Search is a killer application on the web and in the enterprise. Perhaps it is the killer app. Therefore, by definition and practice, it is a success story. At the same time, however, no one has explained search. That is, no one has explained the fundamental nature of search. Where is the psychology behind search? And quite seriously I ask, What is search?

When using PC-native file formats such as PDF or spreadsheets, users feel like they're interacting with a PC application. Because users are no longer browsing a website, they shouldn't be given a browser UI.

Users are easily confused when websites link them to non-Web documents that offer a significantly different user experience than that of browsing Web pages.

The debate that has flared up recently over the significance of weblogs in corporate communications conjures up memories from the days of internet hype. Back then people saw signs – triggered by the increasingly widespread use of the internet – of a revolution in communication and business models. Now opinion is divided once again, over blogs: the spectrum of views ranges from their being irrelevant to their heralding a new communication channel for business. How, and where, can blogs be deployed in companies? What risks arise when blogs are used? What measures should companies take to ensure they are equipped to deal with the increase in blogging?

They say talk is cheap. Google thinks it should be free. Google Talk enables you to call or send instant messages to your friends for free–anytime, anywhere in the world. Google Talk offers you:
Choice: Get in touch how and when you want to–over email, IM or a call
Quality: Talk through your computer but hear your friends as if they were in the same room
Convenience: Your Gmail contacts are pre-loaded into Google Talk so inviting or talking to your friends is just a click away

One of the primary reasons for the ClickZ News Blog is scale. There's an absolute glut of interactive marketing and advertising news these days. Our editors simply can't cover everything in depth. We're making harder and harder calls about what we do cover.

The blog is a place where a well-informed, connected, and seasoned group of editors can provide glimpses into the stories we can't fit into our News section, but which shouldn't go unmentioned, either.

The blog is also a place where we hope to have a dialogue with our readers on a number of levels. We publish reader feedback, of course, and we'll continue to do so. Comments on blog posts will be more immediate (we had to start human-editing feedback a few years ago due to spam).

Don't be obsessive about your intranet content — it's not going anywhere. Unless you're looking for something specific, there's no need to constantly check the system.

Try to designate a specific time during the day in which to surf the intranet (i.e., content discovery) or to catch-up on newsletters and RSS feeds.

Stay focused. If you accessed the system for a specific purpose, stick to it. It's all too easy to get sidetracked in content heavy intranets.

If you find content of interest that doesn't apply to your immediate needs, make note of it and return to it later.

If you haven't read something you saved or filed away within a week, you're not likely to read it at all so delete it.

Don't sign up for content delivery just because it's there. Try to be more selective in the amount and type of content that's delivered to avoid a flood of information.

Organize your content. If you're collecting content to be digested later, don't dump everything into one place; instead, categorize your research material to avoid clutter.

Content owners need to be mindful of what types of information they post on their intranet to ensure that irrelevant material doesn't detract from, and clutter up, more important content.

An intranet can hold as much content as server disk space affords. When you run out of space, you can always add more. But as human beings we don't have the same luxury. With all the information and work we already have to deal with on a daily basis, you don't want your intranet content to cause a meltdown.

Don't curse an intranet for having an abundance of information. As a CMS, that's the system's job: To manage information. But you have your part in this too. Content is placed into an intranet to suit as wide an audience as possible — it's up to you to decide what's applicable to you and not to feel the need to become a sponge. If you do, you're going to end up changing the "M" in CMS from "management" to "migraine."

Google is still a pretty small place, so when we heard that our AdWords friends had put together an Inside AdWords blog, it got our competitive juices flowing! It also made us think about all of the information we'd love to share with our publishers – and there's quite a bit of it, from site optimization tips, to product feature descriptions, to ideas on getting more out of AdSense.

The majority of respondents to the survey were less familiar with RSS feeds. Among the other respondents, 23 percent understood RSS but did not use it, while 66 percent either did not understand the technology or had never heard of it.

