This week I've been personally invested in Gwen Bell's The Best of 2009 Blog Challenge aka #best09. The idea is that each day in December you reflect on the past year and write about a different topic each day. Obviously you can write every day, or pick and choose which topics you want to cover. It's only been a few days but I've enjoyed reading through some of the blogs and tweets from people participating. Today the topic is:
December 3 Article. What's an article that you read that blew you away? That you shared with all your friends. That you Delicious'd and reference throughout the year.Since the topic is right up our alley, the SEOmoz crew decided to put together a list of our favorite articles from 2009. Some of these are search related, but many of them are not. Take a peek into our minds and I think you'll find it interesting the types of articles we love.
Scott
On the flip-side of the equation is this excellent article from the Washington Post illuminating the incredibly high cost of being poor. Fascinating and eye-opening.
Together they pack a one-two punch that sheds a ton of light on just how drastic wealth and class disparity can be, even in the U.S.
Pete
From an SEO standpoint, I've been getting a lot of mileage from Eric Enge's interview with Google Image search engineer Peter Linsley. It's a topic that doesn't get covered often, and the information in the article is incredibly useful.
This Smashing Mag post is Usability-oriented, but great stuff for any web person. Unlike many of these kinds of articles, almost every point in this one is directly actionable:
Of course, I also think this post was pretty good - the author is clearly a genius ;)
Danny
We Have Been De-googled! - One blog talks about the impact of being kicked out of Google for seemingly no reason.
Jen
Personally this short post helped me get my personal goals organized.
Rand
https://www.contrast.ie/blog/youre-just-getting-started/
https://www.zeldman.com/2009/11/24/on-self-promotion/
https://000fff.org/getting-to-the-customer-why-everything-you-think-about-user-centred-design-is-wrong/
https://www.smashingmagazine.com/the-death-of-the-blog-post/
https://www.everywhereist.com/borough-market-a-place-for-love-but-not-vegetarians/
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/11/06/business/economy/unemployment-lines.html?hp
https://www.inc.com/magazine/20091101/does-slow-growth-equal-slow-death.html?partner=fogcreek
https://cdixon.org/?p=1391
I'll continue to add to this list if any of the other team members decide to add theirs as well. 2009 has been a wonderful year for us and we look forward to many great articles in 2010. Please tell us about your favorite posts and articles from 2009. And we encourage you to be a part of the blog challenge!
By the way, there's still time to get your FREE SES Chicago Pass by purchasing a year of PRO! We've only got a few passes left, so you should probably hurry. SES just raised their prices to $1995 for a pass, so $799 for an entire year of PRO and a full-access SES Pass is an awesome deal (and if Chicago's not your thing, SES will let you exchange the pass for any SES Event in 2010).
Scott: The billionaire article was fascinating. I had never seen a billion dollars broken down like that. Now I know how I'm going to get my Lotus Elise. And Aston Martin. Just have to figure out where to park 'em...
Pete: Thank you for the link to the Smashing Magazine article. I'll be passing it along to clients.
Danny: Derek Sivers' article on education is fascinating. I love the idea of raising expectations - and I think Kimo might be a Zen master.
There's a story about a professor who goes to visit one (a Zen master, that is). The professor blathers on about how much he wants to learn from the master, as the master pours tea into his cup. When the cup begins to run over and spill all over the floor the professor jumps up and yells, "What do you think you're doing!?" To which the master responds: "How can I teach you anything when your cup is already full?"
Jen: Thanks for linking to the personal goal organization post - she included my personal life manifesto post in there. Cross-pollination, baby! (And thank you so much for organizing your team - this is a great post.)
Rand: The self-promotion piece is great. And a good reminder. I'll read the rest of your links soon.
Everyone, thank you for participating in #best09 - hope it was as fun for you creating as it has been for me administrating.
