Posts tagged good
A Good Social Media Marketing IDEA: Identify, Deliver, Empower, Amplify
Feb 9th
Josh Bernoff of Forrester Research and co-author of bestseller “Groundswell”, shared tips for success in social and instigating positive change by causing trouble in a way that’s disruptive at Covario’s recent INFLECTIONPoint 2012 conference.
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
Chrome Beta for Android Will Be Good for Mobile HTML5 Development
Feb 7th
When Google announced that the Chrome browser would become its own operating system and run on netbooks, the thought around the tech community was that eventually Google would have to merge Chrome with Android. After all, what is the point of supporting two disparate mobile operating systems? The convergence has not yet occurred but may have taken a step further today as Google announced Chrome for Android available on devices running version 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.
Chrome for Android is a win for everybody. Except, of course, most users. As of Google’s latest Android platform numbers, only 1% of devices are running Ice Cream Sandwich. That will change as 2012 moves along with adoption accelerating from new device purchases and updates. Chrome for Android immediately becomes on of the go-to browsers on the platform, will be good for HTML5 development, reliability and security.
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A Big Day For HTML5
The best thing that Chrome for Android brings to the table is robust HTML5 integration. The native Android browser is known to have mediocre HTML5 performance (pre-Ice Cream Sandwich) but Chrome for Android promises to make up what has been lacking.
That will include a hardware-accelerated canvas, overflow scroll support, HTML5 video specs support along with Indexed DB (for offline caching, presumably), WebWorkers and WebSockets.
The biggest advantage for mobile HTML5 though will be the ability to bring Chrome tools to the Android platform. If a developer knows how to work in Chromium, working in Chrome for Android will be a seamless transition. This is where the possible convergence of the Chrome and Android platforms will take place.
“Much of the code for Chrome for Android is already shared with Chromium and over the coming weeks, the Chromium team will be upstreaming many new components developed for Chrome for Android to Chromium, WebKit and other projects,” Arnaud Weber, Google’s engineering manager for Chrome, wrote in a blog post.
Chrome for Android has already been put through its initial HTML5 tests with a score of 343 (+10 bonus) on HTML5Test.com. The native ICS browser scored 256 (+3 bonus) which put it in the middle of the pack in terms of mobile browsers.
Enhancements For Users
Chrome for Android promises to be fast, simple and reliable. It pre-loads pages with the Chrome Omnibox (only when Wi-Fi is enabled) and predicts where and what you want to navigate to. It also brings a simple user interface to the Android browser environment, something that many users will be very grateful for after dealing with some of the more complicated UIs from third-party options like Opera, Dolphin HD and Skyfire.
The best aspect of Chrome for Android though will be the ability to sign in to your Chrome browser and have access to all of your bookmarks, tabs and browsing history from anywhere. If you leave your computer with open tabs, Chrome for Android will recognize those and open them for you. Chrome will also be able to track your browsing history to better provide search suggestions. Like many other mobile browsers with desktop presences, Chrome for Android will also be able to sync your bookmarks to your mobile device.
This 1% Problem
We are going to be perfectly honest. No writer at ReadWriteWeb has a device running Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. So, we could not put the Chrome Beta through the paces (most RWWers use iPhones as well).
And there is the rub. Next to no one has Ice Cream Sandwich yet, outside a couple Galaxy Nexus users. This poses a problem, if a temporary one. Many existing Android devices are never going to get the ICS upgrade and the devices that have it pre-installed are still in early adopter/Android geek territory.
For many, the Chrome for Android is just an exciting announcement to shrug at since most will never see it on their current devices. Chrome for Android developers have plenty of time to roll out dynamic Web apps before the mass of Android users actually gets the browser. So, perhaps there is a positive side.
Excited for Chrome for Android? Will you develop for it? What about signing in to Chrome across all your devices? Let us know your reactions in the comments.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Think Before You Tweet, And Other Good Advice From The Experts
Jan 30th
Officially, Sree Sreenivasan is the dean of student affairs and a professor at Columbia University’s Journalism School, but for many he is the curator of Sree’s Tips, a Tumblr blog crammed with how-to social media information, as well as a leading figure in the social media movement. This past weekend he was also the point person for Columbia’s Social Media Weekend in New York.
What follows is a recap of some of Sreenivasan’s best advice for better utilizing Twitter from the weekend, as well as nuggets of information for doing better social media that were culled from the more than 50 speakers. When talking about social media, Sreenivasan tends to stress connections over self promotion (although being connected tends to lead to better promotion). He was also quick to stress throughout the weekend “We’re all learning here.”
