Link Buying, Data Segmentation, and the Streisand Effect – Monday Feb 7th Roundup

This week has been on fire with talk about Bing ripping off Google’s search results, and whether this is a good or a bad thing. It’s an interesting topic for me, since I’ve always been critical of our ideology of “original work”, and supportive of people combining others work to produce something greater.

On the other hand, what MS did was pretty blatant.

But we’re going to ignore that for now and focus on what people aren’t talking about, including link buying, data segmentation, and the Streisand Effect.

• We start the week with GetElastic and using Facebook Connect (FBC) with ecommerce. They explain some of the ways that FBC can be used to enhance your store experience. However, while they do touch on Facebook’s spotty reputation as far as privacy goes, they don’t talk about the growing anti-connect sentiment that is growing online, including stuff like browser plugins to block it.
• Bruce Clay ruffled some feathers claiming that no matter what you do, buying links is going to bite you in the ass.

• Not a whole lot here today, just some questions for the industry on HTML 5 and web video.

• We start our analytics section off with something a little unusual. Instead of talking specifically about a web analytics technology, we’ve got a broader piece on segmentation research, including multiple ways in which you can segment data.
• Six revisions continues this trend with ways to look at users quantitatively, and gauge engagement.

• In one of the cooler copywriting articles of the year, 90 Percent of Everything talks about black hat copywriting, and how one example, creditexpert, uses the all too familiar inverse pyramid approach to copywriting to construct a rhetorical method that hides their intents, while still stating them. Very cool.
• UXMatters asks “why don’t usability problems get fixed?” Citing technical limitations, organizational culture, lack of resources, communication issues, and more.

• Dan Ariely writes about how project cancellations can cause serious motivational issues, and how to avoid them. Good ideas, as always, but I can’t help but think that they would, at best, cushion the problem.
• Have you ever heard of the Streisand Effect? You have now.