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Sept 24, 2009 - Spotting things you'll want to see today.

This is the September 24 2009 edition of Who's Blogging What, a newsletter that covers over 1,000 top web marketing blogs for online professionals involved in social media, search marketing, email, user experience and web analytics. Subscribers are updated with highlights and useful new links every Thursday. If you would like to be kept up to date please enter your email address in the box at the right.

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Google demonstrates Sidewiki with video

Google awaits your comments

Google's launch of Sidewiki on Wednesday kicked off a very lively debate about the control of user contributions on the web. Ars Technica provided a good rundown of how Sidewiki works and also suggested that Google will need to do some work to prioritize the truly helpful comments. Jeff Jarvis, author of What Would Google Do? and a self avowed Google 'fanboy' immediately decried Sidewiki's efforts to take interactivity away from web publishers. The Inquisitr termed the whole thing 'a very bad idea', using stronger language in the post. Blogoscoped provided historical precedents of similar projects failing and Econsultancy found early uses of Sidewiki to be nothing more than anti-brand graffiti.

Tweets by Google's Matt Cutts comparing Sidewiki to FriendFeed didn't totally resonate and Sidewiki's project manager Caesar Sengupta explained how Google algorithms would result in higher quality commenting. Support for Google ranged from tepid to strong. Marketing Pilgrim said that their advice to reputation management clients would be to just not worry about it. Jeremiah Owyang came out strongly in favor, telling corporate websites to accept and embrace the concept that the users really own their site.

Perhaps the most interesting theme of the week was the continued suggestion that Google, founded on the belief that completely automated systems could find relevant content along with appropriate advertising, was now increasingly looking to human beings for help. Gigaom wrote about 'the problem of plenty' and how it was demanding user intervention at Google. The fact that Google has been so slow to the social media feeding frenzy may hurt them now, as John Batelle noted that a strong community (something that Google has never really had) is a key ingredient to making Sidewiki work.



The most useful posts of the week

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Social Media
  • 5 Ways To Help Face the Fear of Social Media [Kyle Lacy]
  • How To Measure The Value Of A Fan Or Follower In Social Media [Search Engine Land]
  • Social Media and B2B - 5 Findings [Current Vibes]
  • 100 Tips, Tools, and Resources for Twitter Research [Sociable Blog]
  • A peek at Twitter's new 'retweet API' [The Social]
  • A Closer Look at Fan Engagement on the Fox News Facebook Page [Adam Sherk]
  • Top 10 Viral Videos - August 2009 [Marketing Charts]
  • OneForty: A directory of Twitter apps [LA Times]
  • Effective Twitter Backgrounds: Examples and Best Practices [Smashing Mag]
  • 10 Less Known Facebook Features [All Facebook]

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Search Marketing
  • Simple Steps for PPC Ad Testing Strategy [Seer]
  • Exact-match keyword domains: the fastest way to first page SERPs? [Econsultancy]
  • Google does not use the keywords meta tag in web ranking [Google Webmaster Blog]
  • LinkExaminer: SEO Friendly Link Scanning Utility [Search Engine Journal]
  • Page Titles > The Worst Practices [Quickstart SEO]
  • Ad Split Testing Method for Content Campaigns [PPC Proz]
  • How to Confidently Build Links That Pass SEO Value [Winning The Web]

User Experience
  • 10 Useful Usability Findings and Guidelines [Smashing Mag]
  • 41 Image and Icon Search Engines Designers Should Know [Hongkiat]
  • Simplicity in Good Web Design : Advantages & How-to [Noupe]
  • Want Responses? Try SMS-Based Calls to Action [Ad Age]
  • Seven Ways to Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment [Practical Ecommerce]
  • 50 awesome free fonts for professional design [Design Reviver]
  • 35 Beautiful Water-themed Web Designs for Inspiration [Six Revisions]
  • Introduction to HTML 5 [Ajaxian]
  • 40 Breathtaking & Creative Logo Designs Just to Inspire [Noupe]
  • The New Lead Generation is in Membership Programs [Junta42]

Email Marketing
  • Subject lines: Amazon's lessons on discounts and frontloading [Email Marketing Reports]
  • Socialized Email? You Can't Ignore Thousands Of New Users [Email Insider]
  • How Are ISPs Changing Their Spam Filters? [Be Relevant]
  • Email Opt-in Field: Ideas on Placement to Maximize Your Opt-ins [ProImpact7]
  • Intro To E-Mail Marketing For Facebook Page Admins [All Facebook]
  • Tactics for Reactivating Non-Responders [Be Relevant]
  • Let's Keep Testing: Its Not the Length But the Width That Matters [Email Wars]
  • Yahoo Mail Users Starting To Get New Interface & Features [SEO Roundtable]

Analytics
  • An Important Analytics Distinction: Bounce vs Exit [Seer]
  • Microsoft working on social media Analytics tool [Search Cowboys]
  • The Web Analytics Headache [eMarketer]
  • Integrating Yahoo! Search and Microsoft Bing with Google Analytics [Practical Ecommerce]
  • New Video: What is the Analytics API? [Google Analytics Blog]

Radar Screen

  • Feeding Your TV (and Facebook) Habit [Hulu Blog]
  • Facebook To Wind Down Beacon To Resolve Privacy Lawsuit [MediaPost]
  • Welcome to the New Yahoo! Search [Yahoo Search Blog]
  • Facebook, Nielsen Invite Users to Critique Ads [Ecommerce Times]
  • Web Will Account for 15 Percent of Total Ad Spend in 2010 [ClickZ]
  • Yahoo's New Ad Pitch: It's You! [WSJ Digits]
  • Will Yahoo's New Marketing Blitz See Success? It's Up to You! [Marketing Pilgrim]
  • School's Out: Are Students Taking a Pass on Facebook? [Ad Age]
  • Announcing the new DoubleClick Ad Exchange [AdWords Blog]
  • Three Future-Looking Videos Of Augmented Reality For Business [Jeremiah Owyang]

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