Monday January 5th Roundup

Another short roundup this week. Most of our staff is away, and have been for the last five days, leaving us without much good input for the Monday roundup.

In this weeks roundup: manipulation of human irrationality, more CSS3, and Firefox increases in market share

• We start this week with one from SearchEngineLand, talking about using Twitter for links building. The premise is pretty simple, that using instant communication and micro-blogging you can respond to customer needs, which will, in turn, cause them to post about your or some such. Actually their scenario is kinda far fetched (what is the percentage of people who get good deals then go to blog about it?), but they approach a good point: low quality links can be of value. In their scenario our customer writes on a PR 0, next to no back link blog, which seems useless. They argue, however, that having a satisfied customer who recommends you to people they know, or who orders again is valuable. Not real SEOy eh? Well, even in other settings a low PR blog or page can have value provided it has potential for growth. I know several links I built early on through simple reciprocal trades that benefited them far more than my site, became high PR high value links once the domain aged and they earned a nice back link profile. A simple concept, but one that I find people forget in this field so inundated with scammers and blackhats looking for a quick SERP boost.
• And for the black… or at least Greyhats out there Brian Usssery has a list (I know, I know) of little known link opportunities. While I don’t recommend most of these (I foresee a lot of this losing any kind of link power when people start abusing them) this kind of thinking may actually lead to legitimate chances for link building (say, appropriate and well thought out contributions to sites like panoramio).
• Finally one of those theory heavy articles that I just love. Seomoz has a set (err… list…) of irrational human behaviors that you can leverage for internet marketing. Complete with enough stories and examples to make Malcolm Gladwell proud, this is one of those reads that can add to almost every area of marketing. I highly recommend it.

• NETTUTS is playing with CSS 3. A step by step guide to several new features, some of which seem very cool, and some of which incredibly lame (seriously, drop shadow? How ’bout a lensflare call while we’re at it.) It serves as a nice primer to how design is going to change once CSS is released (millions of drop shadows everywhere).
• Ghacks has an article on using standardizing variables to code fasterr. Good practices to use, even for us HTML/CSS guys.

• New to the round-up, Velvet Blues rants about annoying website design features. Their last one is my most hated, people who think that the holidays mean time to put snow, music, and other miscellaneous stuff onto their page. At least the snow animations have gotten lighter and better than the old “is my monitor dying?” static of the 90’s. They also mention blogs with too many social networking butto… oh…
• VSearchEngineLand is talking about internet shopping usabillity. This is such key stuff I am amazed people still muck it up. In their example they offer a site that didn’t even have a customer log-in or details on stock. My god, I would have presumed it was a scam at that point.

• • Last Week Google launched Google Product Ideas which has some complaining that Google is trying to outsource idea generation onto their customers. However, it seems to me that these are the same people who complain that Google Street View can see their cat in their window. Google farming the generation of ideas to users really isn’t that new though. You may know, if you know our company well, that our own Neal McGann won Googles Google’s design a feature award

back in November.

• Mozilla FireFox has reached to unexpected highs, rising in market share to 21% according to netapplications.com. I bet their methodology is still flawed, what with it being near impossible to get an accurate random sample online, but its interesting to see none the less.
• And finally one for the conspiracy bandwagon, Microsoft-watch is asking who leaked Windows 7? Suggesting that it was Microsoft itself. This is a tactic that’s often batted around, and many claim that companies like Microsoft and Adobe originally leaked their software in order to become standards.