It all started this week with Rupert Murdock, everyone’s favourite media mogul/crochety old man, and his decisions to pull News Corp. info out of the Google index, and his call to other news companies to do the same. The internet has been in an uproar about anti-competitive practices, legal issues. Whether it’s actually illegal or not (I am NOT a lawyer), it’s still an awfully dirty move and bound to blow up in News Corps face. So this week we have Mashable and 90% of everything on News Corps de-Googling, a great primer to usability, and more…
Internet Marketing and SEO
- Following on the tail of Murdoch’s statements comes Out of my Gord with Aligned Intent: A Different Ad Engagement Metric, in which he argues that engagement is shifting at a fundamental level, and that this bodes poorly for Murdoch.
- SEO Moz has a post on an old favourite of the SEO department: Xenu Link Sleuth. In this post they take you through how to use Xenu for more than just broken links.
Technology
- Ever wanted to know more about regular expressions (for instance, when using Notepad++)? Nettuts has a complete tutorial on regular expressions.
Web Analytics
- Kaushik is back! This time talking about analyzing your Twitter data.
- Even more on Avinash, talk about a media blitz this week (he was everywhere) Rapid Fire Web Analytics Q and A with Avinash and Nick
Web Usability
- Speckboy has an intro to web usability, which really just links to an absurd amount of data on usability. All in all a treasure
- 90 Percent of Everything has taken a page from Michael Stralker’s book, and then turned it on its head: the Romero and Juliet effect and how it applies to design. Unlike Michael, who applies these premises to design itself, 90 Percent of Everything applies it to the work process to show how designers can get caught up in their own design, and how that can affect their work.
Miscellaneous links of the week:
- The story that started it all, Mudock (doesn’t that name just sound evil? Mudock, Malock, Mordor, Murlock, it has all the right letters to sound evil) has made it his mission to go after Google, withdrawing all News Corp content from Google and wants others to follow suit. I, for one, can’t wait to see more media conglomerates do this and fall to pieces.
- The Bountii blog has pointed out a few problems with Bing negative cash back before, to the ire of Microsoft, and they’re at it again with “negative” Bing cashback which would show higher prices through Bing than you’d normally get on the store. Apparently this is an “isolated instance” and Microsoft “work[s] with the merchant to correct the issue immediately”. Well here is my challenge to our readers: let’s give Microsoft a hand and find more instances of negative cashback.
