Yarr, eh? – Monday July 6th Roundup

Canada Day, and The Fourth of July. Being a half American half Canadian that makes this a pretty big weekend. Or it would if I was at all patriotic. Oh well. At least the rest of the company was out celebrating.

This week we have some unique jpeg optimization techniques, advanced segmentation in GA, designing to social systems, and The Pirate Party of Canada!

Oh, and as one more reminder, send me your stories. You can tweet them to me at @ordinarychap, start a discussion at our facebook page or email me directly

• We start the roundup with BPWrap, a source of somewhat interesting internet marketing related jibber-jabber. This (last) week they decided to do a piece on a couple of SEO mistakes that large companies make. What I find funny is that this is all they mention. These two are, in my experience, pretty common amidst large organizations, and even more common is actually link sales from fairly large sites that are sure of their page rank.
• On an (always) more intellectual note we have the HuoMah, with Real-time search engines; should SEOs care? The man with two first names himself comments on the fact that ‘real-time” search engines arent so real-time, that there are some major problems with the very notion of “real-time search”, including performing a few searches through various “real-time search engines” to watch results. The results were, as expected, somewhat poor. Go, David, its nice to see other people taking reasoned looks at such hyped topics.

• I love Smashing Magazine. Last week they posted some clever JPEG optimization techniques that blew me away. Even if you aren’t a designer or what have you this kind of stuff gives an interesting look into how optimization techniques work.
• Also more nettuts, this time some CSS fundementals for dealing with containers and children.

• From ClickEquations, part two of Avinash Revisited, giving more insight into how to look at numbers.
• Econsultancy has some cool advanced segmentation schemes in “pattern recognition with Google Analytics”.
• Finally, just to make you feel impotent here are May’s top ten online retailers by conversion rate. Again, this isn’t that meaningful as a metric as it’s sometimes made out to be (pretty sure Amazon.com outsells most of these people, despite a smaller conversion rate) but its neat to see, and to compare with your own site.

• Only one today, and thats tools of engagement the new practice of usercentered design by robert fabricant. Fabricant makes one of the greatest claims I’ve heard in the last while: that in order to affect any real change we need to design to social systems, not individual needs.

• I hadn’t realized Postini was owned by Google, though in retrospect I guess that explains why we use it. Cnet takes a look at how Google sorts spam, and takes a look at Postini’s systems. As I mentioned we use Postini, and actually, I’ve found it’s pretty darn impressive when it comes to blocking the potentially spammy email.
• And finally, I may have a party that represents my view in Canadian politics: The Pirate Party is coming to Canada. With recent talk about the Canadian government mandating ISP’s to enforce Canadian content regulations on Canadian surfers, there hasn’t been a better time for a “free information” party.