Happy Friday, MetaFans! We’re starting up a new segment on the MetaBlog that we’re calling “The Friday MetaBits.” We’re planning on keeping this as a quick, weekly post where we’ll share a few of the great links that we’ve been collecting over the course of the week. So let’s round em up!

1. Do You Want To Succeed At Social Media Or Social Media Marketing?

   It’s not such a simple question if you don’t understand the difference. Thanks to Chris Poterala for this one!

2. New Digg: Tips for Marketers

   If you haven’t heard yet, significant updates were recently pushed to Digg that digital marketers will definitely want to take note of.

3. 5 Web Design and Development Tools I Simply Can’t Live Without (and Why)

   My old MSU web professor put this post together! Great picks, Ethan! :)

4. Eye Tracking Study Shows Importance Of Search Snippets

   So it turns out that search result snippets are fixated over more than the result title and URL combined. So don’t forget to write your meta descriptions!!

5. The 4 Hardest Things About Conversion Optimization For Local Search

   Conversion Optimization is becoming the “industry benchmark” but there are still a lot of problems with tracking and optimizing conversions. This post gets the discussion going by reviewing some of the more difficult issues that arise.

6. How to Bluff Your Way Through Every Conversation About Which Programming Language is Best [Comic]

   And here’s a fun one for all you programming junkies! This comic involves dinosaurs AND Ruby On Rails – what more could you ask for?!?

7. The MetaSpring Blog Carnival: Issue 8 – Web Marketing

   And now it’s time for a little shameless self-promotion, if you didn’t check it out already – please head over to our most recent Blog Carnival for the a run down on some of the biggest news in Web Marketing for the month of August.

Well that’s all we have for you this week. Keep checking our Twitter and Facebook feeds for more daily news and updates!

Have a great weekend!

Well, there’s definitely no shortage of Web Marketing-related articles floating around the net. In getting ready for this month’s carnival, we had a heck of a time just narrowing down our options! There were a ton of great marketing posts and a fair amount of game-changing news articles to choose from, but we think we’ve captured a well rounded bunch. So check ‘em out!

The 17 Commandments of Setting Expectations in SEO

In SEO, we frequently come up against people whose expectations are WAY out of line, but handling those misguided expectations can be a challenge. That’s why Wil Reynolds of the Seer Interactive blog decided to poll the experts on how they do it, which led to the creation of this awesome post and PDF.

Official: Google Now Lets One Domain Dominate Search Results

Earlier this month, Google launched a significant change to the way they display search results from a single site. Previously, only two results from a single domain would appear on a single search result page. Now, Google is allowing more results for a single domain if the query indicates a “strong user interest in a particular domain.” Google hopes that these improvements, “will help users find deeper results from a single site, while still providing diversity on the results page.” A lot of people are skeptical though, claiming this new algorithm creates an even large brand bias – what do you think? Has Google turned to the dark side?

The Predictive Power of Social Media

An interesting post from Dan Woods, of Forbes.com, discusses how cluster analysis of social media content can help us find the “unknown unknowns,” i.e., questions we wouldn’t think to ask.

Visualize this type of analysis as a display of circles that get larger and brighter red as the relationships get stronger and as the cluster is found in more and more documents. The circle gets bigger as the strength of the relationships grow; a brighter shade of red indicates the amount of documents involved. [...] The predictive payoff comes from seeing when the circles start to get bigger and redder faster and begin to provide clues to future trends.

Niche Analysis: Where to Start?

SEO campaigns typically begin with some sort of website analysis or audit, but depending on the nature of the site, it could be harder to get answers than you think. Dmitry Gushchin, guest blogger for the Daily SEO Tip blog, suggests a few nifty tools and techniques for analyzing these niche websites.

New SEOmoz Web App Now in Beta for PRO Members

If you’re not already an SEOmoz Pro subscriber, we highly recommend it as a great resource for some very powerful SEO tools and uber-informative pro-webinars. As if those features weren’t enough – they just launched the Beta version of their SEOmoz Web App, an automatic data tracking and recommendation tool with multiple campaign tracking abilities. We set up a few of our campaigns and have already discovered some great areas for improvement. Check out the post for a complete overview of how the app works.

Buzz Kill

TWiT‘s Leo Laporte recently had a falling out with the “vast echo chamber” that we call Social Media after he discovered that none of his Google Buzz posts from the last month had been seen by anyone – not even by himself. “No one noticed,” he said, continuing with:

It makes me feel like everything I’ve posted over the past four years on Twitter, Jaiku, Friendfeed, Plurk, Pownce, and, yes, Google Buzz, has been an immense waste of time. I was shouting into a vast echo chamber where no one could hear me because they were too busy shouting themselves.

While Leo’s given up on social media, we’re pretty sure that it’s here to stay, and that there is now and always has been significant value in keeping a presence. So what do you think? Is social media worth it??

Next Month’s Issue: Ruby On Rails

Thanks to all of you who submitted posts this month! We appreciate hearing from you and hope you’ll tune in next time as well. Our next carnival will focus on our favorite web framework: Ruby On Rails! Ruby On Rails is a powerful open-source framework, “optimized for programmer happiness” – and we sure do love it! If you’d like to submit a post for next month’s Rails carnival, please send it to media@metaspring.com.

The world famous Ann Arbor Art Fair is here! With booths and displays setup throughout Ann Arbor, we’d like to get in on the action and showcase some of our artwork from the past few months. When the cruel weather of the midwestern winter and spring lured us back to bed each morning, these were the projects that kept us motivated.

More On the Way…

We’re well into Summer now with some great projects in the works. Make sure to follow our latest musings, launches and news on our Twitter account or Facebook page!

