Uba Kontrovasie

Google going Social

I suppose none of us have been oblivious to the birth of Google Search Wiki in recent weeks, I’ve already heard lot’s of people say “hang on a sec, it’s not really a wiki”.

Search Wiki at the moment serves a purpose for Google account holders, who want to annotate, customize and improve the quality of their own search results pages.

I personally think Google might have bigger plans for Search Wiki as they may; over time use Search Wiki annotations and amendments collectively, as a means to improve the quality of their overall search results.

Google already have a very firm stance on aggressive link building activity, especially towards paid-for back links. Search Wiki along with other sources of internal data may, in the near future reduce Google’s dependance on analysing back link portfolios in order to judge website authority and relevancy.

The natural search results of Google are often just as manipulated as the sponsored search listings that advertisers use, It’s about time Google did some thing to clean up their search results. I’m sure Search Wiki will be warmly received by Google account holders, who in time will become self-motivated, vigilantly search Police.

It’s a real early warning for old school SEO practitioners that need to wake up and smell the coffee! Delivering good website structure, amazing content and excellent user experience will stop the public from deleting you from their search results.

Friendly Friends

In addition to Search Wiki, Google has also launched Friend Connect. With a quick copy and paste of code any website can now have “social” features. The ease of use makes Friend Connect a great quick win for any webmaster that wants social features on their website at minimum cost.

In addition to the simplicity of the installation, Friend Connect also allows people to join website groups using non-Google ID systems, such as Open ID and Yahoo ID. This is not only handy for users, it is also handy for Google as it increases the amount of people using their products and services.

Further to the points I raised above about Search Wiki annotations and amendments effecting natural search results, will the most socially active websites gain greater authority or improved rankings in the future? It does make sense to some degree as there are newer, UGC heavy websites on the web, which are more useful than top ranking websites that rank well because of their link equity.

Tags: friend connect, Google, improving search, search wiki, social media, social search

Morality

I love reading Wired, every month the magazine is a good mix of technology, politics, science and other things from the town of Geeksville. 

I never really log-on to their website purely because I read so many blogs and tech websites, picking up an actual paper pub and flicking through it over a coffee makes a nice treat. 

Anyway I digress…

In this months issue there was quite a good piece on Google, their recent acts of immorality and the organisation changing it’s stance on their original promise of “not doing evil”. 

Wired as we all know is a US magazine and all the examples given in the piece were based on Google’s immoral doings in its homeland. 

Personally I think the acts of immorality have not been exclusive to the US. Google’s recent move to allow gambling advertisers to use paid search advertising in the UK is quite frankly, the icing on their immoral cake. 

They have clearly opened up their advertising platform to gambling advertisers in order to sustain financial business growth throughout the credit crunch. 

With a currently unstable economic climate, people are being encouraged to be wise with their cash. This means living within our means, avoiding credit use, overdrafts etc. 

Taking all of the above into account, what does Google do? They help gambling companies push gambling (a significant waste of money and cause for bad debt) onto the public for the sake of sustaining their own profitability and growth.

Hmm…I’ll leave you guys to be judge of their actions, in the meantime enjoy the pic I’ve scanned from this months Wired.

Tags: gambling policy, Google, morality, wired

Chrome Androids

Well I guess there’s been a lot of talk about Chrome over the last couple of days and using it today I have to say I’m mighty impressed with load speeds, fast as promised!

What I’ve been even more impressed with recently is Google Android, the new Google OS for mobile phones. I believe it will be the first mobile OS to rival the Apple’s mobile version of OSX 10, which harnesses Apples “Core animation” using MBX 3D hardware; this stuff was the tipping point for me to go out and buy a handset.

Google seem deadly serious about tipping the mobile market on its head (once again) as the SDK for Android has been made available for developers to start putting together applications. In addition to this a fund of $10,000,000 has been set aside to reward developers who develop the best applications.

Chrome will no doubt be a part of the Android package and I look forward to seeing what type of handset houses Android…we hope it matches the practicality and the aesthetics of the iPhone.

Above everything else Chrome and Android are further indicators of the direction Google is taking to become a credible technology company and not just an internet property/media owner with frills. With free high end web applications, a blazingly fast browser and a cutting edge Mobile OS, I think we’re close to seeing Google provide a fully extended OS for webbook style devices in the not too distant future.

Tags: android, Apple, chrome, Google, mobile OS, operating systems, osx, osx 10

The Google Social Graph and beyond

Referring back to my earlier post about The Semantic Web, I mentioned that new build projects should utilise things such as Microformats and RDF.

