I hear the masses chanting: “Link-y good-ness, link-y good-ness!”

• Josh Wolf, the longest-jailed journalist in the US (though he’s been free for a few months), covers Poynter Online’s coverage of using Facebook as a resource for journalists. Could I make that explanation more convoluted?
• Speaking of Facebook (and we’re always speaking of Facebook!), every time we mention them someone (usually me) has to say, “How the heck to they make money, anyway?” Well, word has it that the advertising/sponsorship rate card for Facebook has been leaked. $10 CPM x kabillions of page views.
• WebTrends measures engagement now! With a metric far better than just time on site, WebTrends says they can tell you how engaged (involved or interested) a visitor to your site is—weeding out 29:59 pageviews during coffee breaks.

In an interesting article at SearchEngineWatch.com, Eric Enge discusses how price comparison sites might impact the amount of time that customers take to purchase products. He compared data between HealthPricer, a health product price comparison site, and ScanAlert.

A quick analysis shows that customers using HealthPricer tended to purchase much quicker when arriving at the retail site than the customers that ScanAlert studied. In fact, while HealthPricer shows that 87% of the customers it monitored placed orders within an hour, ScanAlert reports that metric at just 43%.

So what does this really tell us about comparison shopping search engines such as HealthPricer? I am afraid that the answer is not much. While it might be tempting to try to draw correlations between the data, customers using price comparison shopping engines are usually much further into the buying process–they have already decided what to buy (through previous use or education) and are just looking for the place that sells it at the cheapest price.