Andrea Wiggins recently posted an excellent article on her blog on “Data-backed Personas,” in which she discusses using Google Analytics data as input to persona design. As someone who appreciates the relative confidence numbers provide, I found the article (and extensive related discussion, including on Jared Spool’s User Interface Engineering blog) to be [...]
Monthly Archives: August 2008
How can your landing page convert visitors that don’t care?
August 27, 2008 – 1:46 pm
Seth Godin posted a couple of thought-provoking blog posts recently about online ads: Ads are the new online tip jar and a follow-up, Beating the status quo.
What Godin proposes is, when you read a blog, “if you like what you’re reading, click an ad to say thanks.” If everybody engaged in this behavior, it would [...]
Secret Google Ranking Document Posted Online
August 26, 2008 – 7:42 pm
Most of my blog posts don’t get many hits. It’s not that surprising; I don’t really spend much time being thorough with the information I write about because I don’t have as much time as I’d like to write a post. I do try to be original, so I’m not repeating the same [...]
An unscientific case study of online curtain-shopping
August 25, 2008 – 5:26 pm
So, I had to buy some curtains last night. I thought I would buy them the old-fashioned way, by driving to a nearby store, but I discovered that the local store didn’t sell curtains in the dimensions I needed. I could get cafe curtains or long panels at the store, but nothing in between.
So, I [...]
Why is Flash hard on SEO?
August 22, 2008 – 12:39 pm
It’s pretty common knowledge now that Adobe has started an initiative to provide automated flash indexing for the major search engines. (Google describes its involvement here). As exciting as the idea is, the consensus in the SEO community is that the ability to truly index Flash content isn’t here yet, and won’t be for a [...]
The OS X One-size-fits-all Text Size
August 19, 2008 – 11:29 am
OS X has some fine accessibility features. For example, the ability to zoom in by holding down the control key and scrolling with the mouse is excellent. What it lacks is any way to increase the operating system’s text size.
OS X Universal Access Dialog
Sure, you can alter the size of icons and text on the [...]
How Information Scatter Informs Content
August 18, 2008 – 2:45 pm
Not too long ago, I centered a post around a diagram of the web from a network perspective, with components labeled. The point was to take a closer look at the structure of the internet, beyond the simple notion of billions of webpages connected by hyperlinks.
Network metrics like degree, betweenness, etc have also been [...]
The Subjective Web: Online Opinion Mining
August 15, 2008 – 3:35 pm
At the end of July, Microsoft Research held its 2008 Faculty Summit to survey the state of computing R & D, which this year included a social media summit. A major topic of conversation included the transition of the internet from a network of documents to a network of people.
As participant (host) and Microsoft Scientist [...]
Will Paid Search Boost John McCain’s Brand?
August 13, 2008 – 5:42 pm
It’s strange that we’ve started discussing branding, because there’s been a sudden boost in arguments that search results have a brand impact. This article from Search Engine Watch, for example implies that the paid search advertising executed by John McCain, who is currently spending enough to get four times as many paid search impressions as [...]
Stolen Analytics Code?
August 11, 2008 – 10:56 am
Has stealing other sites’ Google Analytics code snippet become a valid (albeit desperate) strategy to lure visitors to a website?
Last week, in glancing at the ‘Content Drilldown’ report in the Content Reports of the profile for our company website, I noticed not only the two top-level sites I expected to see, but also [...]
