Dayn W Creative

I’ve been slowly making the switch from Apple Mail to Google Apps mail. One of the most challenging parts has been changing my personal dogma of filters and folders to labels and search.

Thankfully, there is a sherpa out there for your Google Apps and Google Wave adventures. Her name is Gina Tripani, author of the Smarterware.org blog, and regular host of the This Week in Google podcast. She uses Gmail search operators to quickly filter her mail like “label:new biz” or “has:attachment”. I’ve been using the following lately to show only my unread email in my inbox: “label:unread in:inbox”. Love it. But I didn’t want to keep typing that into the search field every time I used Gmail. I wanted to save a Gmail search for later use.

I searched for the answer, and after finding that while Firefox has some Greasemonkey options for saving Gmail search, I thought I was SOL on Chrome. Of course, the solution was forehead-slapping simple. I performed the search in Chrome, and bookmarked the results page. Duh. It’s in my bookmarks bar, and now I have one click access to show only new email in my Gmail inbox.

These are my links for May 19th through May 25th:

• GoPro : Wearable Digital Cameras – 1080p, timelapse, slow mo, waterproof to 180 feet: $200. @storiestold recommends this little crash cam. After losing one to a semi, he’s on his second. That’s all the endorsement I need.
• Ten free usability testing tools | Econsultancy -
• SpyFu – Let’s you spy on your competitors’ search marketing efforts. See their keywords. Hackalicious.
• 25 ways of encouraging and rewarding customer engagement | Econsultancy – Building a community or social app? If you build it, they will come, but might come back. This article offers some functionality that can help to make your community or app stickier. Participation is essential to the health of any community. It’s really the currency of social wealth.

These are my links for May 7th through May 18th:

• 5 Tools For Integrating HTML5 Video in Your Website – Audio & video player options, no Flash required. I’ll be checking out that Degradable audio and video plugin for WordPress.
• HOW TO: Reclaim Privacy on Facebook – ReclaimPrivacy.org bookmark lets you check on your vulnerability by checking your Facebook privacy settings. Possibly the most useful part of this tool are the quick links to your Facebook settings pages for controlling specific exposure areas.
• eMarketer – Is the click still king? Despite the recogition of the need to measure hard ROI, moat of us are still counting click throughs.
• eMarketer – Consumers still prefer ads that offer discounts or deals.
• @twitterapi’s countdown to Basic Auth removal – Countdown to mandatory oAuth integration for Twitter apps.

These are my links for April 28th through May 4th:

• HOW TO: Embed a Tweet – Here’s the official instructions for embedding a tweet. No more screenshots!
• eMarketer Mobile - – Reviews are still most valuable to customers, but Facebook Page catching up.
• Twitter to Launch Embeddable Tweets? – I wonder how each embedded tweet will be identified? Probably by ID? Ohh, I wonder if that means tweet carousels or slideshows will follow.
• Can’t wait to see the traffic spike from @twuffer’s mention on @Mashable! -
• HOW TO: Secure Your WordPress Blog -

• 7 Useful CSS3 Code Generators | Coding | PelFusion.com – Here’s few visual tools to help generate CSS rounded corners, RGBA, text shadows, @font-face, multiple columns, gradients, and borders.
• It’s official: Google incorporates website speed into your ranking | Blog | Econsultancy -
• 25 Subtle and Light Grunge Textures – Lost and Taken -
• Web Design News 30/03/10 « Boagworld – An killer group of usability & blog tips from @boagworld last week. The dirty quickly:If your site is designed well (with a visual hierarchy, scannable content, and good typographic relationships, etc) there really is no fold. Yes, important content will always compete for the top of the page, but great designs draw the visitor naturally deeper down the page.Usability testing needn’t be a daunting task. Do it early, do it often. Grab a few people and freely available web tools like fivesecondtest and checkmycolors Finally, Mark Hayward lays down some tips for anyone who needs to get started with blogging, but has “I’m not a writer” syndrome.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Five Simple but Essential Web Usability Tips (sixrevisions.com)
• Round Up of Low Cost Usability Tools (mt-soft.com.ar)
• Of Google and Page Speed (zeldman.com)

These are my links for March 12th through March 16th:

• Interactive Online – 10 Features to Look Forward to in WordPress 3.0 – RT @jonmacdonald
• Facebook Upgrades Search Capabilities | Mashable – Suggested results while typing in the search box now show more than just your friends or pages you’ve fanned.
• A Guide To Typography On The Web | Fonts | PelFusion.com – Thx @eyedesignstudio @alvinmartinez
• Microdata support for Rich Snippets – With HTML5, Google helps microformats grow up. Add another to-do to the SEO checklist.
• The Battle of the Men’s Body Washes – WSJ.com – Ms Wells thinks W +K’s Old Spice campaign has the edge for men’s personal grooming because they’re selling to the ladies. For the rest of us, we prefer whatever is already in the shower. I’ll do frilly, especially if it’s convenient.

