Online Surveys & Research - News and Blog

You have to hand it to Henry Blodget. The infamous securities analyst who arguably promulgated more hype in Bubble 1.0 than anybody else on Wall Street seems to have a knack for bubbles.

His blog, Silicon Alley Insider, or SAI, is an increasingly influential force in the tech blogosphere and has given Blodget the ability to establish a front row seat for Bubble 2.0.

Dela Quist explains how new ways of measuring email performance can boost ROI and give you a new perspective on your email strategy. Find out how customer-based metrics could transform your campaigns.

This week's The Web Week in Review is a hodgepodge of news.

Research firm Yankee Group has removed a report on the virtualization market "after several inaccuracies were reported".

VMware, a virtualization vendor, pointed out the inaccuracies in the report "which seemed to favor its competitor Microsoft."

German firm Siemens has the best corporate website, while eight of the top ten websites are those of European firms, according to a study of 75 top company sites.

The FT Bowen Craggs Index looked at the effectiveness of corporate websites, and finds that more of these firms are now taking their web presence more seriously.

There is plenty of room for improving the user experience of some of the UK's top travel websites, according to a new usability study.

Webcredible's Flights Online study looked at the flight search and booking process on 20 travel agent and airline websites.

The highest scoring website was Opodo with 67%, while Monarch came off worst on 38%. On average, travel agent websites were more usable than the airlines' sites.

Overall advertising spend in the US rose by 0.6% last year, but online ad revenue continues to rise, growing by 18.9% compared with 2006.

These figures (PDF) are from the Nielsen Company, and show that online advertising is still growing much faster than all other categories, though growth has slowed from 35% between 2005 and 2006.

Here, we talk to web analytics expert Avinash Kaushik about the future of web measurement, online surveys and 'visitor experience optimisation' - something he predicts will be a life or death thing for websites to adopt in the next couple of years.

It's doom and gloom, according to many of the economic commentators, but now is not the time to take your eye off the customer experience ball. 

When things get tight, a company needs any edge it can get and retaining the customers it has is one way of minimising the impact of any downturn. Here are a few things to try to hang on to those most valuable of assets – your customers.

The Web 2.0 community has been a potent purveyor of myth . One of the myths that Web 2.0's most ardent kool aid drinkers have promoted is that the world of news media has been democratised.