From Before & After magazine. It’s part of their process to collect email addresses so you have to provide an email address to get the document. However, I find their monthly how-to emails often interesting, not pushy.

This article shows a series of basic steps you can follow to take a photograph and extract many different possible color palettes. Picking colors can be hard, especially for business people on a budget. Even with a budget, it helps to know the color picking process if you manage or hire designers. In this case, their article shows how to use colors in one element of a document, a photograph, to then extract palettes from a color wheel. It’s a very good primer on that process.

UPDATE: This document on how to pick colors that work together also works great with an online color wheel to pick analogs, tetrads, and so on. Color Scheme Designer, for example, lets you define an RGB color value (to the lower right of the circle on the left side of their page) and then all its different color relations. Color Scheme Designer also lets you see how your color choices look to color-impaired people. You still have to pick your colors and ensure they work together in a palette, but an online color wheel can make the process faster and easier.

From Salon. If you have not figured it out already, the avatar, the small thumbnail sized picture you use on Facebook and LinkedIn, among other places, can say alot about you. This blog post describes six different issues to consider as you pick and change avatars.

All of this is brilliant and powerful, exciting and motivating. But I’m also worried. I’m worried about the rhetoric we use when we talk about technology. Given what we’ve experienced and what we witness today, we tend to believe that these technologies are the great equalizers, that they can help ANYONE participate, that the technologies in and of themselves can revitalize democracy. In other words, we tend to believe in a certain utopian myth of the internet as the savior. What if this weren’t true?”

From “The Not-So-Hidden Politics of Class Online”, a presentation by danah boyd. Found through a NYTimes.com Blogwise item, Does Social Networking Breed Social Division?.

Both the presentation and the NYTimes.com post are important to read. However, the research points up something that should be rather obvious: people associate online with the same people they associate with offline. The class divisions in any society will be carried into the online world. Technology is neutral. If social equality is the goal, and I would sign up for that goal, perhaps technology needs to expand to make connections online that might be impossible in the real world.

These items also point up the flip side of some technology policies, for example, Facebook’s invitation only model. Building a service on invitation naturally reinforces the carryover of our offline social networks online. But it also makes it difficult to break out and identify and connect with people who share our interests but would not connect with offline. Facebook groups help break the walled garden dynamic. But you have to find a group, join, and then participate actively to make friends outside your real world friends.

Perhaps humans also should create technology that passively suggests connections based upon participation (e.g. key words in posts, group affiliations) and level of activity (e.g. suggesting only people who are active online). People could choose to not connect. But they also could choose to connect with confidence there was sufficient basis for connection based on interests.

What disturbed me were the disparaging comments about people who use the other service, in this case, MySpace, made by the teenagers boyd interviewed. While it is human to engage in us versus them thinking, teachers and parents should work to balance that way of thinking with the equally real notion that we live in a big world with lots of people who are very different from us, that we are indeed equal at the human level, that we should be open to others even if they are not like us or even disagree with what we think and do.

From Need Something? Talk To My Right Ear in Science Daily. Found through HiveLogic.

Best part is that the tests were done in a noisy nightclub asking people for cigarettes. Probably the worst place to have a conversation. This research suggests that when you pitch your clients, you should always directly face their right ear.

From AllFacebook. This article nicely describes how to take advantage of Facebook for your business. It is extremely comprehensive, an excellent how-to and checklist for your pages.

In reading this, however, it struck me that Facebook does (or soon will do) everything a good corporate website must. A Facebook business page is a second website. Only it has better tools to connect with customers and a platform to expose your business to many more people than a search engine (see also John Battelle’s Searchblog article, The Conversation is Shifting).

From the Groundswell blog at Forrester Research. While the topline is “Social Media isn’t just for teenagers,” it is striking how many business people currently read and participate in social media, from blogs to Facebook to Twitter, to connect with other businesses to do business. Social media has become mainstream.

From Smashing Magazine. A basic but thorough list of what should be in a portfolio website. Includes links to articles about creating an online portfolio and examples of excellent online portfolios. Basically this is a great article that covers a range of issues related to creating an effective portfolio website: what’s included, how to create one, and examples to inspire and give you ideas for your site.

