Since I arrived at Quirk Rob's been pretty keen for me to go into the field of Conversion Optimisation. For an intern starting out with little or no experience in the field; research has been paramount. As a result it feels like I’ve spent half of my life on, or looking for, enlightening blogs these past few weeks.

Rob helped out by setting me up with ten or so feeds. The first few days I mostly spent trawling over the feeds coming into my reader, scratching my head, and backtracking to previous articles and other links to try and lay some kind of foundational knowledge.
Then I was asked to write up a blog post on the best measure of web-usage. Again, with little hands-on experience and not really yet having had to have relied on any form of web-analytics these blogs were my first port of call.

So now I'm writing a post of my experiences of writing another post. Profound. Well, for an intern it is, and so I guess I'm in a position where I can list the conversion blogs that I have so far found to be the most useful and enlightening.

Without any further ado, here they are:

• Avinash Kaushik's Occam's Razor: When Rob was first talking to me about Conversion Optimisation, Kaushik's name and his blog came up almost immediately. The blog is normally updated once or twice a week and I've taken to visiting it regularly, as not only are his posts excellently written and have a habit of striking to the heart of the matter, but the discussions that they provoke from other established voices are often just as enlightening.
• Eric T. Peterson's Analytics Weblog: In one of his recent posts Kaushik dubbed Peterson as “our esteemed world leader” when it comes to web analytics. Author of such books as Web Analytics Demystified and Web Site Measurement Hacks, Peterson has done a lot to earn such high praise, with his books often being referred to by many marketers first venturing into the world of analytics.
• WebMetricsGuru: I wasn't mad about Marshall Sponder's blog when I first visited it – the layout made me feel like my eyes were doing acrobatics – but having subscribed to his feed I am now glad for having done so. It's updated a couple of times a day, and whilst remaining focused on analytics and metrics it manages to cover a wide array of relevant topics.
• Optimize and Prophesize by Jonathan Mendez: This was a late addition to my list, and I  haven't visited it as many times as I'm now wishing that I had, but I found it remarkable how Mendez takes the reader through the common sense behind Conversion Optimisation.
• Turn Up the Silence, the iPerceptions Blog: This is a blog dedicated to attitudinal analytics, and while it doesn't necessarily deal with the tools and trends that may seem immediately relevant to web analytics the insights it contains are nothing if not relevant.
• A Day in the Life of a Persuasion Architect: With regular posts from Bryan Eisenberg, one of the inventors of Persuasion Architecture and co-author of books such as Waiting for Your Cat to Bark?, this blog carries a lot of authority.
• Analytics Talk: Justin Cutroni, who runs this blog, works for a firm that is a Google Enterprise Partner so expect a lot of content about Google Analytics and Urchin Software.
• Conversion Rater: Pat McCarthy describes Conversion Rater as “a blog to discuss web entrepreneurship, online advertising, Web 2.0, and other news.” Again it has a strong leaning towards analytics.
• Demystifying Usability: This is a great blog by Frank Spillers. Just read his Personas LIVE interview with Tamara Adlin (former Customer Experience Manager at Amazon.com) and John Pruitt (Senior User Experience Manager with Vista at Microsoft).
• Increasing Your Website's Conversion Rate: I remember this post building my interest in Conversion Optimisation.  

The above should by no means be viewed as a complete list – these are merely the blogs that I've found to be the most enlightening and interesting during my short few weeks at Quirk.

Import my Conversion Optimisation OPML to get reading:

Please feel free to add your own thoughts on which blogs should have been included and those whose inclusion you don't agree with.