Monday December 15th Roundup

It’s Monday again, and the snow is actually falling on the trees. What the….

This week we have The Wall Street Journal talking about Web marketing, Yahoo’s new microformat searches, Eric A. Meyers on CSS3, and Googles additions to web toolkit.

• Last week the Wall Street Journal, of all things, had an article on marketing in a Web2.0 world. While I make no secret of my detest for the term Web 2.0 (Can some one tell me why we still use this term?), I can’t actually complain too much in this circumstance, because… well… its actually a pretty spot on article. Among their advice to marketers: “Don’t just talk at consumers — work with them throughout the marketing process”; “Give consumers a reason to participate.”; “Don’t control, let it go”.
• Yahoo! Developer Network Blog is reporting that Yahoo has added a load of new microformats to searchmonkey. You can now search address, geocode, and tag microformats. They’ve also added extra namespace to ID’s. Being unimaginative, their examples included geolocated searches for santa clara, when it’s obvious what they should have been searching for.
• Some of you may remember my first article for this blog, which was a guide to search rank analysis. Well, SearchEngineJournal has one upped me with a similar article, but for a more experienced audience, and far, far more succinct. Their tools are pretty good (I’ve used them all) and their advice is spot on. They do not, however, compare Google to the Mafia, and for that I have to take points off.

• Last week Six Revisions. had an interview with author Eric A. Meyer on CSS3. Eric talks about advanced selectors (my most looked forward addition to CSS), the “modularization” of CSS3, and more.
• The Yahoo! User Interface Blog is (well, was) talking about their new tool: YUI Doc. This tool “generates API documentation for Javascript code”. It’s always nice to see new efforts to promote the documentation of code.
• The Google Code Blog has a nice bit of info on the new Google Visualization API Library for Google Web Toolkit, which is now available. It allows people to implement features such as visualization and reporting in Google Web Toolkit applications. How long until we see piles of money become the hamster dance of the business world?

• Another from Search Engine People, this time on “life after ranking”. The article discusses the ways in which analytics are going to play a more important role in standard SEO practices as search results diversify. He argues that the traditional SERP is dying because of personalization (like SearchWiki), localization, mobile search, and the Long Tail, and it’s going to be important to analyze your site, so as to be able to gather data on search traffic, quality and conversions. As massive supporters of analytics, we could not agree more.

• NETTUTS has an article ten principles of the UI design masters.
• A topic of much contention within our office, 456 Berea Street has an article on the use of target=”_blank” in anchors and some CSS to reveal them to users. Part of the problem, they argue, is the lack of identification of a link as opening in a new window, and thus their intrusiveness. While their directions are meant for users applying style sheets through browsers, this would work great for web developers focusing on usability.

• And our last link of the week is, once again, from Google. In fact, it’s increase in coverage of Google Street View . Their before and after pictures are pretty amazing, considering a mere year between the two. I swear I even saw one of the panorama cars driving around Vancouver the other day.