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Is social media/Web 2.0 for retail just hype or an essential part of doing business in the 21st century? The Wikipedic definition of Web 2.0 is "a second generation of services available on the World Wide Web that lets people collaborate and share information online." Wikipedia, being a user-generated knowledge base, is itself Web 2.0. In the ecommerce context, Web 2.0 includes leveraging social commerce on your own site, blogging/podcasting and participating in social networks like Youtube, Facebook, Twitter - and anywhere you or your customers can create and share content. Retailers often wonder what Web 2.0 / social media activities to be involved with, so this post ranks what I believe are the top 10 Web 2.0 activities for ecommerce based on their business impact.

Web 3.0, according to Wikipedia, is a term used to describe the future of the web. Web 2.0 would refer to the recent evolution of the web. A brief description of this evolution would be apropos. Wikipedia explores the following ideas in the first 179 words of its definition of Web 2.0

What should be the role of marketing in the semantic web? Should there be any? According to the W3C, the semantic web is about common data formats that make it easy to integrate and combine data from diverse sources. It's about mapping ideas expressed in human language to data in a way that facilitates automatic processing, where software can programmatically comprehend how different pieces of data are related. It's a web behind the web of animated banner ads and branded UI designs.

Like fashion and architecture, web design enjoys an ever changing ebb and flow as trends become popular, become mainstream, and then become passé. To maintain a modern and aesthetically-pleasing look, web designers should examine current trends, estimate their staying power, and implement those techniques that will have the best and longest effects.

This document catalogs the many tools and tactics available for corporate web strategy in 2008. Even if your strategy or resource limitations restrict you from entering all spaces, awareness of the changes in our digital landscape are critical. This document is intended for decision makers roles such as CMO/VP/Director of Web and Marketing.

The Web helps us make better decisions based on us doing often very detailed research. But certain decisions don't require any research at all.

Fireclick, an industry leading provider of web analytics services, is proud to introduce the world's first publicly-available web analytics benchmark index. The Fireclick Index provides an objective comparison of key metrics across a variety of segments. Compare the performance of your online business to the many successful industry leading web sites using Fireclick today!

Although there are many forms of Web Monetization (I've listed out nearly 15 forms), the newest iteration of web marketing: widgets, haven't yet fully cashed in. Widget, Gadgets, Applications, Canvas Pages, Embeds, it goes on and one. One thing is clear, the rate of widgets continues to increase, take for example Facebook's application platform has over 15,000, 20,000 applications in just about 9 months. Granted, many of those are slightly tweaked clones of each other, the top 100 widgets clearly has adoption. In some cases, there are sophisticated companies developing widgets, the RockYou's and Slides of the world can really zero in and focus, or take the garage developers such as the two Russian developers who created Scrabulouos, or lastly, the big corporations or interactive firms that are getting in on the action -often with limited success. Yet, how do we monetize widgets? There's only a few ways, some tied back to traditional methods, and some leaning on the new media.

You're an individual who is responsible for the long term direction of a website, and meets the requirements of business, community, and technology. Part of your role is to keep your website profitable, even if it doesn't generate direct revenue streams.

Traditional Web Marketing needs to evolve, and this post intends to kick start the next generation.

Clicky Web Analytics is simply the best way to monitor, analyze, and react to your blog or web site's traffic in real time.

The Usage Lifecycle describes how far a person has progressed in using your web application, helping to identify the hurdles someone needs to overcome to become regular, passionate users.

About web page content writing

Findable. Scannable. Readable. Concise. Layered. We know much these days about how to make Web content usable-thanks to experts such as Robert Horn, Jakob Nielsen, Ginny Redish, and Gerry McGovern. What we don't understand as well, however, is how to make content win users over to take the actions we want them to take or have the perceptions we want them to have. We don't understand how to make Web content both usable and persuasive. I, by no means, intend to imply that we should sacrifice the usability of content to make it more persuasive. Truly winning content must be both.

Welcome to the weekend Web, where people are spending a bigger slice of time online via wireless devices - and using a different set of sites than during the workweek. "At Google, we see the majority of our desktop traffic [in the US] during weekdays," says Matt Waddell, chief of staff for Google Mobile. "On mobile, the situation is completely reversed." Mobile browsing surged 89% in the past year, with mobile page views increasing by 127%, according to researcher M:Metrics. The increase reflects growing availability of all-you-can eat data plans and increasingly sophisticated handheld devices such as the Apple iPhone.

Gen Y is taking over. The generation of young adults that's compromised of the children of Boomers, Generation Jones, and even some Gen X'ers, is the biggest generation since the Baby Boomers and three times the size of Gen X. As the Boomers fade into retirement and Gen Y takes root in the workplace, we're going to see some big changes ahead, not just at work, but on the web as a whole.

BTBuckets is a free web-segmentation tool that allows sites to create user clusters based on their behavior. These clusters can then be integrated with your adserver, CMS, web analytics or any other site tool to create a richer user experience

This article highlights 5 further principles, heuristics and approaches for effective web design - approaches which, used properly, can lead to more sophisticated design decisions and simplify the process of perceiving presented information.

Organizations take time to change and adapt. That's the one big lesson I've learned since I started in the web business back in 1994. It's easy to stand on the outside and pontificate about what needs to be done. It's much harder to drive the necessary change within an organization, no matter how well managed that organization is. And the larger the organization is the harder that change becomes.

I've written about this before, but new reports keep reinforcing the point that most organizations don't know what to make of their Web Analytics, meaning they can't take action to improve their site based on the information they have. And while the best bet in these situations is simply to hire an expert guide, that may not be an option for you (or maybe you're just a hard-core DIY-er when it comes to website improvement). If that's the case, here is a quick and dirty 5 step process to get you started: