Monday April 20th Roundup

What? What happened to last weeks roundup? Well, Monday is a holiday and I was so absurdly busy with other projects that I decided “we’ll let it slide”. And what happens? Awesome stories come in, Just my luck.

Anyhow I’ve included a few here, such as Googles new search picker, and a video of the google server farms. Also we have surviving a twitterstorm, host level spam detection, problems with the “bounce” metric in the top content report, and more.

• Since I’ve recently been getting into Twitter, I’m going to start this week with Advertising Age on How to Weather a Twitterstorm. Really the article lists some basic rules of reputation management that can be applied on or offline.
• Next up emarketer with an interview with Bob Evans, on tips and tricks for people doing online marketing.
• Last, but by no means least, David over at Huo Mah has another one of those research and theory heavy posts that I always enjoy, this time on Host level spam detection. In this case HuoMah has pulled our a few patents on host level detection and analyzed their methods.

• AliasPoorYorik has a post this week Comparing ColdBox and Fusebox. Gives a nice overview of structural differences in the two frameworks.

• E-nor, which I only recently started reading, but am very impressed by, put out a great article on Problems with the Bounce Rate in the Top Content Report.
• Another “problems with analytics” post, this time from Kaushik: Standard Metrics Revisited: #6: Daily, Weekly, Monthly Unique Visitors. He gives a great run down on cookies, unique visitors, and how to the daily report is useless when looking at periods outside of a day.

• A strange one from UXmatters that I am warry to put under the usability banner: A Visual Approach to Competitive Reviews. Really this post is about performing, well, repetitive reviews (duh!) but its his manner of doing so that interests me, as it applies some interesting data display principles that remind me some what of Hans Rosling and his myths of the third world.
• Dr. Pete is better than Dr. Phil. But then leprosy is better than Dr. Phil, so… No, but seriously Petes walkthrough on “what is usability” is a decent definition of usability and may be nice for people trying to explain to clients why they should hire you to test their site. Now just to be totally ironic: for the video click here

Both of these links are a week old, but we didn’t have a roundup last week and frankly they are just too awesome to pass up.

• First off Google images now has a color picker option. I can not get over how awesome this is. Try typing in Tulip, then select the color ‘green’. You get green tulips. Green tulips! The designer in me is totally geeking out over this.
• Second up blogoscope has a video on the Google Data Center, including their impressive airflow management. Very cool.