My own piece of the Internet
 
Latest Reads: 3 Feb 2013

Latest Reads: 3 Feb 2013

Here’s a few things online that inspired, delighted, and interested me.

Holy Grail of eCommerce Conversion Optimization – 91 Point Checklist and Infographic

Despite continuing the trend of very very long lists as link-bait, this is an impressive list of optimisation tactics for ecommerce websites.

Whether you’re selling pajamas, concert tickets, shoes or shaving blades; e-commerce today has evolved and humanized beyond just convenience shopping . It is therefore imperative that you stop seeing people who land on your store as ‘traffic’; but as real human visitors. People come to your store and engage at various levels (let’s call these levels ‘touch points’). With each word that visitors read and with each media pixel they view at these touch points, they form a picture of your business in their minds. And based on whether or not they like the final picture, they make a decision about buying from your store or your competitors.

Social Media Overcrowding Is LinkedIn’s Opportunity

This Huffington Post article contends that LinkedIn is the most successful social network whose growth will continue to grow because it focuses on authentic connections and “more steak and less sizzle.”

How many social networks do you belong to? How many devices do you have connected to those channels? How many apps, websites and services have you granted “permission” to access your data on those networks? How many friends, acquaintances and colleagues have you grouped, circled and filtered?

10 ways to create a great content campaign

Some great beginners tips on where to find inspiration inspiration when creating a content campaign.

Google and the future of search: Amit Singhal and the Knowledge Graph

Just days after Facebook launched the Search Graph, Google launched the Knowledge Graph. What’s fascinating to me is that the chief engineer responsible for making sure Google knows you in an intimate and slightly creepy way, Amit Singhal, used proto-post-modernist Ludwig Wittgenstein to inform how he refined the technology – words are informed by context.

What’s so great about Google+ Communities?

A Google+ fan writes that Google+ Communities promises to create the potential for thousands of interests.

Communities solves Google+’s undeserved reputation as a place only for geeks and photographers. I’ve said from the beginning that every interest is represented on Google+. Now, Communities creates explicit spaces where thousands of interests can be easily discovered.

Why The Fuck?

Solve health issues using your techno-skills not social monetisation and dating.

Why the fuck are the greatest minds of our generation toiling away in the Googleplex, harnessing the greatest computing resources in history, trying to figure out how to get Scott Hanselman to click on ads?

2013 Annual Letter from Bill Gates

In his 2013 Annual Letter Bill Gates writes about the importance of measuring outcomes. I find his philanthropy truly inspiring.

But in the past year I have been struck again and again by how important measurement is to improving the human condition. You can achieve amazing progress if you set a clear goal and find a measure that will drive progress toward that goal-in a feedback loop similar to the one Rosen describes. This may seem pretty basic, but it is amazing to me how often it is not done and how hard it is to get right.

 

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