The Olympics start this Friday, to a nice warm Vancouver February. With a week light on rain and heavy on spring temperatures, it looks like its going to be a gorgeous month. Well, unless you want stuff like snow and ice and all that "winter Olympics" stuff.

This week we have real time social search, tests on the best kind of video ad (and its a preroll ad, ugh), CSS3 tips and tricks, and Facebook in China.

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If you're serious about bringing usability practices into your organization, there's something you need to know before you even get started.

To succeed, you're going to have to shift the core belief system of your organization. If you can't pull this off, you'll encounter resistance at every turn, and your project is destined for failure.

Below are some of the fundamental shifts that must occur before a true user-centered web design process can succeed.

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Link building is one of the essential tactics all SEOs must know how to do if they have any hopes of getting a website to rank in Google's organic results. This will remain the case until the day in which Google decides to move away from a links based ranking algorithm.

A big part of the link building process is determining what the value of a link actually is, because without that you'll have no clue as to how much time and effort to invest into getting it. So let's take a look at a few metrics that will help you make that judgment about a link.

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Maybe it's because I do an email newsletter, maybe it's because I write blog posts, maybe its because I love to complain about peoples lack of CAN-SPAM compliance, but I just love to sign up for newsletters. I'll sign up for any one I see, then go about trying to unsubscribe if I don't like it.

Normally I'll rant about how one email campaign or another doesn't comply with some best practice, but today I decided I am going to take a different tact. Instead, I am going to show off some email campaigns, mainly from small companies, that do things that I just love. Campaigns of little guys, without huge marketing budgets, which manage to pull certain effects off better than most of the high-class email marketing I see. While none of the following are examples of perfect email campaigns, each does one thing well, be it providing useful content, tempting the reader to buy, or creating a lasting relationship with the reader. 

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Oh god it's February. There's going to be chaos in Vancouver as a million tourists pack onto public transit, line the streets, fill the locales. There's going to be protests, armed guards, no parking— it's going to be grand! Oh and there's also some kind of sporting event or something going on…

In the internet marketing world we've got notes on how story telling can improve your user experience, stories about SEO algorithm chasers, the splintering of the internet and how redesign should actually your site.

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People frequently complain about cookies. They don’t like the idea that their actions are being tracked and watched, so they disable cookies outright. The thing is that cookies are really the least of your problems.

Cookies may be a good way to track people, but they are at least a known way. You can clear your cookies, disable them, manage them—and if you know enough, edit them.

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Even die-hard web usability zealots agree that being easy to use is just a starting point. To be truly effective, a website must also be beautiful, inspiring and (in most cases) persuasive. But very few people are experts in usability, graphic design and marketing. That's why:

• Usability professionals tend to make designs that are easy to use, but very conventional and uninspiring.
• Art directors and graphic artists tend to make designs that are beautiful and innovative, but hard to use because they don't work they way users expect.
• Traditional marketing folk (who are usually the most knowledgeable about marketing strategies and the psychology of persuasion) often know little about usability or graphic design... and can't make either type of web site!

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No problems with permission this week, I'm afraid I just haven't been getting that much spam. However, this is a good time to explain something that we tend to gloss over when talking about email marketing and problems with permission:

You may be an "Accidental Spammer"

What's an accidental spammer? You ask.

You don't have to be one of those devious "80% OFF of Pfizer" senders to be a spammer. In fact, devious problems are less of a problem than you might think. Over the years spam filtering engines have gotten really good at both filtering those before they go out, and catching them before they reach the inbox (in fact 95% of email gets caught as spam). The problem lies in legitimate email senders, small businesses and the like, who in good faith decide to send an "email blast" or overload their viewers with marketing messages. These seem like legitimate marketing, but are seen negatively by users all too willing to hit the mark-as-spam button.

We've covered a few times why being considered spam is bad. In a nutshell, spam complaints adversely affect your ability to send mail, as well as your ESP (Email Service Provider). Because of this you don't want it, but your ESP really doesn't want it (just a few bad email campaigns can ruin an IP). Lots of stuff counts as spam complaints, from weighty complaints and domain blocks by IT admins to too many viewers hitting the report-as-spam button.

All that needs to happen for you to be considered spam is that you send an email to some one who doesn't want it or for a filter to mark you as spam.

That's it. So how you can prevent that?

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Lots of stuff this week. With hype building over Apples show on the 27th the tech blogs are filled with tablet rumors, burying a lot of good content with hype and speculation.

This week we've got European spam statistics, studies on personalized search, SEO analytics tips, and the connection between beauty and fluency…

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If you've been wondering where BrianK and his series of Google Analytics Tips Tricks and Traps has been, wonder no more! Coming this February we're launching the newest of our seminar sessions: (REALLY) Understanding Google Analytics, planned and taught by none other than BrianK.

This two seminar session covers a host of Google analytics concepts and issues beginning with understanding the specifics of Google Analytics and how it tracks data (including solutions for  subdomains, cross domain tracking, eCommerce, etc.), and following up with analysis and interpretation.

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