Looking Good On The Ski Hill
Back in high school I used to go skiing with a guy whose motto was “If you look good, you are good”. The ironic part was this: he was one of the best skiers on the mountain and he wore these ski pants that were held together with a couple of rolls of duck tape. His comment was really directed at guys who were dressed to the nines, looked great in the lift line, but completely fell apart as soon as they got off the chair lift.

I was laughing about this with a friend today and it got me thinking about perception and reality on the internet.

Looking Good On The Internet
The internet is a very unforgiving place. People come to your website and often know absolutely nothing about your business, competency level, history, customer base or reputation. However, they quickly jump to conclusions based on one thing: graphic design. Continue reading →

How Social Sites Reveal What Your Audience Likes

Using social information to measure user information is an effective way for bloggers to understand what their readers like. It is also possible to use the methods we’ve outlined here to measure the popularity and effectiveness of pages on a corporate web site.

I check my Google Analytics quite frequently to get a feel for what my readers are most interested in. My WordPress Popularity Contest Plugin is also helpful in showing me which posts are getting the most attention. And lastly, the number of comments is also a good indicator of what you’re all interested in.

It hadn’t occurred to me to actually do research in Digg and Del.icio.us to see which of my posts got the most play on the social networking scene. Nice work by the guys at Read/Write Web to document their research process.