From Global Neighbourhoods. This is a fascinating interview with Jeremiah Owyang, currently at social media analyst at Forrester. For one, Owyang has built his job and online following in three short years, starting as a minion at Hitachi, developing small social media projects based on clear business goals, projects that were shut down when he left.

Also, Owyang points out that his online brand follows him from job to job; it is an asset his current and future employers get by hiring him. This is an excellent way to describe one mostly hidden aspect of social media: for some people, developing an online brand is as important as the more obvious professional skills they have, for example, as a programmer or marketer.

I also like very much his comment that his real goal is to help businesses connect with their customers online, something I strive for professionally and through this blog. As a guy with six brothers and sisters, from the beginning my life has been about connecting with people.

That tool is blogging, though small businesses with blogs are still a distinct minority. A recent American Express survey found that only 5 percent of businesses with fewer than 100 employees have blogs. Other experts put the number slightly higher.”

From the New York Times (free registration required; stories available free for short time).  Part of this article is typical feel-good roundup. But it also highlights the key reasons smaller businesses should set up a blog, especially if one or more people in the company like to write. I slightly disagree with one of their sources who says companies with a product have less of a reason to blog. In fact, many people who use products are very interested in how a particular product is created, how it evolves, how it is maintained. More important, blogs allow customers and prospects to comment and engage the business. That’s always valuable.

At its root, SEO is an inexact science. It’s a world where we follow best practices and use our best judgment to make decisions on what to do next. This is one reason why the SEO community is very open, with experienced SEOs regularly sharing their knowledge on their own blogs or on sites like Search Engine Watch.”

From Search Engine Watch. This is excellent advice and he goes into some detail about how an SEO log might work. Certainly there is a lot of detail that can be captured as you tweak all the different elements of a website, as well as PPC campaigns and the rest.

From GrokDotCom. This is a really excellent discussion about the possible reasons businesses rely on instinct rather than hard data to make business decisions.

I believe it is culture: people start and run businesses based upon interacting directly with customers, in person and on the phone and by email. The quantitative skills required for optimization and testing typically are found in the accounting department and possibly a marketing research department. Most staffers don’t have an analytic background and so don’t necessarily think in terms of data and testing for marketing materials. They get that through customer contacts. The quantitative research function, if it exists at all, is part of business planning, not necessarily day to day marketing, which is what this article argues is needed.

From my client experience, aside from the cultural issues, the big problem is what to measure. I tell clients to start first with what they want to accomplish. It can be a small goal, for example, to get a site visitor to click on a button or signup for email. Or retweet their tweets. That tells you what to measure. And also to limit what you measure to one or two things to start. And to keep some sort of log file so you can measure results, recheck your assumptions and goals, and all the good stuff that comes from tracking your online marketing.

But this process does not have to be terribly complex. Indeed, complexity in measuring online marketing is the kiss of death. The best results come from incremental changes and optimization based on testing different ways to incent and motivate people to interact with your marketing.

Photo courtesy of Jon Clark’s Flickr stream.

From SEOBook. (If you don’t know, ‘longtail’ refers to less frequently used key words and phrases used to search online.) This is a fairly quick discussion about how to improve the search rankings for a new website when competitor sites obviously rank highter. But it also works for long time websites, as well. The trick is to provide many paths into your site, not just the obvious paths from ranking high (or trying to rank high) with obvious search terms.

From HubSpot. This looks mostly like a way for HubSpot to find clients. But anything that generates useful data helps. It’s a fresh way to look at your website by itself and in relation to competitor websites.

Photo from katecat.

From Mashable. Six basic steps to take when putting video online. Really doesn’t address the main issue with online video which is production. It’s a fairly complex task to create an online video file. And the ability to organize your information within the video, never mind tell a compelling story, is another hurdle. Once you have your video, however, these steps are useful to keep in mind.

But I hear less about the “why”: Why use Twitter at all, when there are already so many other distractions to your workday, or your home life? Why bother talking to people you won’t ever meet, when you have real-world friends to keep up with? What kind of relationship can you hope to form on Twitter, anyway? Is there something wrong with you? Do you have ADD? Are you lonely, anti-social, weird? Or are you just needy?”

From Marketing Profs. Her four reasons are good for individuals and businesses. Plus the comments are equally interesting. Mostly this is a good case study for how businesses can use Twitter to gauge interest and value of their offerings.