Dealing with Duplicate Content, Analytics Insights, and So Much More… The Monday Dec 21 Roundup

What a week! Christmas is coming and I guess every company wants to get everything finished for Q4 so that they can go enjoy their holidays without worry.

This week we have social media completely reshaping music sales charts, more Google purchases, dealing with duplicate content, finding insights outside the box, the FTC doing its job, Facebook privacy issues… and so much more.

• We start the week with something that blew me away last week: Rage Against the Machine beat Joe McElderry (of X Factor) for the UK Christmas top spot. What do music charts have to do with internet marketing? The song that won was “Killing in the Name”, written in 1992, and it won due to a social media (specifically Facebook) push to prevent X Factor from taking the top christmas spot for the fifth year in a row. To make it even better, the song reached it through downloads alone.
• Feel like doing a little holiday testing? HuoMah wants volunteers to test Google’s new “logged out” personalized search.
• Last but not least, SEOMoz talks about on a topic that our “SEO Missed Opportunities” series touches on frequently: How to deal with duplicate content.

• In one not-so-fell swoop Google has bought AppJet and its product Etherpad and then released it as open-source. Etherpad, a collaborative text editing program, is being integrated into Google Wave (and likely Google Docs), and will likely replace their current collaborative word processing implementation.
• I can hardly believe it, but Firefox 3.5 is now the most used browser in the world. Well, according to Statcounter at least. It has taken a narrow lead over Internet Explorer 8, as IE7’s numbers have fallen drastically. Apparently pushes by services such as Youtube to eliminate non-html5 compliant browsers have been successful in kerning IE7’s popularity, and IE 8 has not been able to match Firefox 3.5’s growth. Expect to see Firefox’s numbers increase even more drastically as it is growing at a greater pace than IE8.That said, both IE’s together still outmatch Firefox by nearly 25%.

• Kaushik again, I swear I need to read his blog less often. This week he’s looking at how many analysts need to move beyond their top 10 list. In classic Avinash style he also lists a bunch of ways to do exactly that.I guess it’s pretty obvious why I read his blog so much…
• Kaizen analytics notes eConsultancy’s Online Measurement and Strategy Report (which costs money, so I’m not going to link to it) and its findings that technology was the last of the 11 barriers to effective online measurement. They go over why, and how to fix this in your company.

• I’ve been saying this for a while, but now there is evidence: “the fold” is a myth. Well, that’s not to say that the most effective place for content is not above the fold, it is, but people will definatly scroll down a page looking for more.

• The FTC is finally cracking down on “free trial” scams. These are offers where the seller gives a free trial, but if you don’t cancel it within a small time period they charge a full exhobrinant price to your credit card. Honestly I am blown away that they didn’t crack down on this sooner as it should bloody well be illegal.
• Watchdog group Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) has filed an FTC complaint against Facebook. Their claim is that Facebook’s new privacy options, prompting users to set their privacy settings more granularly, have resulted in more personal information being shared online. Hate to break it to you guys, but the reason for that may not be some insidious trickery by Facebook staff bent on making all of your information public, but rather that users (such as myself) have changed their settings to allow more of their information out into the public. Why would people do that? Because getting your information out is the entire point of Facebook. You want your information public because that’s how people will find you. Now granted there are a few things that you should leave private…