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Think Before You Tweet
Sreenivasan says he spends an average of three to five minutes thinking about and composing every tweet he sends out, which is a lot of time for a guy who pumps out half a dozen tweets on an average day.
It’s even more time considering that Sreenivasan concedes that “most people will miss most of what we send” through social networks. Still, Sreenivasan says what he tweets tend to have the biggest impact, and are therefore worth the extra care.
Content Is King
On Sunday, Sreenivasan pulled up his own Twitter page, which had tweets full of links, hash tags and mentions of other users. An @ mention insures at least one person will see your tweet, while links add value to the tweets you put out into the world.
“See all that blue?” he said, referring to the links. “All of those are connections or potential connections.”
Indeed, several presenters stressed the importance of not only including content, but presenting content in a way that encourages click-throughs. Erica Anderson, Twitter’s manager for news and journalism, said when sharing articles, try to find an interesting quote or tidbit from the story instead of simply tweeting the headline.
Anderson also said photos and video had also become more important since Twitter’s redesign late last year. In particular, they have become popular among reporters embedded with the presidential campaigns, who have been sharing candid moments. “People love photos on Twitter,” Anderson said.
Overhaul Your Twitter Profile
Sreenivasan pulled up the Twitter profile of New York Times reporter Brian Stelter and noted that he included two phone numbers, an email address, a Web site and a description of what he covered for the Times (as opposed to just saying he was a reporter for the paper).
Sreenivasan said that despite having more than 100,000 followers, Stelter has never received a prank phone call.
Stelter, who is as close to being a social media expert as one can get in journalism circles, also uses his full name on his profile. Users who just defer to their Twitter handle, a company name, or nick name risk not being found by people who want to follow them, Sreenivasan said.
Finally, Sreenivasan directed people to look past the number of people following Stelter and look at the 2,500 Stelter himself follows. That, Sreenivasan said, is the real value for using social media in journalism and other fields: by seeking out people to follow, we’re seeking more information, he said.
“Whatever you have as a number in that ‘following,’ space, it’s not enough,” Sreenivasan said.
Be Safe
Anderson spent a portion of her Saturday morning talk stressing security. She gave a plug for multi-platform manager 1Password and said people should get in the habit of checking their browser’s address bar for https:// as opposed to http:// before logging into Twitter and other sites.
Anderson also recommended using a company email account when signing up for Twitter and other sites where social interaction is encouraged. That can prevent hackers from accessing personal email accounts, which may have more sensitive personal information.
Keep Reading
One blog post is not enough to digest a weekend’s worth of info sessions. Some of the best tips have been curated under the hash tags #smwknd and #smwkndcool.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
6 Reasons Why Adding Google+ to Your Web Presence & SEO Strategy is a Good Idea – iMedia Connection (blog)
Jan 30th
 Promotion World (press release) |
6 Reasons Why Adding Google+ to Your Web Presence & SEO Strategy is a Good Idea
iMedia Connection (blog) This is proof that the lines between social networking, social media and SEO are indeed thinning and that social networking and social signals are becoming more important to the practice of SEO. Google+ is a social networking force to be reckoned with … The (Quickly) Changing Role of Twitter in SEO |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Google Shut-Downs & the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day
Jan 20th
Google announced today that it is closing a number of services that it wasn’t able to attract millions of users to without making any effort. The worst of the lot to lose are two: the Social Graph API and DIY data extraction service Needlebase. Following on the heels of the kitten-stomping-bad sunsetting of Postrank, these latest closures are really meaningful, even if the adoption of the services never was.
Back when there was hope for Needlebase, the Social Graph API and for Postrank, those services represented hope for the web making the world a better place. Of course people can still use stupid Facebook to organize a protest, or Twitter to speak without hinderance to the world, but with the demise of these three efforts, some important things are lost from the web. These are the kinds of things that a benevolent organization would have invested a lot of support in, for the sake of the world.
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“As we head into 2012,” Dave Girouard, VP of Product Management at Google and probably the kind of person who boos after children’s Christmas plays, wrote today, “we’ve been sticking to some old resolutions–the need to focus on building amazing products that millions of people love to use every day. That means taking a hard look at products that replicate other features, haven’t achieved the promise we had hoped for or can’t be properly integrated into the overall Google experience.”
