A combination of Easter holidays and April Fools day has left us at a loss for good news this week. But we've still got native Flash support for chrome, the furture of search, and optimizing for the iPad.

• We start the week with Social Media Today's 5 Steps to Evaluating Social Media ROI.
• Out of my Gord has an article on how he thinks that the use of search is going to change in the coming years. He says that he see's search as a utility instead of a destination. I don't know, isn't that what everyone said about search originally?

• The Chrome blog has announced that Chrome is getting native support for Flash. This has got to be some kind of response to Apple's recent dig at Flash. 

• With the iPad out in two days Omniture is using analytics to figure out if Mobile-optimized Experiences Improve Engagement on "Super" Phones and Tablets like the iPad.

• A List Apart has a wonderful post on whether FAQ's are a functional means of improving usability. The title is great too: Infrequently Asked Questions of FAQs.
• HumanFactors talks about a pretty cool technology feature available to android phones: "smart" keyboards that expand keys based on what it thinks the next letter is going to be. Potentially very cool, but also potentially frustrating.

• Apparently lawmakers are now urging the FTC to investigate Google Buzz over privacy concerns. Isn't this kinda beating a dead horse at this point?
• New Zealand has rejected software patents, declaring "a computer program is not a patentable invention".

Creating a usable and persuasive website takes self discipline. Too often, we feel that if a potential customer might want to see or do something on our website, we must include it.

Those with technical backgrounds are particularly likely to struggle with this. Being highly security-minded, they are trained to design for possibilities. "If something can happen, we must plan for it."

Usability folk must think differently. We should plan for probabilities, not possibilities. The reason is simple: a website designed to accommodate every conceivable user — and every conceivable task or need — will turn out to be a cluttered mess, completely lacking in focus. It won't be usable or persuasive to anyone.

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At a certain point, while drawing up a SEO strategy for international multilingual sites, decisions have to be made about how to structure the whole thing: domains or directories by country/language, content localization, link building multi-country strategy and so on.

Measuring the success for every country independently is not so hard but the Internet has no geographical barriers and traffic from several countries, using many languages, can mix unexpectedly. Web Analytics to the rescue.

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Today I was reading a white paper on a collaborative study by Psychster Inc. and Allrecipes.com that reminded me of just why I like the kind of easy testing you get with tools such as GA and GWO. This study asked which ad types are more effective: banner ads, newsletters, corporate profiles with fans and logos, corporate profiles without fans or logos, get widgets, give widgets, and sponsored content. To answer this question they formulated a study involving respondents from Facebook and Allrecipes.com. While the test was web based, it was modeled after a pretty standard focus group test: you site a group of people down, make them interact with something, then ask opinions. In this case they took 478 people from Allrecipes and 681 from Facebook, showed them a narrated video of some one interacting with an ad mock-up, and then presented them with a survey. The Psychster white paper then compared the following 4 opinions (I assume the actual study had more options) for each content type :

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This Monday we have a whole host of news form last week. Included is discussion of Google advertising policies, why Bing is losing to Google, the value of rule based systems, and how to code an HTML 5 application for the iPhone.

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Today I decided to go back to basics and take a quick overview of the nitty gritty aspects of email that a lot of marketers (including myself) are perfectly happy never to have to think about. These provide the reasoning for a lot of rules that we follow in regards to email, but many never fully understand. Why do emails have to link absolutely to hosted images, instead of just bundling in the email itself? Why do we use inline CSS? Why do we avoid relying on body or head tags? And why should I avoid using "Oprah!" in my body copy...

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Last week, I discussed how to use one-on-one interviews to gather the vital information you need to make your website more persuasive. This week, I'll touch on how to analyze this data and put it to use.

The first step is review your notes from the interviews, pulling out useful quotations and other snippets of information.

For the purposes of persuasive architecture, FACTS don't matter. For example:

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is this what your visitors are seeing?

This week it occurred to me that one of our analytics posts, Tracking Error 404 Pages and Broken Links in Google Analytics, actually had some pretty hefty SEO implications. 

Error 404 pages are something that every webmaster has to deal with. Best practices regarding them vary, as most things do, depending on the field you work in. Redirect? Make careful custom 404 pages that invite users to keep looking? Contact webmasters of linking sites and ask them to change their links? What to do.

The middle ground approach seems the best, with different actions depending on the page, who is linking, and what you think a user is trying to reach. However, interpreting and managing that kind of information is a full time job in and of itself. Fortunately tracking your 404 error pages in Google Analytics gives a quick and easy way to prioritize your action and pick off some of the low hanging fruit.

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I recently worked on a project that had me copy a profile 39 times. Needless to say, this was a long and arduous process. Using both Lunametric's Goal Copy plug-in, and ROI Revolutions Profile Copy Greasemonkey script, I was able to cut down the time. But, there was still a lot of manual clicking involved (can you say RSI?)

Luckily, Google Analytics has quietly released a new feature to help with copying profiles. When creating a new profile, you can now choose to import settings from another GA profile. Not only can you copy profiles within the same account, you can even copy over profile settings from another GA account!

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the world is a-spin. Or maybe it's just me.

A fairly action packed weekend with the Paraloympics ending locally and the US getting some real healthcare reforms passed. There was also an abundance of news in all sectors of the tech world, with shouting matches between Google and Viacom, and Microsoft implementing its browser choice ballot across Europe.

So this week sit back and read about how Facebook is limiting ad targeting, Google is letting you opt-out of analytics, and a whole lot more.

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