MarketingSherpa has produced yet another fascinating ecommerce guide which includes 23 full-color eyetracking heatmaps, graphic indications of where the eyes of testers are drawn on typical e-commerce product and search pages.

The results cannot be easily summarized here but some of the findings include

• Website visitors tend not to look at big, block images, so don’t put interactive elements, such as navigation in these images.
• People don’t look intensely at images. Images in general are used as “anchors”, which serve as starting points for a scanning pattern.
• The more personal the image, the more powerful the impact can be. Images of people draw attention more than other images. Photos of employees do better than spokes model types. While human images help to attract attention, it can distract from more important page elements too, so it’s an indication that testing is important.

BlogChina, better known as Bokee.com in China has recently organized the first beauty contest for bloggers.

The winners are determined via online voting. In addition to their physical appearance, the participants were ranked on a variety of other criteria including the quality of their blog postings and the popularity of their blogs.

The beauty contest attracted controversy when one finalist posted semi-nude photos of herself on her blog.

Apparently there are more bloggers in China than the Malaysian population. There were more than 33 million bloggers in China by the end of the third quarter of 2005, according to local research firm Analysys.

One thing that I’d like to do more in this blog is to add more photos to spice things up a little.

Since I’m not ready to shell out money for custom or stock photography, finding a royalty free photo sites should solve the problem. So if you are like me who are looking for free photos, you can head over to Yotophoto or Everystockphoto for some free photos you can use on your blog or site.

Yotophoto or Everystockphoto do not actually store those photos themselves but instead they are obtained from various sources around the Internet including Google Maps, Wikipedia, Flickr, and other stock photography sites.

MarketingExperiments.com is offering a free report about an experiment they’ve conducted which shows how a few changes to a landing page resulted in a 40.7% increase in the conversion rate.

Such report would normally cost you something. I remember purchasing an ebook about optimizing conversion rates from MarketingSherpa.com which cost me USD299! That’s the most expensive ebook, or any Internet marketing book that I’ve ever purchased in my life.

Anyway this report from MarketingExperiments.com won’t cost you a thing. You don’t even have to provide an email address. The report is called “Optimizing Landing Pages 2006″.

Here’s a fun thing to do on a lazy sunday in front of the computer

Paul Sadowski has constructed a tool that allows you to get astrological information based on your exact birth date. Even if you don’t believe in this stuff, it’s still interesting for the statistics included on each page, such as the U.S. population, birth and divorce rates at the time you were born.

Visit PaulSadoski.com

[via CNET]

Just two quick links to posts I find interesting recently:

Technorati Tags Dominate Yahoo Search Results

Google Crawling AdWords Landing Pages for Quality

Will video ads slow down my site? Do I have to pay for bandwidth?

Are video ads intrusive to my users?

How will I be paid for video ads?

Will I earn more from video ads?

Those are some of the questions (and more) answered by Google in their blog about the new video ads. Check it out here.

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch believes that this new ad format won’t be popular for advertisers, publishers or viewers.

I think it’s still early to decide what the future may hold for video ads but anyway here are the reasons why Michael thinks so.

First, Google needs to eat its own dogfood. It won’t be placing these ads on their own sites for now. Why? Perhaps their early testing showed that consumers don’t want to click on these nearly as often as significantly less intrusive text ads. Or perhaps Google just doesn’t want to sully its super-clean site with this stuff. Either way, without Google search, advertisers will be significantly less interested in the product.

Google recently unveils a Linux version of the Picasa photo organizer.

Picasa is a desktop application that helps you find, edit and share all your pictures on your PC.

The Linux version of the software shares nearly all the features of its Windows version counterpart. It utilizes the open-source technology called Wine, which acts as a compatibility layer for running Windows programs on Linux.

According to Google, this has resulted Picasa to run faster on Linux as compare to when using an emulator or a virtual machine.

Picasa can be found at: http://picasa.google.com/index.html

Apparently that’s the case according to a recent press release by Microsoft.

MSN® Spaces is the most widely used blogging service worldwide with more than 100 million unique visitors, according to data released today by comScore Networks Inc. of Reston, Va., an independent Internet audience measurement and consulting company.

comScore World Metrix’s proprietary audience report for April 2006 showed the total number of unique visitors to MSN Spaces has more than doubled in the past 12 months, from 41.65 million to 101 million.* Figures compiled by comScore Media Metrix indicate that during April 2006, nearly one in seven Internet users worldwide had visited MSN Spaces.