links for 2008-11-01

"The site features animated guides who help visitors navigate a virtual mall and interact with shopkeepers and other consumers. Kids can design and print advertisements for a shoe store, uncover suspicious claims in an ad, and guess the retail price of various candies based on their supply, demand, and production costs. One game that has players match the features of various cell phones with certain audiences illustrates the principles of target marketing; another allows visitors to compare sales pitches from three pizza joints as it explains competition".

"On Thursday, Google added this warning to the search page: 'Google 2001 will no longer be available after tomorrow.' The 2001 search was put online as part of Google’s recent 10th birthday celebration, and was never planned to be a permanent feature". Phew - I found an interweb without currybetdotnet on it to be plain wrong...

Some really interesting stuff here it seems, but *surely* skewed away from the mainstream by having used Amazon's Mechanical Turk as the vector for recruiting the test subjects?

Locates Movable Type in c.1050CE - insert your own blogging platform punchline.

"Tied into this is search engine optimization (SEO) and search ranking. If the change is not carefully planned out and done correctly, there is a business risk that the site could lose visibility it has gained over the years. A possible unintended consequence could be lost referrals to the site from search engines, as well as reduced advertising revenue."