These are my links for March 9th through March 12th:

• Open Site Explorer: Link Popularity & Backlink Analysis Tool – Powered by SEOmoz’s data, this alternative to Google “site:” search or Yahoo Site Explorer let’s you discover the sites linking to you or your competition, and rates them by authority.
• Wanna Know How Your Neighbors Spend Their Money? It’s All on Bundle.com | Fast Company – Say hi to social financial influence brought to you by Razorfish & access to US spending data.
• Best Tweets from SEMPDX Searchfest 2010 Conference | Burlington Bytes – @PeteJewett’s fantastic tweet roll of the best-of tweets from #SearchFest 2010.
• Google Launches the Google Apps Marketplace -
• Blog Smarter | Zemanta Ltd. – Enhance blog posts automatically with related content and images. Gives you tips and advice as you write. Firefox extension. Promote your posts more efffectively. Must try this.

These are my links for February 22nd through February 24th:

• UNBOUND Technologies – Social Data Append, Leader In Social Network Intelligence, – According to the DishyMix podcast, these guys have developed technology that allows you to identify the influencers in your social graph. That’s the silver bullet for brands engaged in social influence marketing. Identifying influencers has to be one of the most difficult tasks for SIM marketers these days; right up there with showing ROI.
• Review of new “Beachtek DXA-SLR” XLR adaptor for HD-DSLR cameras | Philip Bloom – A new pro audio hardware de facto standard for a 7D workflow.I was wondering when the breakouts for the DSLRs were going to finally make the pro level. This answered everything I wanted to know. Mostly, I feel like I now know what will be the standard for recording pro audio in a 7D workflow.It’s still going to feel funny piping into that mini-jack, no matter how you slice it, though.Oh, and BeachTek: I have mega lust for the DXA-SLR, but please hire a graphic designer for that packaging. Yikes.
• Brad Callen’s PPC Web Spy – Discover your competitor’s AdWords keywords
• SEOmoz | Google Link: Command – Busting the Myths – Don’t take those inbound link search results too literally.
• ROI: How to Measure Return on Investment in Social Media -

If you haven’t yet clicked “Show Options” in the upper left of a search result page on Google, go ahead and do it now. Be prepared to lose an hour exploring the new ways to shake the Google search results tree.

One of the quirky, yet instant friends you’ll make from the Google options sidebar is the Wonder Wheel. Like a wagon wheel with your search term as a hub, Google graphically suggests related search terms at the end of spokes off of your hub. Clicking a spoke term launches a new wheel based off that term, but still leaves your original wheel visible. As you’re busy exploring the spokes, ‘classic’ list style results are being updated in the right column for the current search term.

I’m not sure how many times this process can repeat, but I tested it out to 6 levels, starting with “cycling pants” (which I need for winter commuting) and eventually ending at “surly cross check” (the bike I commute on).

The top feature of the Google Wheel for actually trying to locate information has to be search history. One of the hardest parts about traveling down the search rabbit hole is remembering how you got to the term you just searched for. The Google Wheel makes it easy to see your tunneling path, and you can visually hop back to any wheel you’ve spun off.

Building a keyword list, but not sure what people might be searching for? The Google Wheel can be seeded with a search phrase to see what other phrases are commonly searched related to that phrase. Keep poking at it, and it’s easy to see how this will quickly become an invaluable tool for keyword list makers.

Click, by Bill Tancer

If you haven’t come across this book by Bill Tancer, force yourself to. As heard on NPR’s ‘Talk of the Nation’, ABCNews’ Sci-Tech Blog, as well as a columnist for Time Magazine, Tancer’s book is a data-driven glimpse of the hive mind of online searchers and trends.

I enjoyed the sociological data romp that was Freakonomics, and Click is the companion guide for the web-curious. As the GM of Global Research for Hitwise, Tancer unravels billions of data points to mine insight from what we’re all doing online. From understanding which day is the busiest for porn, to his ability to predict the winner of popular reality shows, it’s almost too much to absorb in a single read, so have your dog-earing finger at the ready.

Google auto suggests good keyword phrases for keyword list building

For a real quick and dirty method of building a keyword list, I just use Google’s handy auto suggest.

As you know, Google.com helpfully tries to guess what you’re searching for as you type, even going as far as telling you how many results there are for that phrase. So toss one of the more general keywords relevant to your subject in there, and Google will suggest other phases that are usually related. If the phrase comes up in the auto suggest, you can bet people are searching for it. If it’s a relevant suggestion, it gets added to my keyword list. Poor boy’s list keyword phrase builder.