Monday February 16th Roundup

Lots has been going on this week. We’ve got a new canonical link tag being accepted by all three major search engines, a cool new online text editor from mozilla, personal email campaigns, Zoomable User Interfaces, paper based information design, and a cool new script from our very own Erik Vold.

• Everyone already knows this, I’m sure, but Google Yahoo and Microsoft have all announced a Canonical URL tag. This will direct spiders to the “master” content page of a site, hopefully solving many duplicate content issues.
• On the other side of the internet marketing field Forrester has a wonderful reminder that email marketing can be personal. In fact, in their example, that of a European vacation rental company, it’s downright casual. They also show the benefits of personalization and working to your audience with a 20% repeat within three years (on vacation rentals!), 40-50% referral rate, a 3-4% CTR, and non-stop glowing reviews.

• Mozilla has released Bespin, an open sourced cloud based IDE. It requires a fairly modern browser (with support for the canvas tag). It also features a bit of the linguistic input structure that they’re pushing with Ubiquity and the (upcoming) ability to pull data from open sourced projects. There are some interesting implications for this.
• And because I feel some kind of need to post every jQuery update, Nettuts has an ‘intensive exploration’ of jQuery 1.3

• • The unfortunately named Grokdotcomdotcom has a set of articles they’re calling The Missing Google Analytics Manual. What is their first listed item? Our own Google Analytics Setup Checklist

• Avinash Kaushik‘s recent answers to people emailing him have covered a bunch of great topics, ranging from how to find bounce rate in SiteCatalyst (short answer: you dont), to things to check if you have sudden data drops.

• UXMatters has some great hints on designing no search results pages. Given the potential of these pages to drive people towards other, related, pages it astonishes me that people do not take greater advantage of these.
• Usability Post has a great article on zoomable user interfaces(ZUI’s). I’ve always seen zoomable interfaces as a part of the change that we’re going through from linguistic or command-based interfacing towards a function paradigm, which is why they don’t normally work that well with command-based input methods (say, a keyboard) but they work great when operating using usage-based interfacing (multitouch screen, or to a lesser extent a mouse). The article does give one fantastic example of a workable ZUI using mouse input; however, I still don’t think they’ve pulled it off as well as Supreme Commander.

• This is just too cool: information aesthetics held a paper-based visualization competition, the winner of which built a representation of daylight using a flower of paper ribbons. Though unintentional, I am sure, the perspective created by the shift in sizes also created a sense of closeness and distance, which is probably fairly to scale with the actual distance to the sun.
• Google has also released a new Social Web Toolbar.
• And finally our own Erik Vold has released his Exact Target Auto-complete Greasemonkey Script. It’s pretty simple really, you put in a few values and it lets you auto-log into exact target, a site notorious for not forcing you to log in over and over and over…