Junk email, Keyword research, and the Apple design process – Monday August 10th Roundup

Little in the way of news up in Vancouver. The north-wests heatwave has passed (for now) and it seem’s like we’re well on our way into November. Everyone seems to be more excited than ever about the Olympics, and the disgusting levels of merchandization has started. Good time to be an internet marketer with a strong knowledge of ecommerce.

This week we have tips on how to keep your newsletter from hitting the junk box, new uses for keyword research, building charts from Google docs, the language of business, and Apples design process.

• After criticizing BPWrap last week, I want to start this week with a pretty good BPWrap article: Stop Your Email Newsletter Being Junk – A Case Study. This one covers what defines junk mail. The only thing I would fault it on is being a little short, as just when you’re getting really engaged sudden affiliate promotion and it’s over.
• Next up, Elastic Path with Beyond On Site SEO: Applications of Keyword Research. In this Linda Bustos takes you through alternative uses for keyword research, although in this case I might just refer to it as “research”…
• Finally, just to fulfill my metaquotient, Smashing has an all too true post on 10 harsh truths about blogging. I wonder if this is a re-post because its giving me some serious deja vu.

• One part SEO, one part technology… What can I say, Huo Mah’s guest author Terry Van Horne knows a lot. Context-Aware Query Classification. Quite frankly this post is downright fascinating, with a nice explanation of Microsoft’s Conditional Random Field (CRF) and contextual analysis technology, and soem great conjecture of how this applies to Google universal search.
• Not sure if this should be in tech or marketing, but most good things defy classification. Nettuts has a tutorial on building a web application that creates interactive flash charts from google spreadsheets
  . Waaaaaay too cool.
• …and Firefox 3.6 Alpha 1 is out.

• Looks like some one else is doing an all out guide to Google Analytics this time with stuff like tracking flash and flex.

• Another hard to classify post, uxmatters on the growing field of visual browsing.
• Normally when we think about usability we tend to think about reaction to imagry and placement, but grokdotcom takes it another way and talks about how we use language, and how that can affect user understanding and conversion.

• This ones a little old, but worth it. It’s an interview with Steve Jobs where they talk about Apples design process, including the admission that Apple doesn’t do market research. They design for themselves, not for their customers, with a group of 20 tightly knit top designers.
• Technologizer has a humorous look at mice that never made it, and how input devices can go wrong. Just looking at some of these make my wrist hurt, and others… well…