Beantin

13 Articles worth reading… (Spotted: Week 6-7, 2011)

This time, a collection of links (and summaries) including articles related to: Social media and social search, web strategy and web management, Optimisation, usability testing and Eye tracking.

Google Social search: followers and follows

This week Google rolled out a new feature to it’s SERPs and snippets when logged in. If you have a Google Profile and Google has indexed who you are connected to, there’s a chance that you will see a small profile picture along with a name and the text “shared this on <someplace>”.

How many twitter users in Sweden?

Today Intellecta Corporate presented the results of their Twitter Census. The first time a systematic analysis of Twitter use in Sweden has been performed. During December 2010, Over a million Twitter accounts were analysed and over twenty million tweets. Leading to a figure of 91316 Swedish Twitter accounts.

12 Articles worth reading… (Spotted: Week 42-43, 2010)

Information Architecture 101: Techniques and Best Practices

A great “briefing paper” from Six Revisions, intending to raise awareness of the discipline with designers.

Mental Models

The latest Alertbox post covers what users think they know and how that affects their behaviour. Users, designers and developers all have differing mental models. You need to work with conformity not against it, and gently adjust the mental models of your visitors and users.

10 essential usability guidelines for websites

If every website followed the ten points in this list, i’d suddenly have hardly anything to complain about any more. Well, perhaps not *hardly* anything - more like “less”.

How Yammer Won Over 80% of the Fortune 500

Yammer boasts that 80% of the Fortune 500 use Yammer. I wonder how many of those 400 companies have adopted Yammer as their official, or main, collaboration platform?

How I learnt to stop worrying and love enterprise microblogging

Nice case describing how Yammer took flight at AXA Australia in just the few months since August.

Information flow part 3: Why persistent links are important

I’m really enjoying Kristian’s series of posts about aspects of his work over the last couple with the intranet at Region Västra Götland. This particular post goes into the details of how they’ve tried to deal with managing URLs and links across multiple systems.

How we improved our intranet search experience

Luke describes how they implemented and tweaked their Intranet search (using a Google Search Appliance). Some good lessons-learned and insights that anyone dealing with intranet search can make use of.

Report: iPad Is an Enterprise IT Triple-Threat

The headline talks about iPad (and thereby iSO) but the report concludes that Android and HTML5 should also be prioritised. I’m going one step further than Forrester and saying prioritise HTML5 and Android. Plan for mobile/wireless working and plan soon.

How Google tested Google Instant

An insight into how Google tests it’s products (before launch in this case). What I find interesting is that normally Google uses eye tracking whilst testing. It gives them real data to work with. In this case, Google Instant, they chose not to. Why? I suspect they did try, but realised that far too many people were spending too much time looking down at the keyboard whilst typing - and not looking at their instantly-changing search results.

How Facebook Decides What To Put In Your News Feed – These 10 Secrets Reveal All

Some useful testing into how Facebook decides what to display into your news feed. Would be interested though to know their source for saying “Top News is how a vast majority of Facebook users get their information”

20 Real Tips for Hiring a Social Media Consultant

A good list to help you separate the wheat from the chaff in the world of social media consulting. You don’t need to hold yourself religiously to all 20 points, but there is some really good, honest, to-the-point advice in Pam Moore’s post.

How Google dominates the Web

If you had any doubts about just how dominant Google are in our World of Web Stuff, then this Royal Pingdom posts shows you the stats in easy to consume pie-charts.

9 Articles worth reading… (Spotted: Week 39-41, 2010)

Implementing Yammer within Your Organization Using Twitter Best Practices

The featured tool in this article is Yammer, but the tactics and principles described are valid for whatever intranet collaboration tool you are rolling out. Three critical tactics according to Hanesbrands: Gain leadership support, Partner early with IT, Help employees use the platform & see value.

Should intranet links open in a new window?

James at Step Two Designs has written a blog post based on a lively discussion on the Intranet Professionals LinkedIn group. I’m in agreement with James on this one - try having opening links in the same window whenever possible (or practical). Let the user choose.

Culture, Contribute, Confidence – The Gateway to Intranet Success

Some concrete advice & ideas by Carolyn on how to initiate a shift in company culture towards a collaborative and sharing organisation - a social intranet.

Information flow overview

In the first of a series of blog posts, Kristian has sketched the intranet information flow at Västra Götaland Regional Council. Understanding how all the information inter-links and flows around helps you maintain the information quality and ensure users are obtaining the correct information when and where they need it.

How to measure the effectiveness of web content

Website owners generally don’t do anywhere near enough testing, and testing of content in particular is almost non-existent. This article describes a three-pronged approach for measuring the effectiveness of your content. It’s a pipe-dream, and not really practical for a major re-write; but the theory is good and useful for more contained content changes.

How to find bloggers relevant to your business

Taking the time to find, nurture, and reward relationships with bloggers is a key task in marketing (and SEO, branding, PR, etc). Not only is it effective, it can be really cost effective too.

Nokia upsets blogger due to marathon PR failure

Nokia’s PR company Mission shows you how not to engage the blogging community. They have subsequently apologised (in the blog comments of the original post). But still. Smells of time-pressure & poor project management at the very least.

SEO starter guide updated

Two years after releasing their first SEO Starter Guide, Google have updated it and released an updated version. A great handbook for web managers - it explains many best practices and recommendations for websites - but it’s not an ultimate guide to SEO (and doesn’t claim to be!)

Is hiding text with CSS to improve accessibility bad for SEO?

Will you get into trouble with Google if you do the right thing accessability wise? Basically, no. If you create valid code, your SERPs are safe…

8 Articles worth reading… (Spotted: Week 37-38, 2010)

Children’s Websites: Usability Issues in Designing for Kids

9 years on from their first survey, Nielsen have produced a new study into the usability of Children’s websites. “It’s now common for a 7-year-old kid to be a seasoned Internet user with several years’ experience.” - If we think that the millennials are the internet generation - in 10-15 years this wave of 7 year olds will be in the marketplace.