This year has lent itself to a slew of new buzzwords, and gamification is easily one of the most buzzed about in the marketing industry.

Businesses clamored this year to understand the concept of gamification and apply it to their digital and mobile products, offering badges and points galore … but how many of them actually understand the point of gamifying or if it’s even useful for their business goals?

via Is Gamification Right For Your Business? 7 Things to Consider.

Google is poised to completely alter how websites market themselves over the next year. While easing users into changing search results pages, Google has also designed a new method for websites to structure data so that its crawler can better pull information. This is a tremendous strategy. Google doesn’t need to own all of the information in the world, but does own the methods of accessing that information — as well as the ability to advertise to people who use that access.

via Google Will Change Web Marketing in 2012 – Brian Whalley – Harvard Business Review.

There are plenty of cool technologies available to collect and examine data. Both web and desktop applications have provided some really great interfaces to fall in love with data mining, and with the rise in popularity we have noticed an increased number of infographics created over the past few years.

via Data Visualization: 20+ Useful Tools and Resources | Rods Web Design.