Monday December 1st Roundup

Its Monday roundup time again. Of note this week is the announcement of the shutting down of Alexa Web Search, NASA’s Extra-Terrestrial web protocols, and the head of the FCC announcing that he wants a free publicly owned wireless network for the US. Come on Canada, if there has ever been a time to follow in the US’s footsteps.

• First off MarketingProfs has an interesting article on marketing in a recession. A decent article despite its overuse of the “Web 2.0” meme. It does offer some good tips on the type of technologies that are going to pull through.
• TechCrunch is reporting that Amazon is shutting down Alexa search. Now the question is: if they had not announced it, would anyone have noticed?
• The ever popular seomoz.org is talking about how to get links from your linkbait. Bonus link building techniques presentation from SMX London included.

• W3C has added experimental HTML5 validation support to their HTML evaluator, arguing that this kind of experimental approach allows them to test and tune HTML 5 development. An interesting step and I have to admit it will be fun to see where this goes.
• Internetnews, this week, decided it was time to talk about how business needs to adopt “service oriented architecture” principles, whereby applications designed to allow ‘mash-ups’ that can be arranged together depending on the need. Sounds very Star Trek.

• Another from Omniture. This time they are taking about how analytics optimization strategies require business optimization. Specifically they are talking about how company organization and goals lend themselves to successful optimization strategies. A little bit obvious, but a good reminder nonetheless.
• ROI Revolution has a nice bit of code for Google Analytics that allows you to integrate Google Web Optimizer an Google Analytics. Its been out for a while, but the big news is that Google themselves are ‘unofficially’ smoothing the integration process.

• MarketingProfs has a nice blueprint for the early stages of web development and design. Honestly this should have gone under development, but so much of this is so fundamental for good usability and often gets applied after the fact when people hire companies like ours to spice of their sites. I suppose this is also a good time to pimp our Hippo Tango design philosophy.

• The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Kevin Martin, the outgoing FCC Chairman, is pushing for a free wireless internet service for all Americans. He also specifically notes that it will be pornography free, though I’m not sure how they will enforce that without turning it into some kind of AOL walled garden. I’m sure this is already scaring the pants off the telecom industry, what with the widespread use of iPhones and PDAs and the prevalence of VOIP software.
• And one more here just because this is too cool. According to Internet News NASA is testing a network layer technology that can withstand space communication. They’ve named it Disruption Tolerant Networking, and according to the article it works by sending and storing data across router systems. Apparently standard packet delivery is cumbersome over extra-terrestrial distances. Who’da thought?.

That’s it for this week. If you have any stories for next week, submit them in the comment section.