This is an amazing tool for search engine optimization and site optimization in general.

Here’s the ultimate epilog to a story of colossal IT project failure that made headlines in the national popular press 10 years ago – the ill-fated baggage system at Denver International Airport. It’s a good reminder of why it’s best to keep IT projects small, to deploy as soon as possible in order to start getting a return, and to make incremental improvements from there.

A couple of years ago Jason Kottke shared insight into how power law distributions relate to the web.

Quoting from the post: “Many systems and phenomena are distributed according to a power law distribution. A power law applies to a system when large is rare and small is common. The distribution of individual wealth is a good example of this: there are a very few rich men and lots & lots of poor folks. It’s been shown that the distribution of links on the web scales according to a power law, so it comes as no surprise that the distribution of links to weblogs does as well.”

Leo said something interesting the other day: “the web is fractal in that it has a similar level of complexity at all scales” (or something like that – Leo feel free to correct the quote). This power law thing seems like it might work at any scale. The web as a whole follows a power law. The blogoshpere follows it. Does an individual site follow it (http://www.cor.org/ or www.umc.org)? What about a section of a site (www.cor.org/missions or web.umc.org)? I’m thinking it does.

If that’s the case, what does this tell us about site design? Well, obviously, the most important stuff must be on the highest-traffic pages. Traffic falls off rapidly from the top (root) page of a tree of pages to the bottom (leaf) pages.

Alex Yefetov says we should be building content on our site that relates to the most searched terms on the web, such as: sex, love, dating, health, and career.

Alex lays out the foundation of this approach:
Bridge Strategy part 2

Kerry Woo has some interesting stats about podcasting sermons.

Linked In is another piece of social networking software. Some people I know are using this, including Ruv and Terry Chapman, the IT Director at Fellowship Church.

Chuck Russell sent me to Socialtext and asked my opinion. I’d like to hear from Leo who doesn’t see how this is any different from web-based forum software we’ve had for years.

Another couple of RSS readers to evaluate:
RSS Bandit
AmphetaDesk

Leo says:
simple front end explaining RSS and how to get it – we could model something like this for COR

Clif says:
Yeah, here’s an example of a church-related site doing that