One Half Amazing!

Waiting on the NFL playoff games to start and need to kill a little time?  Here are the articles I’m reading this weekend.

• 35 Beautiful and Effective E-commerce Sites. One of my predictions for 2010 is that “experience” will be the big web buzzword.  Smashing Magazine has put together a set of attractive online stores that try to do just that by creating an eye-catching look and also focusing on usability.
• Google SEO Resource for Beginners.  Straight from the mouth of the 800lb gorilla, Google hands out SEO bananas for you to make your site leaner and meaner in 2010.
• Posterous taps Post.ly to help share your media via Twitter. Attach photos, music, videos and docs to your tweets.  Post.ly takes care of the rest.
• Chris Guillebeau over at The Art of Non-Conformity kicks off his $100 business forum.  The premise being to teach individuals to start small businesses on a budget of less than $100.  I was lucky enough to get into the first class beginning in February.  I’ll keep you updated on how it works out.
• Microsoft makes learning Office fun (yes, you read that right).  Microsoft turns learning Office into a game where participants score points for unlocking challenges and achievements. Badges can then be shown off via Facebook.
• How to create custom YouTube, Twitter and MySpace backgrounds

If you’re interested in seeing more, check out my Google Reader Shared Items.

What are you reading this weekend? Let me know in the comments below.

Online Marketing and Social Media week in review for Feb. 7, 2009.  Bobby Digital talks about the Google Latitude debut, Facebook joining the Open ID alliance, Urchin 6.5 as well as Social Camp Memphis and Social Media Expedition.

Special thanks to David After Dentist

In case you were too busy being inaugurated, here’s what you missed last week;

• Belkin got caught paying people to write fake Amazon reviews of their products.
  
• YouTube is expanding functionality to include links to the iTunes store.  Currently only available in Europe, but could a  monetization ‘buy this video’ option be too far behind?
• Pepsi asked high fructose corn syrup lovers what input they would like to give the new President in order to refresh America. Their new microsite couples user and celebrity content together on a huge wall of carbonated social goodness.
• Google is discontinuing their print ad service, while at the same time giving tips to optimize your campaigns with smaller budgets.
  
• 7% of MySpace users and 3% of Facebook users are dead.  At least those users won’t be sending me an invitation to Mob Wars.
• Smashing Magazine posts their 2009 web design trends.
  
• Twitter is cutting back on the use of their API. Could this mean the beginning of additional features or a premium subscription model?
• Feedburner is making it’s move to better integrate with Google’s architecture, but has encountered some hiccups along the way.