Getting into social media as a way to engage your customers and learn more about them? Heard of del.icio.us and Stumble Upon? What about Simpy, Tagtooga and Dogear? Maybe you've played with Feedblitz but have never heard of Blogburst or Blip. Think Dodgeball was a game you played in school? Perhaps you'd plan to swim in a Pooln? Or maybe Fotogopo sounds like nothing more than a tongue twister.

If so, spend some time playing on the Web 2.0 Top 1000 List. You might find a fantastic new resource that lets you hook up with your customers in a whole new way. The list breaks sites down into dozens of categories.

Here's just a small sampling:

• Audio
• Blogging
• Bookmarking
• eCommerce
• Email
• Filesharing
• Images
• Jobs
• Knowledge
• Mapping
• News

Be prepared to spend some serious time surfing through the list. Not only are there 1000 options, but they'll all take a little time to dig into. I'd suggest scanning trying to check out one or two new sites a day if you want to tackle the list. Only a portion of them will have any relevance to your business, but if you find one that's a perfect fit, it could pay off handsomely.

• Local IP Exclusion: Have you blocked local IP addresses as well as your vendors' so that their activity doesn't get included within your results? If your site receives tens of millions of page views monthly this won't have a huge impact, however for websites that receive only 1,000-10,000 page views, this will skew the data.
• Sub Domains: Not all analytics solutions automatically track activity on a sub domain of a website, so make sure you either have activated the sub domain in the code or in the analytics admin area. Here's how you do it in Google Analytics:

  _uacct = "ACCOUNT NUMBER HERE"; _udn = "DOMAIN HERE"; urchinTracker();

• Email/Download Links: Contact forms and newsletter email registrations aren't the only way to measure the number of leads and conversions. Don't forget to apply appropriate tracking for links to emails and downloadable collateral. Here's an example of how to track a link in Omniture's SiteCatalyst:

  a onclick="s_linkType='o'; s_linkTrackVars='s_events'; s_linkTrackEvents='event#'; s_linkName='Contact us This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it '; s_events='event#'; s_lnk=s_co(this); s_gs(reportsuite);" href="mailto: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it "> This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it /a

• Development vs. Production: During the publish from the development to the production environment make sure you're referencing the correct attributes and files on the production server.
• Paid Search: Analytics providers often don't automatically attribute Paid keyword referrals to PPC unless there is an admin setting turned on or the referring URLs have appropriate parameters appended to them. Forgetting to setup Paid Search tracking can result in the inflation of natural/organic search referrals.
• Tagging Error Pages: Error pages are part of your site as well and a great way to determine if there are any navigational issues throughout the website, so make sure they're tagged.
• Internal search: Want to know what users are looking for on your website? Without being able to identify the internal search queries, this task becomes increasingly difficult. EpikOne has a useful post on how to track internal search queries using Google Analytics.
• QA and Testing: This should be an obvious one not to forget but after a long implementation, QA and Testing often don't get integrated into the implementation plan.

There you have it, 8 items to permanently add to your checklist for a proper web analytics implementation.

Download the Checklist - PDF!

Ask and Google have both been blending up search results from each of their vertical engines for a little while now. As of this past week, Yahoo is joining the fray. With blended search results thought to be the next frontier in terms of serving users the content they desire, the question may shift from who has the best algorithm to who has the best blended search interface. Lisa Barone over at the Bruce Clay blog puts the three systems to the test.

Lisa makes the engines go head to head on queries related to music, sports, maps and travel. Since I share Lisa's passion for Rascal Flatts (hey Lisa, they're from Columbus!), I'll pull that snippet.

In four battles, Ask comes out ahead. (Now if only they'd quit making fools of themselves with their ad campaigns...)

Honestly, I'm not surprised. Back when I first tried out the new integrated search results at Ask, I came to the same conclusions as Lisa.

I'm still rooting for you Ask. Please just stop putting chicks with swords and D-level eye candy into your ad campaigns and everything will be ok.