links for 2009-03-20

Another day, another new feature in Gmail Labs. This one could be more useful than most, as it’s something you probably have a reason to use with some frequency. It’s called “Undo Send,” and as the name suggests, it lets you take back a sent email, as long as you act quickly enough.

What is it about social media people that make them just so darn generous? Every day I read my Twitter stream and come across one or two people who are creating awareness or trying to raise money to help one cause or another.

Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal has published a lengthy review of Internet Explorer 8 that says the final version of Microsoft’s new browser will be available for downloading on Thursday at noon ET. Walt likes it quite a bit, except for the fact that he found it slow in some instances. (He did some speed tests which didn’t agree with the ones that Microsoft itself recently published.)

No doubt Sony is beginning to feel the heat from Amazon. While its Sony Reader was on the market much longer than Amazon’s Kindle has been, in the short time Amazon’s device has been with us it has taken the e-book world by storm.

Suddenly Sony is finding itself in a position it probably would rather not be in: take on Amazon directly or risk being relegated to also-ran status against its growing competitor.

Well, the first move in what will probably be a multi-step response is a partnership with Google. Sony will initially offer about 500,000 copyright-free books for its device that have been scanned by Google’s book search service.

The Internet Marketing Handbook is a free resource that contains almost 100 tools and learning resource that help to master Internet Marketing. It was compiled by Danny Dover and is the result of literally hundreds of hours of study and practice in marketing online and search engine optimization techniques. The information below represents the web's best resources and tools. All of the items listed below are available to the general public and most are free of charge. Enjoy!

I’ve officially given up trying to keep pace with each and every feature Google adds to Gmail, but this one looks neat: There’s a new Gmail Labs option that enables in e-mail viewing of Flickr and Picasa photos, YouTube videos, and Yelp reviews. Gmail notices links to this content, and simply embeds it in your message so you don’t need to click away to see what a friend has sent you.

When conducting keyword research for a client it is common for an SEO (or even a general business owner) to turn to a keyword research tool and start looking up search volumes on keyphrases that come to mind. Some may take it a step further and actually evaluate the keyword effectiveness index (KEI) of each keyphrase to determine the competitiveness and feasibility of a term. All too often those two metrics, search volume and KEI, are all the consideration an SEO might take into accountability before making final judgements.

Here’s your scenario: You’re the CEO of an immensely popular social network with 175 million registered users, or just shy of the population of Brazil. Your users are passionate and tend to protest over the slightest changes. Just recently they got really mad about a terms of service change—so mad it was on the evening news and you had to change them back.

Despite those numbers, despite rabid user loyalty, you’re losing money, so much money you got delisted from Forbes’ Masters of the Universe Billionaires list. At the same time another social network, much smaller than yours with less functionality and more questionable future, is gaining a lot of buzz and membership.

If you’re interested in what Google intranet URLs look like, you can check out the Google Apps for Your Domain help page for google.com itself. The full text of the help message is this:

Need help? Try searching the Help Centers for instant answers. Found a bug in Gmail? Go straight to Gmail eng by visiting go/reportgmailbug Another issue? Contact the Help Desk at https://ticket or https://guts Want to learn more about dogfood products? Visit go/discoverdogfood

According to Colin Jackon at Gen.nz, New Zealand’s section 92a of the copyright law “says that ISPs have to cut people off the Internet if a music company accuses them of copyright infringement. There’s no trial, no proof, and no accountability on the record companies to get it right.” Now PC World New Zealand writes (my emphasis):

Google has made a detailed submission to the Telecommunications Carriers Forum that heavily criticises the draft code of practice for ISPs in relation to section 92A of the Copyright Act [in New Zealand].

Is your web copy all fluff and no hooks? Fluff is lazy, unappealing and pointless copy that wastes valuable web space. Without effective sales copy hooking your visitors they won’t stick around to become customers.

Before you can write effective sales copy you have to eliminate fluff. The first step is recognising where fluff comes from and stopping it taking root. Let it run rampant and that’s a lot of shaving later on.

You have gone to a lot of trouble to get the right kind of people to your website. You now face the task of informing and persuading them well enough to turn them from a temporary visitor into a customer. Creating the content to do so may take a few minutes or it may take much longer, and you need to cast as wide a net as possible without overreaching. Your goal: Convey a message, primarily with words but not exclusively, that will turn both impulse buyers and discerning shoppers into new (and loyal) customers.

Well, according to The Conference Board Reputation Risk Research Working Group and a survey of 148 risk management executives of major corporations, only 49% said that the management of reputation risk was highly integrated with their enterprise risk management (ERM) function.

In the past two days both Google and Microsoft have announced either changes or a new releases for their browser. Both are obviously touting improvements with speed being the main focus of Google and features being that of Microsoft.

It may be worth mentioning Barack Obama may be the first President with an active LinkedIn account. It’s a bit surreal to look at what is essentially an online resume and see listed as current occupation: President at United States of America.

Google AdWords has released new templates that allow you to create coupons for display advertising

comScore has released quite the interesting data on the growing trend of mobile internet usage. It seems daily usage among unique users has grown over 100% from January of 2008 to January of 2009.

Unfortunately, they're elusive to tie down. Since you get penalties (generally) for doing something wrong in Google's eyes, they're not very forthcoming about what they do to you when they catch you. If they had their way, I'm sure they'd like to just say BAD STUFF in their guidelines. As it is, however, penalties typically fall into a couple of distinct categories and Rand has a flowchart for determining whether you have a penalty or not. This flowchart has historically worked very well and covers the vast majority of penalties (thanks Rand!):

Every pattern explores ways of designing space to meet human needs and promote happiness. It doesn’t take great imagination to apply these architectural principles to information architecture—taking them out of the real world and into the digital world.

Track Your Packages Over Email, Text message, Facebook or Twitter

No more refreshing pages. No more wondering if packages have arrived yet. With TrackThis, we'll send you near instant updates via Email, SMS messaging, RSS feeds, Facebook, or Twitter. We track UPS, Fedex, USPS, DHL and several other carriers.

Since when did the number of my friends have anything to do with being able to develop a PR strategy? I guess the theory here is that perhaps I can personally drag all of my friends over and convince them to try out a new product or service because I personally can count on them to do the right thing and follow me.

Rate Opinions on Twitter

Twitter is now the third most popular social network, behind Facebook and MySpace (Compete, 2009). A year ago, it has over a million users and 200,000 active monthly users sending over 3 million updates per day (TechCrunch, 2008). Those figures have almost certainly increased since then. With the torrential streams of Twitter updates (or tweets), there’s an emerging demand to sieve signals from noises and harvest useful information.