SVG graphics, Analytics, and Edgerank – Monday July 26th Roundup

Quiet week for tech news last week. Lots of rumbling over the same few issues, some cool reforms in American copyright law, but nothing that relevant to us. Still some cool posts from around the net.

This week we’ve got Facebook’s ranking algorithm, SVG graphics, and more actionable analytics.

• We start the week off with details of Facebook’s Edgerank; it’s formula for suggesting content to users. Edgerank combines an “affinity score”, “weight score” and a “recency score” to determine what to show to each user. Interesting, but not the great reveal that Teach to Fish Digital claims. This is a loose and undefined series of variables multiplied, hardly a great reveal.
• SEORoundtable reports on a co-claim between Matt Cutts and John Mu, who admit that in cases of hacked sites and spam, Google may hand edit search results.

• SVG fascinates me. Inline, scalable, vector images? Yes please. Unfortunately there are some compatibility problems with SVG and Internet Explorer. Fortunately, as A List Apart points out, there’s a lightweight java-script library called Raphael which can help.
• SEO by the Sea looks at how Google may be estimating the number of users behind an IP address.

• LunaMetrics continues their series on Custom variables with “part III:slots“, which takes a look at some of the subtleties of custom variable attribution.
• Kaushik is back with more actionable tips to kick your data analysis up a notch. This time calling on analysts to dig deeper, ignore lonely metrics and more.

• Our friends over at Elastic Path have a guide to deciding whether you should be doing split testing or multivariate testing.
• Inspired Mag has a web designers guide to information architecture, talking about how to organize content.

• After Old Spice’s last brilliant ad campaign (having ‘The Man Your Man Could Smell Like’ answer questions form the internet) they now own the top 4 spots on adages viral video chart. Even better, their #1 outweighs the competition (in this case Dentyne Pure) by a factor of 28.
• Dan Ariely asks “who cheats more, Americans or your nation?” The results are kinda surprising.