One of the main reasons for this was to provide people with better usability of social networks, enabling them to find existing friends easily on new social platforms and facilitate portable, reusable online profiles, portable social networks and consolidated identities. The Google Social Graph aims to address this by taking note of XFN and FOAF markup within pages indexed by Google Search.

The data is being made available by Google for developers via the The Social Graph API, all interesting stuff and now it seems they are also paying more attention to the hCard Microformat too. Good post on this by Frederic Lardinois on Readwriteweb if you want to dig deeper.

I think the most important thing to note here is that Google are evidently paying more attention to semantic markup and it will not be long before other Microformats in addition to XFN and hCard are noted and effectively used by Google.

Ahem, I smell the possibility of Google Review Search on the horizon

Tags: foaf, Google, google social graph, microformats, rdf, Semantic web, social media optimisation, xfn

Knowing Audiences - Urban Nerds

I recently stepped outside of the Oxford Circus tube station and for some reason a power box fixed to a wall caught my attention. Well actually it was the collage of really cool stickers plastered all over the box that fixed my eyes.

One particular one stuck that out was Urban Nerds, what a cool logo I thought to my-self. Also what a great place to position your brand, trendy West-End of London where all the fashion-conscious work and pass through everyday.

It would be expensive to buy some quality outdoor advertising in a location like this, however to the right people a small sticker is enough to draw the right attention.

I got to the office and decided to Google the brand name, they’re an underground group of hip-hop DJ’s. I dug deeper and in Facebook they have 2493 fans. Good work! They also seem to be using the group to post news releases and market their gigs and activities. Their website also seems to have the right look, feel and functionality for the audience they’re trying to reach.

What I like about the whole approach to their marketing is that it is clever through both offline and online, the advertiser really knows their audience and how to target them.

Whether this marketing strategy was well thought out or combined on the off chance through luck we do not know. Brands need to be innovative across whole their whole advertising schedule if they want social media strategies to work to their fullest extent.

Brands going down the social networking route should also be working to do something innovative with their offline activity too. It’s no good trying to appear informal, cool and helpful within a social networking environment if your offline advertising screams uniform above the line communication, people see this first and then become dismissive of any social media/networking initiatives introduced to them at later stages.

People have always preached uniformity across holistic marketing campaigns when it comes to messaging and approach, the introduction of social media/networking to a businesses marketing mix should not change this.

If your goal is too seek maximum benefits from social media then other parts of your marketing mix should be geared to support this.

For example if your goal is to help people via posting information into relevant social network groups then ensure your offline media communicates a message of how your brand is geared towards helping people, with this pre-notification people in social environments will receive your contributions with more warmth and engage with initiatives more positively.

Tags: advertising schedule, brand engagement, Google, London, offline advertising screams, Offline Media, Oxford Circus tube station, quality outdoor advertising, social media, social media strategies, social media/networking, social media/networking initiatives, social networking environment, social networking route, underground group, Urban Nerds

URL fun with The Ever Project

Well thanks to Seth’s tip yesterday (yes people Seth Godin, quite a surreal sentence I know) I decided to check out ever.com or The Ever Project as it’s officially called.

It kicked off towards the latter end of last year and it uses most of the known Squidoo functionality, this is great for people who are already avid users of Sqidoo .

The USP of the site has to be the game play it provides. Firstly you sit there for a good 10 minutes or so playing about with all the possible url combinations. You’re then left to hunt the web to find facts in order to justify what your chosen URL claims.

Real novelty factors, and I can see a younger demographic getting into the whole Squidoo system early on in their web years. This is not only because of the novelty features, the existing lenses shown on the homepage scream good CTR’s:

Sexiest.cheerleader.ever.com
largest.hamburger.ever.com

Who wouldn’t be tempted to click through to those URL’s? Just to check out the claims out and have a good chuckle if not anything else. Ever.Com has been around for just under a year and there already seems to be quite a significant community building up around it.

cutest.chick.ever is my url

I’m keen to see how the ever-lenses perform in natural search results and how much weighting Google gives the unique URL’s. Some URL combinations might be worth gold dust, and the ability to add a 1000 chars leaves good room for optimised text also.

I did some playing with Google suggest and it can act as a handy to tool to help you pick URL’s.

Interesting times ahead for The Ever Project.

Tags: ever project, ever.com, Google, natural search results, Seth Godin, social media, social network, squidoo, web years