Google's supremacy in the search market has been a key aspect of a new report published by Nielsen. Employment websites are enjoying good year-by-year growth, as a natural consequence of the financial crisis.

There are also press reports talking about company executives lining up at churches and other places looking out for some free meals for their families, signs that the situation is getting from bad to worse in the US.

An interesting workshop took place, organised by the Google AdWords team and the Xenia conference organisation at a very nice venue in Athens' Crown Plaza Hotel.

The workshop begun with some very interesting figures showing the growth in the Travel sector in the middle of the international financial crisis. Russian based travel related searches went up something which shows that the travel industry in Europe (apart from Greece) is going well.

After a detailed review of Usability and to some extent Accessibility, there are a few important conclusions to note from what was presented at the Usability and Accessibility Days 2008 event.

An overall usability evaluation of websites and other information systems can prove beneficial to the end users. The same applies to usability methods being applied within all stages of the development cycle. It can be the key to the success of a website.

A very interesting technology related event organised by the University of Athens and the Media Lab headed by professor Michalis Meimaris. A lot of website usability insight and techniques in the labs.

Sadly I had to miss the first seminar day (went at the opening ceremony), but all days that I was there had always something very interesting and pioneering to showcase from a web developer's point of view.

With great expectation we took part in the Open Coffee networking meeting at the Caravel Divani hotel in Athens with loads of interesting presentations including amongst others the country manager of Google Hellas, the Foinikas represenative, Panayiotis Vryonis and Stelios Kouloglou from "TV Sans Frontiers".

Loads of interesting insight from Panayiotis Vryonis about an old start up company of his with some great insight on what went wrong and things new companies need to be aware of.