Does Google Website Optimizer Work On Large Sites?

You bet it does! With a resounding yes, we're proud to give a shout out to our sibling product, Google Website Optimizer, which was used successfully to run a huge, and we mean huuuuuuge, multivariate test on the YouTube homepage. Take a look at what happened on the YouTube blog. Over 1000 different recipes were tested on all US homepage visits, with great results - the new page performed 15% better than the original page.

The YouTube blog post is fascinating reading, showing screenshots of the different variables on the homepage that were tested. And for those of you working on high traffic, enterprise-level sites, you know that making small, proven improvements - thereby moving the needle by small percentages - can mean huge wins for your bottom line. It's a must-read showing the practicality of multivariate testing.

Strangers gather on Web to make collective art

One of the Web's basic tenets is that small contributions from lots of people can amount to something powerful in the aggregate.
Now, a growing group of writers, musicians, visual artists and videographers is turning this Wikipedia-era philosophy into online collaborative art.

Twitter users are banding together to write an opera for London's Royal Opera House. Bands like My Morning Jacket and Sour, out of Japan, are turning to fans to help film their music videos. Programmers are pulling quotes from online social networks to make automated poems.

More than 50,000 animators are divvying up work on an upcoming animated film called "Live Music," and amateur videographers are re-filming "Star Wars" in 15-second bites.

This crowd-sourced creativity online is putting a new twist on traditional ideas of artistic ownership, online communication and art production.

"What's exciting is that it's being tested out by a lot of people who have access to [the technology]," said Mary Jane Jacob, executive director of exhibitions at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. "I think that we're in a great communal workshop."

In recent months, the collaborative projects have been showing the professionalism it takes to get noticed amid the clutter of content on the Internet, said Ze Frank, an online personality who orchestrated several early online art projects. Sign up for a CNN art project

Frank said people have been making collaborative online art "since the beginning of the Web." But much of it wasn't worth looking at.

Some collaborative books proved to be too much work for even herds of people to tackle. Efforts to create massive drawings with thousands of contributors sometimes ended up looking like random scribbles, for example.