Ah, so many to choose from! Two of my favorites is Rand's "4 Essential SEO Infographics" because it sums up an SEO professional's work in really clear graphs. A picture paints a thousand words. The other one is MikeTek's Examining the Top 150 In-Linked Posts at SEOmoz because it really helps those that are just starting with SEOMoz's blog posts, and those that might have missed these Must-Read articles. Thanks for all the great work, guys.
the #1 post that Rand is linking to has to be the one covering:
Borough market - I have a stock of the very same Jamon Serrano (its serrano, not iberico FYI) - and they also have a STUNNING Manchego cheese, very hard to get outside of Spain - the prices are insane (probably 10x what I would pay back home) but worth it, if you spend any longer than a few months here in the UK.
Oh yeah - did I mention I Lived in Spain until late '07?
Dr. Pete, that usability article on smashing mag is AWESOME! Thanks.
For my own pick, I reference and send this one to people all the time:
https://www.seomoz.org/blog/perfecting-keyword-targeting-on-page-optimization
Yeah that Smashing link from Dr. Pete is awesome.
Agreed.
https://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/658 funny informative brilliant
Awesome links. Please more of these...
https://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_choice.html
If you have anything to do with design should have a look at this.
Then go here and try out the examples and see it in action:
https://whichtestwon.com/awards
(TED has changed my life btw, just wish i could afford to go to one)
Nicely grouped the useful articles here. I hope people could make use of these various link resources and still can be benefitted with awesome information through it.
Thanks for quoting them together here.
I really liked the "Billionaire" article Scott posted here.
Sadly, the majority of articles I remember from this year were from the Onion.
I need to read more.
Why sadly? The Onion is great! Although real news every now and then is probably good. :)
Rand, excellent NYTimes link to the unemployment graph. I hadn't seen that, but it makes me optimistic for the future! It's great to know that the jobless rate among white males ages 24 - 45 with a college degree was only around 4%. I also attribute the knowledge obtained from SEOmoz and all the members here to my ability to remain employable.
Thanks SEOmoz...my favorite link of 2009 is https://www.seomoz.org
Thank you for the post! I've got them all open in tabs. I intend on reading them all now and, if they're insightful, sticking them on Delicious. It's hard for me to have a favourite article of 2009. For some reason, I really enjoyed the two articles on Indexation Caps by Rand. They were really well written and genuinely interesting to read: Google's Indexation Cap
Here's just a list of some of my faves:
30 SEO Problems and the Tools to Solve Them (part 1 of 2)
What Deep Purple Can Teach You About SEO
Real Web Type in Real Web Context
32 Years in the Life of Alison & Jeff Radcliffe
I have plenty more, just head to my Delicious: traxor
Superb stuff :-)
Nice to see something a bit different on here and it's always good to read something non-seo once in a while!
Phil Zimbardo's TED talk on the psychology of evil.
if you remove good/evil from the equation, it provides an amazing blueprint and insight into creating sets of circumstances where predictable actions are likely to occur.
https://www.ted.com/talks/philip_zimbardo_on_the_psychology_of_evil.html
I worked with Phil Zimbardo for a couple of weeks one summer, and his face still haunts my dreams ;)
I really enjoyed the long post that rand proposed (https://000fff.org/getting-to-the-customer-why-everything-you-think-about-user-centred-design-is-wrong/) on the UCD process. There's a lot of truth in there (at least from what I experienced so far).
I was pretty disappointed with it. I feel like the guy writing it was making a lot of incorrect assumptions about user testing. It also did a poor job of conveying its actual message because it wasn't particularly well written - if you read the comments, a lot of people (myself included) got the wrong message from it because the guy didn't communicate what he was trying to say very well.
The whole thing may have made a lot of sense to people who have had bad experiences with user testing in the past, but its message doesn't make sense to the people who actually get a lot of value from user testing.
Basically, it did a great job of preaching to the choir, but the stated purpose was to tell you that what you've learned about UCD is wrong; it fails pretty spectacularly at that because it's very unconvincing.
I've read the comments. And of course there are mostly more than two opinions on topics like that. Especially when personal experience is involved. For what I've experienced I can only say that this article contains a lot of things that I would agree upon.
Well said Jmueller. I agree with you.