Can you evaluate the effectiveness of your website in a mere seven minutes? This exercise can’t approach the value of a comprehensive third-party review, but it can help you brush up on usability and conversion basics.

Yesterday Yahoo announced they are opening up the API to their new search platform (aka “Panama”). I caught up with Dan Boberg, Yahoo’s Managing Director of Sales Technology by phone yesterday to talk about this API announcement.

Musings on a recent Surowiecki column about feature creeped products. While it would be somewhere between disingenuous and stupid to count every site abandon as an order sacrificed to poor usability, it’s worth considering what fraction of these missed opportunities better usability could in fact reclaim.

Interesting results from a study comparing homepage usability among Fortune 30 companies and an Inc. Magazine list of fastest growing companies.

Interesting Google article in today’s NYT. Engineering and marketing are inherently human endeavors, best approached using a “messy” Minsky-esque society of solutions.

The online world is orbiting Mountain View. Not surprisingly, Google continues to pull in top talent and ideas.

I’ll be speaking at Internet Retailer in San Jose next week.