Is it only the 11th? It feels like I've been back for a month. This week we're running around like headless chickens trying to get everything together for our new set of training sessions. Meanwhile if you're in Vancouver tonight check out John Hossacks talk on the contrast principle.

This week a plethora of stories including regulating duplicate content, design of placebo's, and privacy effects of social media.

• There is a very good chance that you have, or have had, duplicate content problems. Our SEO Mistakes series has shown, time and again, that one of the most common SEO issues affecting companies both small and large are duplicate content issues. Fortunately, this week Huo Mah released a post on detecting and dealing with duplicate content. He suggests a variety of tools including copyscape, plagarism tools, and straight out Google search.
• Some SEO kungfu this week from Search Engine Journal. They show how you can use the SEMTools Firefox extension to extract links from a page based on their placement.

• A googley week for our tech section. First off Business Insider on how Google has become a mobile company. Truthfully I'm a little disappointed that they didn't talk about Google's purchase of Gizmo5 and what that means for the future of Google's new Nexus phone, and phone's in general.
• Next up it looks like Google is musing over a new technology to place ads in street view. Interesting in concept, though their illustrations don't seem very realistic. I could just see Panagopolis getting a big add in front of a Pizzahut.

• I'm feeling lazy, so here's Avinash Kaushiks post of the week. Five Sweet Web Analytics Resolutions To Kick It Up A Notch. #1 is my favourite way to be better at anything: Don't suck.
• Websitestatistics.ca has a little gem on using web analytic to track how many people are getting to your social media sites from your website. It's pretty simple really, but useful.

• In EASILY the coolest story of the week, Wired takes a look at how the placebo effect has been increasing in recent years.. From the article:
  It's not only trials of new drugs that are crossing the futility boundary. Some products that have been on the market for decades, like Prozac, are faltering in more recent follow-up tests. In many cases, these are the compounds that, in the late '90s, made Big Pharma more profitable than Big Oil. But if these same drugs were vetted now, the FDA might not approve some of them. Two comprehensive analyses of antidepressant trials have uncovered a dramatic increase in placebo response since the 1980s. One estimated that the so-called effect size (a measure of statistical significance) in placebo groups had nearly doubled over that time.
  
  It's not that the old meds are getting weaker, drug developers say. It's as if the placebo effect is somehow getting stronger.
  What's the implication of the fact that we are seeing increasingly greater effects from fantasy? It's pretty boggling.
  
  But by far the coolest part of the article is near the bottom, where they compare how the design of pills affects their placebic reaction. They're
• There was some talk in the comments of Michaels post on coupon codes about how to properly use them in cross channel efforts. Last week Linda from Get Elastic dealt with the same topic. They focused more on how to make readable codes that don't confuse readers, while our conversation went a little more towards how to do away with codes all together. Still, useful discussion in each.

• Last week the BBC had an article titled "How online life distorts privacy rights for all". You may remember how last week I took issue with the BBCs tech section over their piece on netbooks. This week I can't agree more with the BBC, though I question how extensive a problem it is. In it Dr Kieron O'Hara argues that as we are increasingly less concerned about our privacy we are diminishing the expectation of privacy, and the legal defense of the expectation of privacy, within our society. My argument has always been that as long as surveillance is equal (aka. you can watch the people just as well as they can watch you) this wasn't a problem. However, as O'Hara rightly points out that if the public's expectation of privacy is lowered, then so are their legal right to privacy, which would be problematic. I have still to see evidence of this though. Perhaps our readers can enlighten me?