(Last updated: 11-May-2011)
I recently completed a job application that wanted to know what websites I read & pay attention to. Here are some of the websites & web pages I provided:
John Battelle’s Searchblog – The man who wrote the book on Search. His blog on the online industry is continually sharp & thought-provoking. Battelle writes really well. I don’t always agree with what he might be saying but that is a healthy thing.
Wired – Do you ever wish there was a daily newspaper just about tech? This is probably the closest thing to it.
Search Engine Land – It is kind of an unfortunate name. But they have a number of good search marketing writers & Danny Sullivan knows search better than anyone I know of.
Google blogs – There are a lot of these so I’m just going to list them:
- Conversion Room Blog
- Google Website Optimizer Blog
- Google Analytics Blog
- Webmaster Central Blog
- Inside AdWords
- Google Southeast Asia
- Conversion Room Asia-Pacific Blog
- And the Google Analytics YouTube Channel is excellent too – particularly the Web Analytics TV episodes presented by Avinash Kaushik and Nick Mihailovski.
Conversion Rate Experts – the leaders in conversion rate optimisation. Particularly worth paying attention to for their case studies which give useful insight into their conversion optimisation process.
SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog – While some of what SEOmoz says publicly is often couched in caveats e.g. “this may mean”, “this might suggest”, the need for this is partly driven by their highly visible position in the SEO industry & the trouble with stating absolutes. Their blog is essential reading for SEO news & tactics.
NYTimes – US-centric news but it is better than, say, Fox. Their Magazine section occasionally does great long form pieces. The Critics Best Of videos are good too.
Articles
- Henry Jenkins’s series on understanding “viral” media
as “spreadable” media. Start with Part One of the Seven Part series. - [PDF] ‘Measuring The Immeasurable: Visitor
Engagement‘ by Eric Peterson & Jospeh Carrabis was useful in furthering my thinking about measuring engagement online.
Video
- Seth Godin, a leading thinker in marketing, has an excellent blog. But it was his Google Talk that put me on to him. His TED talk on the tribes we lead is also great.
- Making Inbox Zero my approach to email seriously cut the time I spend on email in half & made email seem useful & powerful again instead of something that chewed up my time & drained my energy. The original presentation by Merlin Mann is highly recommended.
UPDATED:
Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik – Avinash is a Google Analytics Evangelist but he also seems to do things like consulting/speaking on web analytics/writing books on web analytics. He is a guru on web analytics & his blog posts over the years have been critical to educating me about Google Analytics, metrics to ignore & metrics to pay attention to.