In A/B testing, you unleash two different versions of a design on the world and see which performs the best. For decades, this has been a classic method in direct mail, where companies often split their mailing lists and send out different versions of a mailing to different recipients. A/B testing is also becoming popular on the Web, where it's easy to make your site show different page versions to different visitors.

Sometimes, A and B are directly competing designs and each version is served to half the users. Other times, A is the current design and serves as the control condition that most users see. In this scenario, B, which might be more daring or experimental, is served only to a small percentage of users until it has proven itself.

Blogger: Term used to describe anyone with enough time or narcissism to document every tedious bit of minutia filling their uneventful lives. Possibly the most annoying thing about bloggers is the sense of self-importance they get after even the most modest of publicity. Sometimes it takes as little as a referral on a more popular blogger's website to set the lesser blogger's ego into orbit.

Then God forbid a blogger gets mentioned on CNN. If you thought it was impossible for a certain blogger to get more pious than he was, wait until you see the shit storm of self-righteous save-the-world bullshit after a network plug. Suddenly the boring, mild-mannered blogger you once knew will turn into Mother Theresa, and will single handedly take it upon himself to end world hunger with his stupid links to band websites and other smug blogger dipshits.

As the chart above shows, the most influential media sites on the web are still well-funded mainstream media sites, like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN. However, a lot of bloggers are achieving a significant amount of attention and influence.

What in the world is Pingoat! ?
Pingoat is a service that pings or notifies a number of services that keep track of weblogs and publish them. By pinging, you let the services know that your blog has been updated and hence, they crawl and index your site, publishing your blog contents, thus increasing your blog’s popularity.

To support international users, you should ideally have special sites in various languages. If you can't produce such localized sites, you should at least conduct user testing in each of your important target countries to ensure that your main site is fairly easy for your foreign customers to use. The guidelines have always stated as much, but if your company is typical, I know you won't comply.

Even though many companies do half their business overseas, experience shows that few companies are willing to pay the high cost of testing in multiple countries. We're lucky if a company invests in domestic testing; let's not push our luck too far.

Here instead are the minimum requirements for ensuring that international users can use your site. Just remember: To fully maximize your business potential in other countries, you should do much more.

Our conclusion: Even assuming mainstream interest, current blog design standards – at least in terms of navigation, nomenclature and taxonomy – are a barrier to consumer acceptance. In fact, the design of most blogs can incite "net rage" (in the words of one test participant).

Just this week, "bloggerati" like Steve Rubel (Micropersuasion.com) and commentators like the New York Times’ David Pogue have weighed in on these consumer acceptance issues – mostly with regard to RSS, or the mechanism by which blogs can be “syndicated” by publishers. The following report gives some additional shape and substance to the realization that blogs need to meet a different standard of behavioral requirements and expectations if they are to succeed with the mainstream internet audience.

I’ve got news for Jack - actually its news for all of us - making money from blogging is not fast money, its not easy money and its not quick money. Yep there are a handful of people out there saying that it is (they usually want you to buy their book) - but there is no escaping the fact that blogging for a living is hard work and can take a long time to build. If you’re not willing to wait and put in the hard yards you’re probably in the wrong business (although I strongly doubt that there are any businesses that you can double your work load and see 200 times the reward).

Current RSS users are predominately male, 66 percent are adults and 65 percent in the 12 to 21 youth age group. They average almost double the amount of online time per week as their non-RSS using counterparts. RSS users are also more likely to have broadband (adults, 64 percent; youth, 62 percent), use wireless data services (adults, 35 percent; youth, 75 percent) and consider themselves tech optimists (adults, 78 percent; youth, 79 percent).

National news sites are more likely to be used by adult RSS users; 43 percent use national news sites, versus just 14 percent of non-RSS users. The research also shows a clear link between blogs and RSS usage. Twenty-five percent of adults using RSS publish or maintain a blog, compared to only one percent of non-RSS users. Twenty-seven percent of adults using RSS read blogs, only one percent of non-RSS users blog.