Monday March 16th Roundup

Lots of exciting stuff for this week: google is tracking users across sites with Adsense, creative ecommerce navigation, linguistic processing and growth as search and social clash, and interviews about the birth of the world wide web. Oh, and St. Patrick’s day on Tuesday. What a week.

• We begin this week with a decision by Google thats going to scare a lot of people: Google is tracking where you surf. Now now, I know, Google is very good when it comes to anonymity, and this will only work on AdSense pages (Adsense now has what percentage of the online advertising market now?). It isn’t as scary as some people will make it out to be. It also allows Google to better target advertisements towards viewers, such as putting people who read a lot of sports into the “sports enthusiast” interest category—to cite the AdSense blog. I can’t wait for the inevitable outcry as teen boys have to explain to their friends why their google ads are all Bratz Dolls.
• HuoMah delivers once again, this time providing a checklist for Geo-targeting your SEO efforts.
• Clickequations pointed me towards this one today. Hal Varian explaining how the AdWords Ad Auction works, and how CPC bid and quality score work in determining how much you have to spend for that spot. I’ve included it below:

• Not much here today, fortunately for me Nate Koechley (who may be this guy, but I don’t know) added the following video on Front End Engineering to Yahoo video (which looks suspiciously like youtube). The talk also reminds me of Google’s @Google presentations.

• As always Avinash Kaushik has something to say. Actually, today he has lots and lots and lots and lots and lots to say about getting at low hanging analytics fruit and how you can do some simple stuff to spruce up your websites conversions.

• A while back Michaels posted about how you should allow users of eCommerce sites to sort by meaningful criteria. The folks over at GetElastic agree, and have taken it a step further with 6 Creative Ideas for Filtered Navigation. I love the use of iconography in their first example, which perfectly illustrates (pardon the pun) how visual styles require visual references instead of relying on verbal absatraction.Maybe we should rephrase Michaels “just say it” to “Just maintain a coherent form of communication when expressing yourself within a single medium”…Nah.
• Uxmatters has an analysis of functional and disfunctional search page layouts, particularly in relation to the use of width. They say that search pages should maintain a fluid layout. I disagree: while fluidity great for screen scaling, once you start to get larger than 1024px (at least on a large screen, 800px at lower resolutions), line length creates reading fatigue (humanfactors research supports the use of medium line lengths), especially with the widescreen monitors we have today. This is why we really need max-width parameters. Or I could just resize my browser window to a comfortable width, I guess.

• OutofmyGord has one of those articles I love, combinbing linguistics, psychology, and the collision of search and social communication. Short, doesn’t say a lot, but it does give you something exciting to think about.
• Scientific American has an interview with Mark Fischetti on the birth of the world wide web. One of my favorite bits was the following:
  

  I love to see that not only was the notion of content generation and viewing the web so intertwined, but that my bitching about the notion of Web2.0 as something “new” is backed up by Tim Berners-Lee himself.