Sidewiki, Chromeframe, and more Google Jargon – Monday Sept 28th Roundup

Big roundup today. What, 12 stories? But then its been a pretty big week in tech news, with two releases from Google, and the follow through from last weeks conferences.

This week we have advice on selecting analytics tools, motion charts, lots of sidewiki, chrome frame, and all sorts of marketing research.

• We start the week off with the ever popular SEOMoz (what does the Moz stand for anyhow?) and their examination of their top 150 inlinked posts. “Why look at a meta list?” You ask. Because they confirm a point I’ve always believed but that the community in general has disagreed with me over: lists dont work. At least, not always. In SEOMoz’s 150 most linked posts only 38 (25%) were lists.”WHAT!?” You cry out, “but I thought my brilliant marketing tactic was infallible!”

  Well, obviously not. But look, that doesn’t mean they never work. Prediction 1: SEOMoz, as well has having a lot of low level readers, have a LOT of high level readers. That is, people who know quite a bit about SEO and have fairly powerful followings of their own. When SEOMoz makes a list post many of these people will ignore it, because they have no need of aggregate information that they likely already know. When they make a valuable non-list post, giving new perspective or insight into SEO, then these people like it, and link to it. Maybe they even share it over twitter or some other social media resource. Suddenly the SEOMoz membership is joined by the membership of each of those major followers, and the links pour in.

  Just you wait though, before the day is out some smart ass with a floral name will come along with an alternate theory that, when tested, will turn out to be true, proving once again that I don’t know what I’m talking about.

• Next up another heavy hitter, HuoMah (ok, tecfhnically its Tom Demers) with how to identify the best keywords for your niche. The research advice is good, but doesn’t seem to deal that well with long tail keywords. Still a good start.

• You’ve probably heard about this already, but Chromeframe has been released. What is Chrome frame? Well it seems that Google’s solution to the fact that pages don’t always render properly in Internet Explorer was to release a plug in for IE that lets it render pages with Chromes web-kit based rendering engine. With this plugin, when you come across a page tagged withit will switch IE over to the web-kit renderer, and allow the page to both render faster and properly. I like Google’s thinking here: the solution to the problem of IE isn’t to outplace it, but to make it work better using your own technology, opening up users to conversion further down the way.
• This is cool. Like seriously, SERIOUSLY cool. These guys have used javascript to create a realtime content aware image resizing webapp. What does this mean? It moves objects in the image around so as to change the aspect ratio and composition of an image, instead of just squishing it. warning: you will need Firefox 3.5, though I suspect it might work with Chrome.

• What do you mean my data isn’t accurate? e-nor asks in an unusually common example of why analytics data can seem mucked up.
• Haven’t read these guys before today, but was impressed with this advice on selecting a web analytics tool. Pretty good stuff, though everyone should know my response: Buy Urchin. Buy it now! From Google themselves: falling in love with motion charts. I did this long ago thanks to a presentation by Hans Rosling.
• Another unknown (to me at least) China analytics (how keyword rich) has some advice on using regex to filter lists. I’m embarrassed to say that I didn’t know this (and I am sure our analytics guys are going to laugh at me for this admission).

• Are you sure your users are telling the truth? 90% of Everything gives a couple of hints on how to weed out liars.

• Should this be under marketing? Analytics? We posted something similar under usability last week. Anyhow, Jim Novo summarizes a paper titled Firm-Created Word-of-Mouth Communication: Evidence from a Field Test, which presents some interesting data, including that fans are not effective at word of mouth marketing as they tend to “preach to the choir”, and instead your less-loyal audience is the valuable group to capture. The question I have is whether effort/time to convert less-loyals changes their overall value. Guess I should pull up the paper and see…
• Everyone has been talking about Google sidewiki, and arguing whether it was good or bad. I see it as good overall, but that should be no surprise given how much we laud comments and the role of discourse to increase conversions. Some people disagree, and as Malcolm Coles points out, there has already been some Sidewiki abuse.
• While I see Sidewiki as good, I am conflicted in that I also see the Google toolbar as bad (ugh, you want my precious screen real estate?) and so I was overjoyed to find that you can read sidewiki without the Google toolbar. Cool.