News & commentary from a very special week
There's been an amazing assortment of news in the media and some interesting articles from around the blogsphere over the past several days....
The inauguration of President Obama was a memorable, historic occasion to watch on a TV screen. For the people who were there, it must have been an incredible experience. It certainly feels that the world's consciousness changed yesterday for the better. For America, this was surely a watershed moment that nobody who saw it will forget. There are a number of good articles around the net today, talking about how the Internet played such a vital role during yesterday's inauguration. Greg Sterling's article about search trends from the Obama inauguration is particularly interesting.
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Andrew Goodman at traffick.com, posted a very interesting article about Canadian Tire. For those of you who don't live in Canada, Canadian Tire is one of largest retailers for just about everything under the sun. For many years, they were among the leaders of the Canadian e-commerce revolution (sloth race).
Andrew's article wasn't about how well they were doing; it was about how they shut down their online e-commerce operations! Yes, you heard correctly. Canadian Tire shut down their entire online e-commerce operations. They now simply host a look-and-browse, drive-them-to-their-store website. Unbelievable!
Andrew has more of a breakdown about it. Here is the link. I will comment more about this in the next few weeks.
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Lots of buzz this week about some big changes going on in the search engine indexes, such as Google, ask.com and, I believe, Yahoo. I remember when we would anticipate the Google dance at the end of the month. I'm so glad we're over those years; yet we still continue to fuss over index changes and PR toolbar updates. My eyes glaze over when I read the stories.
Is ranking dead? In my honest opinion, it sure is. The days of pulling a consistent ranking on Google for a particular keyphrase/keyphrases are long gone. You can read more about the major shift in organic search results, in particular from Google, and the coming era of "intent-based search".
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I still find usability studies with eye tracking very interesting. Considering the amount of money wasted every year on non-contributing web development projects and unusable technology, and all the fuzzy/grey talk from agencies about their latest and greatest design project, I still don't understand why organizations that have the budget for it do not test their usability regularly. No new website, page or campaign should be accepted without testing first. Yet thousands of organizations make the mistake of initiating change without really understanding what they are changing or what the impact may be.
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Finally, here's a little treat from Sunday's "We Are One" presidential inauguration concert.