Ecommerce, cardsorting, and analyzing direct traffic – Monday Sept 20th Roundup

Is it already the third week of September? How on earth did this happen? It seems like last week I was complaining about how September was upon us and summer was over. Oh well.

This week is packed with content, including integrating HTML with camera’s for video conferencing online, analyzing direct traffic, sorting your ecommerce checkout, cardsorting, and more.

• We start the week with a couple of posts from Wolf-Howl. First up Gray himself on Integrated Versus Interrupted Advertising, discussing a change in The New York Times online advertising when browsing with an iPad.
• Next, five tips on how to use Facebook fans. The gist is essentially to post frequent offers and talk about company events, and try to build personal connections with your fans. Easier said than done.

• HTML 5 is cool. To make it even cooler, people are working on an element to allow you developers to call upon video cameras with it, enabling video conferencing.
• For the kids out there who have no sense of history Macworld has a history of MacOSX looking back to the old days (so, you know, 2000). Holy moly, I had forgotten that the Apple used to be in the center of the menu bar. Boy am I happy they fixed that.

• Kaushik brings attention, this week, to a segment of traffic that we always forget about: direct traffic. We don’t do a lot to attract direct traffic, seeing it largely as a “win” and leaving it at that, forgetting that they are a valuable segment to analyze. Some key pieces of info here, such as that mobile applications don’t send referrer urls, and as such if you’re getting traffic from, say, the NYTimes app, it’s all showing up as direct.
• Next up Huo Mah is getting all analyticsy with Rebekah May’s crash course on Google Analytics Filters.

• Linda over at GetElastic has the 10 (supposed) worst things that can happen at your checkout. I dunno, I think Armageddon might be worse.
• UXMatters has a guide to Cardsorting. Not a lot to say about this one, but its pretty comprehensive.

• Everyone is buying analytics firms. This week IBM announced that it’s going to acquire Netezza (yeah I don’t know who they are either).
• There is a war going on in the interwebs. A few weeks ago the Indian tech firm Aiplex started illegally DDoSing BitTorrent search engines and trackers. Not taking this kindly, 4chan organized a mass DDoS across Aiplex’s servers, and the MPAA which hired them. I think this illustrates something a lot more important than people seem to think. We make a big deal about China hacking Google accounts in order to track dissidents, but here we have open (and declared) warfare by anational figures. There’s your future of war.