Monday March 9th Roundup

Vancouver has gone from a city with no seasons to a city where we get every season each week. After several days of warmth and sun, I walked to work amidst the snow today. And now its sunny again.

Our roundup is equally schizophrenic today, with statistics on direct mail, the Google sandbox, Google Analytics school, and CD rights.

• We start with emarketer, which is reporting that, for the first time since direct mail started being tracked, direct mail spend is decreasing. According to emarketer, the spend is shifting towards higher-value campaigns, and targeted marketing efforts. This is a great time to start thinking about targeted mailing, much as we’ve been talking about with our piece on permission based email marketing
• SEOmoz believes that the sandbox still exists. Honestly I thought that people were pretty much in agreement that it existed, at least in a limited fashion, and it surprises me that there’s still discussion on this.

• Nettuts says I can code faster than you. I can’t, of course, but I can see how the tasks the post it talking about could be immensely useful for coders, SEO’s, marketers, and the like.
• Aliasoiiryorik has a how to on ColdSpring arrays and structs. I didn’t know you could do that in CF, but then my knowledge of Coldfusion is about up there with my knowledge of the chemical composition of dark matter.

• This is the kind of stuff I love to see, GetElastic has a screencast of Hacking Google Analytics for Keyword Research.
• Perhaps even more exciting, Google themselves have started the Google Conversion University. The best part is that its free, all the way up to certification.

• We start with a topic we’ve touched on before, and which I believe Goodusability has too: the difference between usability and user experience. They see one as a subset of the other, but I’ll let you guess which (or you could just read the article, you know).
• Cre8pc has a fantastic starting checklist for building your website with usability in mind. Good advice, if basic.

• Two from econsultancy.com this week, first Ecommerce missing from retail reporting, which discusses how the standard analysis methods used to establish brick and mortar store success has a major gap in it: its analysis of eCommerce.
• Second, a strange decision in the world of MP3’s, a US court has ruled that digital music sales are like CD sales. I wonder how far the fair use crowd will be able to take this ruling in an attempt to preserve (or perhaps ‘return’) fair use rights.