Sonia Zjawinski from Wired posted a photo gallery called How Google Got Its Colorful Logo. It provides an interesting peak into some of the ideas that graphic designer Ruth Kedar bounced off Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page while designing Google's now famous logo.

At Clear Ink we check out a lot of different social networking sites to connect with our friends and look for advertising opportunities, but there eventually reaches a point where all of the different accounts, contact lists and other information start to get difficult to keep. I'm currently signed up for Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Blogger, Flickr, YouTube, Yelp, Hi5 and a bunch others that I can't remember. Some of them send me notifications all day and I use some of them so infrequently that I don't even remember my passwords. As social networking sites get more and more popular it seems like the fragmentation is going to get worse and worse.

What I really need is a single place where I can check the activity of all these different services. I've tried subscribing to RSS feeds from the different services and setting up iGoogle widgets but I really feel like an industry-leading solution is going to emerge in the next year. I saw a post earlier this month on Slashdot called Social Network Aggregation, Killer App in 2008?. Plaxo and some other players seems like its headed in this direction, pulling together information about you from other sites. Today Google announced its new Social Graph API which it hopes will help set some standards for relating profile information across different web sites that developers can use to make social network aggregator and other applications. Here's Google's video explaining it.

The folks over at Smashing Magazine have written a great, highly-researched article called Google PageRank: What Do We Know About It?. It explains what Google PageRank is, how it's calculated, and why we should care.

I was recently reading a post about Google Website Optimizer and how they're changing the meaning of optimization. Anil Batra did a great job of looking at what optimization is and what it's commonly referred to, namely organic search optimization or SEO. He also explained multivariate testing as well and how it is being referred to as website optimization by google. Having a background in both SEO and multivariate testing I think Google is definitely creating unnecessary confusion amongst analysts who know SEO and multivariate testing...even though Google was probably trying to make it easy for people who don't know about either.

1. They're breaking existing nomenclature in the industry by naming a multivariate testing tool an optimizer.

2. While multivariate testing strives to optimize a certain conversion event by finding the optimal web page, it harly optimizes a whole website at once...unless you sell one product or have one objective and you have 1-2 pages in your site. Therefore using website in the name s equally erroneous.

I think it's better to stay within the accepted nomenclature since their product category is not new or challenging conventions, only challenging price points.

Google is clearly trying to expand their reach in the space by using a simple name since few people are familiar with multivariate testing. And I also assume there is some hidden agenda for google to dissuade customers from SEO since it makes more room for paid search...but I always assume google has an evil plot brewing.