A well designed site can never really get off the ground without a little development love behind the scenes. We have some top-notch developers here at MetaSpring and they like to keep us up to date on the latest news in the industry. It seems like there’s always something to talk about with new apps and methodologies sprouting up all the time – so let’s get to it, before these stories are old news!

Google Bringing Accelerometer Support to Chromium

UberGizmo reports that Google is bringing accelerometer support to Chromium, an important move of note for developers. An accelerometer gives a device, such as a video game controller or iPad, orientation awareness which can be used for information input. With more and more devices built featuring accelerometers, developers will be able to craft new applications and programs for interacting with the user. Google, recognizing the significance of accelerometers into he future, has launched support for Chromium, the open source project behind Google Chrome.

Do Web Designers and Web Developers Need to Be Enemies?

Having trouble keeping your Design and Development teams on good terms? Rarely is there a project in which designers and developers see eye to eye immediately. And sometimes that’s okay, but other times…watch out. We’re fortunate enough to have a very tight knit group here at MetaSpring, with designers and developers getting through projects relatively hassle free. But we’ve heard the horror stories and so has Peter from Agriya. In this well-written post, he identifies 4 ways to keep your designers and developers on the same page.

Increase Productivity by Creating PHP Helper Functions

Whether its a new trash compactor or iPhone, time-saving tools are always important. This is even more true for development teams, as we’re often trying to create clean and efficient code in very short periods of time. This post by Michael Watson of Nettuts+, outlines several PHP helpers that cut down on repetitive tasks and help to streamline the development process.

Web Designer as The Artist, Scientist And Philosopher

As a web evolutionary, you must wear many hats. On any particular day, you are called to inspire others with colors and shapes, while also balancing the pragmatics of functionality and answering to the almighty dollar. The unique position of a web professional is profiled in this wonderful post from Smashing Magazine’s Alexander Dawson. It’s so good, you may have seen it on Twitter a couple times already, but if not, do yourself a favor and check it out. It’s also a great post for inspiration when dealing with troublesome clients.

Mobile Developer Economics 2010: The Migration of Developer Mindshare

According to a survey by Vision Mobile’s Andreas Constantinou, developers are moving towards the Android platform with great ambition and focus. The survey reveals some telling tendencies as well. As the article points out,

A mindshare migration has taken place for mobile developers away from the incumbent platforms Symbian, Java ME and Windows Phone, while a substantial number of PC software developers have flocked to iPhone and Android

The reason for this migration might be attributable to the large market penetration, speed of development, potential to make money, and low cost dev tools as reasons for initially choosing Android.

Bootstrapping a Prototype-based Object-oriented Language in 44 Lines of Code

Ever dreamed of creating your own programming language? As Aaron Gough tells us, it’s slightly easier than you think. In a 44 lines of Ruby code, Aaron walks you through the implementation of a prototype-based object-oriented model without using any of Ruby’s object-oriented features. The project starts with storing a Hash and ends up with a micro-language that, while not pretty, definitely works.

Next Month’s Issue: Web Marketing

Thanks to all of you who submitted posts this month! We appreciate hearing from you and hope you’ll tune in next time as well. Our next carnival will focus on Web Marketing, a topic we’re very familiar with. As you’ll see in this blog over the coming weeks, we’re growing our Web Marketing services, building on past successes with clients like Amish Tables, FindItLocal411.com and Ashcom Technologies. Let us know if you’re interested in learning more about our SEO, SEM, Social Media and Marketing ideas. At MetaSpring, we connect all the dots!

Our first MetaSpring blog post in February of 2008 promised that our blog would act as a hub for communications between our company and the rest of the world. Since then, we’ve tried to stayed true to that commitment while also implementing some changes improve this communication.

The majority of these improvements have been pretty abstract, in terms of how we approach blog posts and what content is discussed. Well, we’ve recently launched a physical evolution of the blog in order to help our readers find the information that’s most relevant to them.

Our Creative Director, Ian Wilson, who oversaw most of the changes, explains:

We do a lot of different things for our clients and we like to share our knowledge and experiences in those fields with our readers through the blog. As our readership grew and we began to dedicate more energy to keeping the blog up to date, we quickly realized that breaking our blog out into more discrete categories would help our readers to more easily get to the content they want. On top of that we were also itching to update the design of our blog, so with that in mind we put together the three sections to focus on their specific topics and give our readers a little more eye candy.”

As Ian mentioned, the MetaSpring blog will now be broken up into four distinct categories, each with its own RSS feed (we’ll still have the cumulative feed available on the blog home page – so make sure to update your subscriptions):

• 

  Design

  The design process involves a lot of hard work and dedication in a constantly evolving industry. In this section, we’ll share advice on overcoming obstacles and keeping up with trends in the design world.

• 

  Development

  New trends in web and application development are constantly popping up, so in this section, you’ll find posts on new trends and technologies, code snippets, industry news, and a lot of Ruby-related goodness.

• 

  SEO & Marketing

  We are constantly exploring the marketing aspects of the web, and this is the home of our ruminations. Posts in this section will illustrate ways to capitalize on new methods to market your website or yourself on the web.

• 

  Company

  Are you a MetaFan? One of the best parts of a company blog are the conversations that spark up between the public and the organization. This portion of our blog will highlight some of the great things happening at MetaSpring, such as new job postings and site launches.

This new layout is designed to facilitate better discussion so if you are having any difficulties, please let us know. As we continue to adjust the style of the blog, you can look forward to the same high quality content. We’re happy that you’re here and look forward to many great conversations. Talk to you soon!