Lies, damnable lies, and statistics 2 – Monday July 13th Roundup

Wow big week last week. Lots of work, plus our office had our Fifa 200x (I don’t really know which one it is) tournament. I made it to quarter finals before being absolutely trounced.

Lots of good stuff this week, including brave words on blackhat, more page segmentation, massive numbers of twitter statistics, online advertising numbers, and an updated Better Google Analytics plug-in for Firefox 3.5.

• We start the week with a post by some one with some serious SEO cahones: Ralph Tegtmeier aka. Fantomaster. Fantomaster specializes in cloaking and black hat SEO work, and has a guest post on Some Misconceptions Regarding Black Hat SEO. Most of it comes down to “it doesn’t hurt you unless you get caught”. Sure, same goes for cheating on your taxes. However, he does call out Google on a lot of their FUD and point out how the term “spam” has been twisted to serve Google’s goals. All in all worth a read, if only to marvel at how this guy seems to simply not care about the ramifications of openly proclaiming “come to me for blackhat!”
• Huo Mah is back with Page segmentation and link building aka. how to find prime link real estate. More of a “future proofing” strategy than anything else, but still the kind of theoretical and analytical content I’ve come to respect Huo Mah for.
• Last but definitely not least, some very cool Twitter statistics. Maybe a little older than I usually post in the roundup (this was posted back in June, guess I’m getting slow with old age), but definitely worth the attention. There’s more data here than I know what to do with, so I suggest simply checking it out.

• More goodies from Smashing Magazine: The CSS 3.0 cheat sheet. It is as the name implies, a printable cheat sheet to what’s changed with CSS 3.0.
• And once you have that you may want to take a look at nettuts walkthrough of building a page with HTML 5 and CSS3.

• One from us this week! The better GA plug-in has been updated for Firefox 3.5. Go get it.
• Would a week be complete without Avinash? No. Avinash’s Favourite PPC Analytics Tips.

• A little off the beaten path this week. While reading the web (as I do every Monday) I came across this little piece of brilliance: a well-designed begging sign. It’s functionally fantastic, communicates with intent, provides user feedback, and from the look of it, it works.
• And some new blood to our blog, a nice little piece on overlay box usability.

• Razorfish has completed Fluent, the Social Influence Marketing Report and it contains some cool information, even if it is completely over-designed. Includes such startling revelations as that people trust online video advertisements more than they trust online friends. I have to admit that I am wary to trust that factoid given that the study appears to just be the results of a poll (and, in the words of Howard Moskowitz “the mind knows not what the tongue desires”). Still, interesting though.