Warmest Greetings,

:: Tuesday, December 30, 2003 ::

Today I did what every mom lives for. I took two 13 year olds and a 10 year old TO THE MALL. As soon as we got there. I'll repeat. AS SOON AS WE GOT THERE, the 13 year olds became totally obsessed with every teenage male within sight. I watched as they, both girls, squealed and gasped at heaven knows what. When I asked if they were seeing any of their friends, they said they hadn't spotted anyone they knew. But, they had a crush on "the cute one there" and "see that guy" 147 times in just under 12 minutes flat.

Three hours later I was hanging in there pretty well. I learned to walk with my son a discreet distance from the girls so as not to embarress them. My son and I scoured a store for PlayStation 2 games without an "M" (for Mature. Meaning, violence and much testosterone. What that has to do with maturity, I couldn't tell you.) And we ended our trip with 6 runs up and down the makeup aisle of CVS searching for blue mascara.

The big news in SEO-land is pretty focused on the calm before the SEO Storm of 2004. All hell is going to break loose and my bet is it will begin with an announcement from Yahoo!. There's new engines popping up and existing ones tweaking and polishing up what they already have. I found some usability problems with the new one, Ay-up both in functionality and the front-end. Liesl and Jax are blowing them away with Mooter. It reminds me of Teoma, which I also like.

Google is boring compared to these new entries.

Did you know that usability isn't always about what works well, but is often about what is more interesting to the user?

Speaking of interesting, guess who else was added to the new SEO blog, SEO Roundtable, as a contributing author? It's none other than Phil Craven. Barry (RustyBrick) has been rounding up forums folks to talk about trends, news, happenings and smartly decided to round up forums owners and/or moderators as reporters. Getting them all to live peacefully on the same blog ought to make for run reading next year!

In my travels I came across this blog that also covers search engines. It's called Everything Else. Unlike my blog, this one is more in line with the spirit of true blogging in that it feeds into, and from, the blog Collective.

Web designers may like watching others do it. Zeldman.com writes about their 3rd redesign in a year.

More tomorrow.
Because I'm definitely not going to the Mall.

:: posted by Kim Krause Berg on 12/30/2003 09:36:32 PM

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