Posted by willcritchlow In last week's Whiteboard Friday "Kill the Head or Chase the Tail" , Rand and I started by discussing how to gain true insight into what kind of keywords are leading people to discover your brand and ultimately driving conversions for your business (clue: it's probably not branded search phrases, despite what your analytics reports are telling you). Today, I'm going to demonstrate one way of measuring this more accurately in Google Analytics.

2010 is the year we dive into open source design. We’ve dipped our toes in this pool before (icon contest, graphic design component for Trac tickets, header refresh contest, etc.), but this year we’re going to cannonball and make a big splash. Here’s what you need to know if you want to get involved.

A list for all seasons. Developers have the wp-hackers mailing list to discuss core and plugin code. Sometimes UI/UX stuff comes up and gets discussed there, but there is a whole universe of discussion around navigation labels, gradients, button styling, layouts, alignment, etc. that would be clutter on wp-hackers. Designers need a list to call their own, and now we have one. You can sign up for the wp-ui list to discuss ways to improve the interface or user experience of WordPress, and to discuss progress on design-related projects for the open source project, like the design challenges we’re going to have.

Design Challenges. We learned a lot from the icon design and header refresh contests, and we want to do these kind of open design challenges on a regular basis to give UI/UX designers who want to contribute to the WordPress open source project more opportunities to do so. If we could do one per month, that would be ideal, keeping the challenges relatively bite-sized to allow potential contributors an easy way to get involved at first. As each challenge is posted, people can use the list to bounce ideas off each other and work toward optimal solutions. I’m hoping the design challenges will evolve to be less contest and more collaboration. We’ll announce the first one before the end of January, so if you’re interested, please sign up for the list! (Hint: one will likely be a touch up to the Right Now dashboard module, to improve the information design, and there will be a couple of screen layout challenges coming up as well.)

Distributed Usability Testing. We started to try this out last year, and several dozen usability professionals volunteered to help get the program going, but a combination of scheduling and infrastructure issues combined to stall the progress. Having the “UI/UX contributor team” infrastructure in place, starting with the mailing list, will make it much easier to get this project going again.

Chit-chat. The weekly developer chats in IRC at #wordpress-dev have been very productive. We’ve created an IRC room at #wordpress-ui on irc.freenode.com so that we can have the same kind of “water cooler” for UI/UX contributors as for core code contributors. In addition to being a place where you can drop in and discuss core UI/UX (note: this room will not be a place to discuss the design of blog themes, it’s to discuss the design of the Wordpress application itself), we’ll set up a weekly chat. Choosing a day and time for the chats will probably be the first discussion on the mailing list.

A blog of our own. Once again, taking a page from the code contributor infrastructure, we’ll set up a blog for UI/UX updates, announcements, progress reports, etc. This will be on WordPress.org in the nearish future, and will be announced to the mailing list when it is live.

So, if you want to become a contributor to core WordPress by using your design skills, join the wp-ui mailing list and get ready for a fun year!

Google and AOL are up while Yahoo!, Bing and Ask.com are down from November in Nielsen's December 2009 search rankings . But let's face it, AOL is fueled by Google, so pretty much all of the gains belong to Google. When you compare year-over-year numbers, things are pretty much abysmal for everyone but Google, who gained, and Bing, which remained steady. Here are the stats from November: Here are the stats from December 2008 .

If you are running an AdWords campaign for a website on a shared domains, then you'll want to be aware of a new policy for displaying those URLs in your ads . From now on, the ad must show more clearly the destination a user will be heading to should they click on your ad. Let's say you have a blog at Blogspot. Perhaps you sell your handmade goods on there and you want to drive traffic. Your ad now needs to show the Blogspot name in the URL, like this: exampleblogname.

When I first started blogging, I made a huge list of topics I knew quite a bit about and could help others with. Unfortunately, my mistake was one that many beginning bloggers and writers know all too well when you spread your knowledge too thin across multiple subjects, you end up not being particularly well known for any of them. Instead, your writing comes across as a mish-mash of thoughts and ramblings, and neither you, nor your readers,

by Mike Krumboltz The devastating earthquake in Haiti has alarmed the world. Concerned users have turned to the Web for answers regarding the magnitude 7.0 quake. Below, a roundup of some of the top questions we're seeing on Yahoo! Search. Where is Haiti? The island nation of Haiti is located in the Caribbean Sea, east of Cuba and Jamaica. Haiti lies on the western part of the island, and the Dominican Republic lies on the east.

Less than half (43%) of Americans say they read a daily newspaper, either online or in print almost everyday, according to a new report from Adweek Media and Harris Interactive . Nearly three-quarters (72%) of Americans say they read one at least once a week while 81 percent read a daily newspaper at least once a month. Ten percent say they never read a daily newspaper. One reason for the decline of the daily newspaper is the aging of its audience.

Everyone's Tweeting these days. Name a celeb and we bank they have a Twitter account. Last month, the NY Post reported that Kim Kardashian makes 10K for endorsed tweets. And a quick visit to Twitter's search directory, WeFollow , this morning confirmed the number one Twitterer as Ashton Kutcher , with over four million followers. But if you're a Twitter nerd (meaning: you "follow" but no one "follows" you back), listen up. According to Amit Singhal,

Traditionally, the term "database" as used by technical professionals implied "relational, row-based, transactional." These implied extra characteristics do us a disservice when speaking of databases in a high-volume environment where there must be several types of databases deployed, some of which aren't relational, some of which aren't row-based, and most of which aren't transactional.

In the coming weeks we are upgrading the Microsoft adCenter API Version 6 Sandbox+ environment. If you use the API, you need to know about the upgrade in advance because you must reset your adCenter password for the Sandbox+ environment. Your Production environment credentials do not need to be changed. To reset your Sandbox+ Password: On or before January 19, you'll receive the password reset e-mail with instructions. To continue to access your Sandbox+ account,