Friday Roundup 26th September 2008

Fancy some video fun this Friday? How about checking out Google’s mobile phone interface? Or passing the time with the FIFA 09 ad?

If that doesn’t tickle your fancy, we have some great web related posts this week. Graham Jones urges people to continue blogging, David Meerman Scott tells us that when your product itself has potential to go viral and create triggers to push it along, and Andrew Allen talks us through how to measure the effectiveness of your SEO using Google Analytics.

Have a great weekend.

When your product itself has potential to go viral, create triggers to push it along

by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott

I'm fascinated with Web-based products like Hotmail, Gmail, YouTube, and YouSendIt - products that people share with their friends, colleagues and family members. When you get an email from someone’s Gmail account or watch a YouTube video or someone sends a large file to you via YouSendIt, that's a trigger for you to potentially sign up and use the product too. These products sell themselves: no coercion required and "advertising campaigns" a waste of money. How cool is that? More...

Use Analytics to measure SEO effectiveness

by Andrew Allen of Winooski Office

Google Analytics is a free program which was based on the $500 per month Urchin Live web statistics program. None of our customers could afford this program. But when Google purchased Urchin, they offered their premium service to the world...for free.

While it does take some time to properly set up analytics, with basic HTML skills you could do it yourself. If not, it will take your web people about an hour to set it up right.

What analytics provides you as the site owner is insight into how web surfers are finding your site, what pages they are looking at, how long they spend on the site, what countries they are from, what screen resolution they are using, what internet speed they are using, what internet browser they are using, etc. More...

People don't decide what to do on your web site - it's all pre-determined

by Graham Jones of Internet Psychology

For several years psychologists have known that just before we make a decision to move a muscle, say to move that mouse you have in your hand, or to type on your keyboard, there is a burst of subconscious brain activity. What appears to be happening is that all the information our muscles need to make the right movements we want is being assembled in our brains without us having to think about it.

That's actually a very good thing. Imagine, walking down the road if you were consciously aware of all the brain activity needed to get those legs and feet moving...! You'd never have time to think, talk or take in the view....!

However, a new twist on this old bit of knowledge has recently been published by researchers from Berlin. More...

Google on Android - Sweet!

by si crowhurst of We Love Mobile

I’m actually quite excited by the new android phone that’s just about to come out in the states on T-Mobile. The video below from the google mobile blog shows how the phone has google apps like mail, maps, IM and calender built in, and how they all sync with your PC and integrate on the phone. Updates are pushed to the phone (no logging on, no constant connecting to the web) and what’s more I like the look of the interface and the seamless and intuitive way that information is shared accross apps and platforms. More...

Is your business prepared for the way your future workers will think?

by Graham Jones of Internet Psychology

Businesses are ill-prepared for what is going to happen to them in the next couple of years. Students currently at university and college are avid users of social networking sites. New research shows the dramatic increase in uptake of social networking by students.

The study reveals that six out of every ten college students use social networking sites on a daily basis. This is up almost double on the numbers just a couple of years ago.

To undergraduate students, social networking is now a way of life. More...

Blogging is dying - long live blogging

by Graham Jones of Internet Psychology

Blogs are fundamental to the Internet; without them Google would have little fresh content to index, other than brand new web sites. Existing web sites can help improve their indexing by Google (and other search engines) if they include a blog. The reason is simple. When we visit a search engine and look for something we expect to find the latest. What we hate is going back to search for something only to find the same set of results. We are creatures of "freshness".

The vast majority of web sites are not updated from the moment they are born. More...