session in the afternoon called What The Rest Of Your Company Knows About Your Website, I figured I should make something new.

One of the things that’s abundantly clear — echoed in presentations from Shopzilla, Google, and many other excellent speakers — is that performance matters. It affects your conversion rates; it even changes your Search Engine Marketing ranking (which was news to me.)

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I’m at Velocity in San Jose. Just got in last night, and I wish I could have been here for the whole thing. It’s no exaggeration to say that this is the biggest congregation of people who make the Internet work, in one place, for one subject. Jesse Robbins and Steve Souders, along with O’Reilly, get an amazing group of people together. Even the chat in the speaker room this morning was skimming the top of my forehead.

It actually feels like cloud computing and web monitoring are converging very quickly. It’s increasingly obvious that performance, user experience, and revenues are inextricably linked. Microsoft and Google covered this in a joint presentation yesterday, and by now, you’vep probably heard about the number of results Google shows. They tested the number of results that should be shown on the first results page, then tested them.

As Google’s VP of products Marissa Mayer points out, users wanted 30 results. But when they turned this on, they saw a 25% drop in searches on the site!

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