Analytics maturity, Phono, and Blekko The Google Killer – The Monday Nov 1st Roundup

Ugh. Friday came and I got hit with a cold that put me down all weekend. $40 in costume supplies and three weeks of planning all for not. C’est la vie.

And this Monday the SEO’s are obviously still nursing their chocolate hangovers, since there’s not much SEO or Analytics content out. However, to make up for it there’s Phono, for making calls from your website, Blekko the Google Killer, and Avinash on Web Analytics Maturity.

• We start the week with Web Content Cafe and their post on how social media writing is different than web writing. What they actually mean, however, is how writing is different that writing for search engines…
• Geni recently made a large URL change, and decided to follow how Google spidered the update. The results were interesting, if a tad technical. Interestingly, Google immediately recognized the change.

• Today I came across Phono, a neat little bit of javascript that allows you to embed two way radio chat into your web page, and even connect into VOIP networks to call phones. Pretty rad.
• It seems that even the release of IE 9 isn’t helping Internet Explorer’s browser share. It’s still crumbling, falling to an all time low in September.

• Kaushik has a new post for the month, with “keys to web analytics maturity“, his attempt to create an analytics maturity model.
• Aaaaaand its a slow day in Analytics news, so here’s Kaushik on higher education websites and analytics.

• Gazehawk has taken issue with a ClickTale post. Specifically, they pick apart the claim that there is an 84-88% correlation between mouse movement and eye movement.
• Oh what the… About four months ago my blogophobic coworker Neal gave me a post on wire framing tools. It was a huge post, filled with lots of content and details, so much so that I thought we should try to get it posted on a major UX site (we dont seem to have that much of a UX audience). We were set to have it up last Tuesday, but it got delayed.Then this Monday I see Six Revisions post on Wireframing. Apparently great minds think alike. It’s so similar that I’m starting to wonder if I feel comfortable letting Neal’s post go up any more. Similar topics, a couple of the same images, at this point it would seem like we were plagiarising them… all that work down the tubes…

• The industry is a-buzz with news of “THE GOOGLE KILLER“, a search engine named Blekko. Blekko’s thing is that it uses a combination of Google’s Search Wiki and a Twitteresque character tag that allows you to sort by your own criteria, or the criteria of other users. It’s an interesting addition to search, but by no means a game changer. However, it does offer a HUGE suite of data and analytics tools to help with SEO, including information about every link and why it’s ranked the way it is (that’s going to cause gaming of the system). Also, it’s first entry for “slack” is the wikipedia entry on The Church of the SubGenius. That’s gotta mean something good.
• More Googlers are leaving to go to Facebook, and this time it’s Lars Rasmussen. Yes, the guy who brought us the ever awesome Google Maps, and the not-so-hot Google Wave, has bit the line and joined Facebook.