An ongoing collation of interesting online tidbits brought to you by Tech Dept
Gary Flake demos Pivot, a new way to browse and arrange massive amounts of images and data online. Built on breakthrough Seadragon technology, it enables spectacular zooms in and out of web databases, and the discovery of patterns and links invisible in standard web browsing.
From TED.com March 2010
Social Media Integration is becoming a must have feature for every website and blog. It is crucial for a website’s success that this feature is not overlooked. One of the ways to get user’s attention is having nice social media icons because they are attention grabbing and easily recognizable. In this showcase we are presenting to you a mega collection of beautiful Social Media Icons that you cannot resist adding to your collection.
Note: Please respect author’s Terms of Service when using these icons because if it weren’t for them, we would not have this amazing collection.
From WP Beginner
Delaney Lund Knox Warren has created Codeorgan, a new piece of software that can take any website and turn it into a piece of music.
The program, which can be found at www.codeorgan.com, analyses the “body” content of any web page and translates the code into a tune.
By Matt Williams, Brand Republic, 22 Feb 2010
Nice use of flash on this promotional web site for Norway – flick between day and night and everything!
I wrote an article recently about the use of e-commerce trustmarks and how important it was for sites to display trustmark logos.
Though they may help some sites, trustmarks alone are not the answer, and factors such as brand trust, price, usability and good design all combine to reassure customers about making a purchase.
A recent post on the FutureNow blog makes this point, and argues that the need for ‘costly’ security indicators, can be avoided with good cart / checkout design.
The post cites the example of the Groupon checkout, which avoids the need for security logos, thanks to the overall experience, touches such as the insistence on capturing the card CCV code, visible FAQs which deal with any payment queries, and good form design.
I’ve been looking at some examples from UK e-commerce sites, with and without security logos, to see how they compare to Groupon...
By Graham Charlton, e-consultancy.com, 1 March 2010
Forrester Research launch report for interactive marketers.
Read about the Peer Influence Pyramid, which describes and shares recommendations about three types of online influencers: Social Broadcasters, Mass Influencers and Potential Influencers.
Each of the three types of influencer is important to marketers, and each must be engaged in a different manner. Social Broadcasters are appealing because of their large followings, but they tend to assist more with awareness than with preference. Mass Influencers is a new category of influencer–28 million in number in the U.S. alone–created thanks to the scale afforded consumers by social media tools. (I’ll be sharing more about Mass Influencers in my next Forrester report.) Finally, the vast majority of social media participants are Potential Influencers, people who have modest networks rich with trust.
By Augie Ray, Forrester Research, Feb 27 2010
Who would have thought that nearly 40% of online searchers make a purchase after being influenced by an offline channel? You would expect some influence, yes, but that significant?
That’s exactly what the results from a recent iProspect study looking into offline influence on online search behaviour indicate…
But there’s more for digital marketers to digest. Unfashionable offline is effective in its own right, and much of offline is converging with online. For example, more people listen to digital radio on PCs and TVs than on their radios according to OMD Metrics. People watch television with a laptop and mobile to hand. And it cannot be too long before RFID technology in mobiles interacts with electronic billboards and then to the web.
By Richard Walker, 11 Feb 2010
Last week I aggregated all the most current resources I had found on lean usability testing into one post. As promised, this follow up post is about my personal experiences and lessons learned from doing Commando Usability Testing (CUT). I did CUT with around 30 different users in at least 5 different locations (all cafes): 3 in Palo Alto last summer and fall, and 2 in NYC this fall and winter.
I had never heard it called this until Andre’s usability presentation last week. But what an awesome name 
. CUT is the most informal and low-cost style of usability testing. Basically you go into the field (usually a coffee shop) with your laptop and find random strangers to do user testing/customer development on.
By Carter, Feb 22 2010
In the air doesn’t mean out of touch. While you’re flying, MySkyStatus automatically sends status updates to your Facebook and Twitter accounts with your departure, location and arrival information. It’s travel made social and it’s easy to set up.
DoodleBuzz is a new way to read the news through an experimental interface that allows you to create typographic maps of current news stories.
