Monday Janurary 26th Roundup

The excitement of last week has subsided so much that everyone seems to be, once again, talking about the weather.

Biggest news this week is the rumor of Googles new GDrive, and Monty Pythons remarkable 23,000% increase in sales on Amazon.com thanks to their youtube campaign. Also we have reasons to care about social networking, more cold fusion how-to’s, and more of me ranting about communicatory design.

• In the spirit of our upcoming newsletter (don’t forget to sign up for it) we start the week off with a discussion of the importance of vertical-specific expertise in PPC.
• SearchEngineLand has a guide to setting SEO efforts on large websites. They recommend programmatic optimization using a three step process of formulas, manual review, and implementation of long tail strategies, and despite over referencing Gladwells Blink, the suggestions are pretty good.
• Huo Mah, which I am starting to rely on for the Monday Roundup far too much, asked last week why we should care about social networking. He applies the Maslow hierarchy (which we’ve seen before) to explain how motivations play into social networks, and hopefully how you can use these to better interact and analyze them.edit: A note from the comments that this post is guest written by one James Morris, who just happens to have the best blog url on the planet: http://jmorris.name/, and who is now going into my RSS feed.

• Last week it was jQuery 1.3, this week we have a Nettuts tutorial on how to create custom JQuery Accordions. No, not the type that produce music.
• Aliaspooryorik, last week, discussed methods for accessing the session scope from CFC’s.

• ClickEquations, last week, looked at revenue attribution and how they managed to calculate these for ClickEquations itself. A very cool read for those struggling with these same problems.

• Good Usability, who I am really starting to warm up to, has hit on one of my major usability pet peeves: breaking the back button. Nothing frustrates me more than hitting back and realizing it has taken be back to the start of the page, all of my work filling out forms undone, all of my navigation reset to the start. If I wanted that kind of punishment I’d go play Nethack.
• Usability Post has a fun little article on how visual feedback makes wait times seem shorter. Not that informative, but a nice example of communicatory design at its most basic. Beach balls, loading bars, etc. all tell the user that the load is happening (albeit often poorly), they keep the user updated on what is going on, and as such placate the users desire for information. After all, if you’re at a screen you’re there for information/engagement and when something stops communicating/engaging with you you get bored and or frustrated. This is also why SimCity/TheSims/Spore’s loading screen design is so brilliant, it doesn’t matter that articulating splines doesn’t make any sense, its that the screen is feeding you little bits of absurdity disguised as reasonable behavior, like joking small talk, while you wait for it to load.

• tgDaily is spreading rumors about the Google drive. The tech, they claim, will let people mirror their hard drives and access them from anywhere. Christian Zibreg knows all this, apparently, because he has a psychic link into the Google Brain. Still, cool if its true, though I can see my ISP freaking out as I upload 500gb that month.
• I love being right. Gizmodo is reporting that after putting their clips on youtube with a download link next to them Monty Python has seen a 230x increase in DVD sales. I don’t know why its taken people this long to realize that just because people can see their favorite clips online doesn’t mean that they aren’t going to buy the product. Now if only we can convince the music industry of this…