Social Search, Preroll ads and Facebook and China – Monday February 8th Roundup

The Olympics start this Friday, to a nice warm Vancouver February. With a week light on rain and heavy on spring temperatures, it looks like its going to be a gorgeous month. Well, unless you want stuff like snow and ice and all that “winter Olympics” stuff.

This week we have real time social search, tests on the best kind of video ad (and its a preroll ad, ugh), CSS3 tips and tricks, and Facebook in China.

• We start the week with Huo Mah and a discussion of whetherSEO’s should care about social search. Interestingly he distinguished between social search (or user generated quality scores–such as vote up, vote down,etc) and real time social search, or the “fire hose” of information that comes out of sites like Twitter.
• Pre-roll ads suck. They really suck. In fact, they suck so badly that a research project to find a greater method of video advertising was assembled and they found that… advanced pre-roll ads have the greatest ROI. D#$#$*&#@$&*. The Ad Selector model developed by Hulu took the lead here. Unsurprisingly, letting people select ads they’re more interested in resulted in higher click through.Now my question is: how did this impact the user experience?

• With CSS3 being supported in (most of) the newest set of browsers SixRevisions has covered 8 CSS tricks you should know. If you’ve been following CSS3 then you already know these, but if not they’re pretty cool. My only complaint is the inclusion of ::selection while leaving out round borders/objects.
• Another from SixRevisions, this time 15 resources found on Google Code. They include icon and button sets, code cleaning tools, footers, and more.

• Fresh off their hilarious mistakes with Apple history, the Harvard Business Blog releases a pretty good post on the problems with Vanity metrics. Oh a problem I know too well, as I look at our per post page views…
• It aint anything new, but ROI Revolution has a pretty good summary of Google Analytics custom variables, and how to use them.

• Numeric filters have usability problems like anything else. UXmatters has an especially dense piece on various numeric usability issues and how they solves them.
• Simplicity is hard. Forum one reminds us of this with 5 lessons in keeping your design simple.

• Coming on the tail end of the Google/China clash, and reports of profile abuse by Facebook employees, Facebook has apparently deleted the Facebook page of Hong Kong Opposition groups. Oh Facebook, when will you learn not to be douchebags?
• I don’t normally post the Tyee in the roundup, for the last while they’ve been running a series on “marker culture”, and this week its all hackers.