Lot’s of news on the tech front this week, not the least of which being Google rolling out two new tags. I wonder what kind of effect these will have with scrapers. Lets say you include the tag somewhere in a post, and some one scrapes it. Normally a scrapper won’t take header data, will it? So basically this is great for allowing people who already are crediting you, but not much else.
Anyhow, beyond the attribution tags we’ve got the basics of CS3 transitions, Google Instant Preview counting as pageviews, and whether “I think” or “I feel” persuades people more.
Internet Marketing and SEO
- Google has implemented two new tags, targeted at integration with Google news. The first is Syndication-source which indicated the preferred URL for a syndicated article, allowing syndicators to denote which is an original source. The second, original-source, points to the source that first broke the story. The two might seem similar to me.
- Adage (and it’s retarded pay wall) have a story on Youtube’s new pre-roll ads. Google plans to implement a “skip ad” feature for Youtube videos. Following in the “adwords” style skipped ads will be be charged to advertisers.
Technology
- The Chromium blog has posted on conglomerating web app permission prompts. A nice usability touch, though there’s something I like about my web browser telling me each thing that an app is going to do to my system.
- A List Apart has a guide to those wacky CSS3 transitions that you keep hearing about, but have no idea how to use. The basics are surprisingly easy, though I agree with the author that they seem like they’d make more sense applied to the :hover or :focus state than on the base element.
Web Analytics
- Linda over at GetElastic has a list of 6 common ecommerce problems that can be solved with Google Analytics. These include missing transactions, inflated e-commerce revenue, and more.
- People at the Google Analytics forum are reporting that the new Google Instant Previews (that happen when you hover over a result in Google) are being counted as Page views in GA. This actually makes sense (as they are viewing your content) but may confuse some people.
User Experience
- More from Get Elastic, this time on applying consumer research and personas to your campaigns.
- Psyblog is back with whether “I think” or “I feel” is more persuasive. The results are somewhat predictable: it depends on what the person being persuaded uses. If they use more cognitive language, think did better. More emotive language, feel did better. To be honest, I’m not sure if these people have taken into account that people are much more likely to be persuaded if they “feel” (or is that “think”?) that the person persuading them is like them.
Miscellaneous links of the week:
- Stuck for alternate promotional options? Wolf-howl has a bunch of ways to build publicity (and from that links) about your products/brand.
- Dan Ariely has a post on why we punish managers for things beyond their control. He argues that often competent people are being fired because of something they couldn’t have taken action to avoid, turning potentially valuable people away.
