Monday February 23rd Roundup

We have a strange one for you guys this week: a Monday Roundup completely lacking in articles on SEO. How very strange.

What we do have, on the other hand, is Avinash Kaushik on ‘not useful’ KPI’s, common usability errors made in the name of usability, Googles 1000’s machines per query, and Microsofts stolen phone prototype.

• We start off with blogstorm, and their discussion of online PR. No folks, not page rank, not press releases, but public relations (you know, that little phrase that Bernays admits to have used because ‘propaganda’ had too much of a national socialist party connotation). They argue that a lot of what we do as social media marketing can be more accurately considered PR, and set out a few steps on this process. Sure, this might just seem like an exercise in semantics, but it illustrates that shift in internet marketing from ‘SEO’ towards standard marketing.
• Clickequations has something similar, a task we’ve probably all done in one way time or another, but they have given a name to it: the Detweet. This consists of simply passing a post of someone else with a mark of disapproval. I’m sure that will be perfectly understood by all those people who don’t read clickequations and don’t understand what they mean by detweet, and there’s no way they could ever take your passing on another’s tweet as, say, a sign of approval…Me, I like to just call the original poster an idiot and then take it to another medium.

• No roundup would be complete without a nettuts article or two. Lets make it two. We have:A great primer on writing clean CSS code. The best part is the guy in the comments who announces that he writes all of his CSS code in one line. *shudder*

  And a primer on Javascript and the Document Object Model. Its super easy to understand, in nettuts fashion, and great for the javascript newbies out there.

• As always, Avinash Kaushik has something interesting to say about analytics, this time discussing four ‘not’ useful KPI measurement techniques. As always it’s a great read, detailing how people can get caught up on averages, percentages, ratios, and compound metrics.
• To complement Avinash, grockdotcom(dot)com has an article on what they term buying stage schizophrenia, or rather “when our selling process doesn’t jive with the visitor’s buying process.”

• Erova hit’s on some great usability errors with 5 Usability Mistakes Designers Make in the Name of Usability. At number one? Gratuitous keyboard shortcuts. They also mention poor filters, using Nikes online store as an example. We’ve noted this problem before too…
• Spoonfed does things a little differently, instead of auditing what’s wrong with a website they decided to look at apple.com and point out what is right. Sure, they do a lot right. But why is it so god damned hard to find a download link for iPod software updates? You know, in case iTunes is erroring out trying to download your update through iTunes, as it was for me a few days ago. (click the images)Quick search:
  

  Full search:
  

  And just when you’ve found it in the iPod touch section of the support page you click what should be a download link and…
  

• Geeking with Greg interviewed Jeff Dean at WSDM 2009. The interview has lots of juicy info on Google’s hardware, including that they need 1000 machines for each query. Ouch.
• As if Bill Gate’s rant on web usability wasn’t enough to remind you of Microsoft’s various internal problems, now the existence of a iPhone competitor has been leaked because, well, the phone was stolen. Wow, just wow.