Google's treatment gov/edu's, the science of SMM, and more… – The Monday Jan 18th Roundup

We are not going to talk about Google and China. I promise. Instead, this week, we have our usual mishmash from around the web, with a bit more of a focus on marketing theory, just because that’s the kinda mood I’m in. Included is: How Google treats gov/edu’s, the science of SMM, and more…

• We’ll start this week with a question I’ve always wondered about:how does Google treat links from social sites? Matt Cutts explains a few things that might surprise you, such as .gov and .edu domains don’t necessarily pass more value. In classic Cutts fashion he doesn’t [em]really[/em] answer the question, but the .gov/.edu line is pretty major. That said, there is still a good chance that .gov and .edu domains themselves carry a lot of trust/PR and thus are likely good links, it’s just that those three letters alone don’t mean jack to Google.
• Next up Cardinal Path and The Science of Social Media Marketing. Nothing we haven’t heard before, but still worth noting.

• Slightly old news, but Hexxeh has released Chrome Zero. If you ever wanted to check out ChromeOS, this is the time. The process for installing Hexxeh’s ISO onto a thumb drive using Hexxeh’s ISO is just slightly more difficult than scratching your head.
• Oooh, cross topics! Luna metrics has a post on HTML 5 and analytics.

• The boldly named Analytics 2.0 is talking about identifying site interactions, the key for optimizing.
• Easily the post of the week, Dan Siroker talks about how they used data (and analytics) to win the election.

• Usability counts doesn’t like tag clouds. I can’t blame them, as they don’t really seem to offer any kind of interesting information to a user visiting a site.
• Out of my Gord asks How Our Brains “Google”, and responds with eyetracking heatmaps. The actual topic is how people read Google results, which corresponds with the classic F shape. Then they dive into a lot of detail on how people look at stuff. The most interesting part, though, is how the inclusion of an image in the middle of the Google results changes the way people scan, turning from an “F” to an “E”. Very cool.

• Not sure I agree with SixRevisions here, but they list Five Ways to Guarantee Your Failure as a Web Professional. I know I’ve complained about the second point in more than once in more than one job, and it seems to be a result of companies being scared about their revenue.
• More Out of my Gord, saying “Who cares about what’s hot?”. Bingo! From describing marketing fads as digital candy to pointing out that Facebook isn’t necessarily functional for everyone, he argues that effective marketing relies on targeting, which relies on established patterns and sustained behaviors, which depend on things we find useful. Otherwise our audience will always just be “passing through” to the next thing.