Urchin Segments, luxury brands, and stuff white people like – The Monday Sept 13th Roundup

Everyone is creating a Google Instant spinoff. First Youtube instant, then Google maps instant (which is awesome), then iTunes instant, and so on and so forth. Truthfully I’m still not 100% sold on Google Instant, so I’m not sure I want to see this become a trend…

This week we’ve got a plethora of posts, ranging from Urchin Advanced Segments to designing for luxury brands, to what white people like.

• We start the week with Search Engine Round Table, which has a quote from Jeremy Sussman on the Google Maps team stating outright  that Google Places does not use domain to determine place.
• Next up, Get Elastic recommends six ways to deal with profit loss from promo codes, including using promo codes to build your email list, and designing to discourage promo code usage (ooh, dirty).

• We’ve talked about Google’s use of hardware acceleration for rendering webpages in Chrome, but Microsoft has gone all out, explaininghow IE9 uses hardware acceleration to speed up all parts of the page rendering process. Very cool.
• Six Revisions has a “getting started” post on learning PHP, which is basically a guideline to beginning the development process, including creating a development environment and selecting an editor.

• Urchin 7 is out, and e-nor has a guide to using the new Urchin 7 advanced Segments.

• Over at Good Usability, David Hamill has a post discussing luxury brands, and how to design for them. It actually goes into a lot of detail about copywriting, including many bad examples of it.
• Six Revisions has a doozy of a post this week: Using power structure and Gestalt for Visual Hierarchy. In the course it gives advice on determining goals, developing sitemaps, and more.

• I love OKTrends, the blog of OK Cupid’s Christian Rudder. For those who aren’t familiar with it, it takes data from OKCupids 3.5M members and uses that as a means of drawing conclusions about the US populace at large. This month, it’s “The REAL Stuff White People Like”, breaking interests down by both ethnicity and religion. Pretty interesting stuff, and, as always, funny as hell.
• Finally Mashable has a collection of unofficial Google Instant services. These are amazing, such as Google maps instant (which feels incredibly CSI), and Google Images Instant (which isn’t exactly work safe, if you know what I mean…)