Rest in Peace, Needlebase
Needlebase, which came to Google in the acquisition of travel data giant ITA Software, was (is) like a magic wand; you could touch a part of the marbled, veiny web with it – and its magic would flow through every crease and crevice until the web’s swirls and pockets were traced and could be illuminated in a flash of data visualization. Specifically, you could point and click to train Needlebase to recognize the various parts of a web page, then jump from page to page of structured data, extracting information and placing it in a database, map or other visual experience.
If, for example, you were preparing to attend a big conference, you could point Needlebase at the conference speakers’ biographic entries, show it where the home page links are, where the “next page” links are, and then set it free. Like a cross between a bloodhound, a sheep dog and a magic unicorn, Needle would gather all those links up into a bundle. Set them inside a custom search engine and what have you got? Instant access to the collective published knowledge of every speaker’s organization at a conference, usable to better understand what any other speaker says in context. In minutes.
My favorite story about using Needlebase is this one. One day here at ReadWriteWeb we caught wind of a local Salt Lake City newspaper that ran a story about a big new data center opening in town with a mystery anchor tenant. The paper believed that the tenant was Twitter, opening its first data center outside of San Francisco – as the company said it would, in a location undisclosed. We used the (now Google-acquired) web app called Needlebase to investigate.
We grabbed the URL of the Twitter List of the staff of Twitter Inc. and we trained Needlebase’s point-and-click screen scraping tool to recognize what a user name, Tweet text and location field (when there was one) looked like on the page of staff Tweets. Then I clicked a button and said “go!”
In just a few minutes, the most recent 1125 Tweets from staff were pulled into Needlebase and we said “show ‘em on a map!” Sure enough, one Twitter network engineer had posted a Tweet with a location attached to it right across the highway from the alleged mystery data center. He’d just left San Francisco, he had Tweeted, and arrived in Salt Lake City ready to get to work.
That Tweet was quickly deleted after we reported on it.
Needlebase was one of the most accessible of a class of tools that made data magic available to non developers. Magic.
There is too much information on the web for the human mind to understand it all, of course. The ability to draw sets of it together, to extract and sort it, and thus to discover new qualities about that which is described with the data, is humbling, it is a thing of contemporary existential beauty.
“It’s not simply that there are too many brickfacts [datapoints] and not enough edifice-theories,” writes author David Weinberger in his new book, Too Big to Know. “Rather, the creation of data galaxies has led us to science that sometimes is too rich and complex for reduction into theories. As science has gotten too big to know, we’ve adopted different ideas about what it means to know at all.”
At least some of us have begun to adopt new ideas about what it means to know at all; there are not millions of happy people playing with DIY data extraction tools as a little part of that experience. And since they have not scaled in adoption, Google has decided to dismantle these instruments of ecstasy, just as the curtain began to rise from in front of the stage where the real story of life was to be seen.
Social Graph API, Great if You Care About Other People
The Google Social Graph API was an API that indexed all the rel=”me” links connecting social media profiles around the web. You could use it to search for a person and discover all the places they had profiles. If you cared, that is. Google apparently doesn’t, because now there’s Google Plus. Presumably, not enough other people cared either. I cared though.
Here at ReadWriteWeb we like to use Martin Atkins’ AJAX interface for the Google Social Graph API to find all the places that people post things around the web, just by searching for their names. It’s a crude use of the tool, so much more could have been done with it.
Right: a search for my name surfaces my blog, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Quora and other profiles. Who really wants to learn new things about other people though? What a bore!
How else can you programmatically discover, from one hub of a person’s identity, all the arms of their star of activity online? Being unable to know that, or being told to go instead to one single social network to learn more about real dynamic people, feels like a throw-back to the Dark Ages.
PostRank…
The worst loss to humanity at the hands of Google’s startup eating monster of late remains PostRank, which Google acquired this Summer. I can’t bear to write about that again, but the gist of the story is this: Postrank ingested RSS feeds and then let you filter for just the hottest content coming from any source over time; enabling you to subscribe to a much larger number of voices, with the knowledge you’d be less likely to miss anything really important. Google ended that part of the service and made it all about publishers tracking their own social media accolades, though.
The original version of Postrank was like a magic horn that a woodland fairy called Learning and Empathy could hold to its ear to hear the tiniest caterpillar stretch and yawn in the morning, along with the rest of the whole concert of forest noises (blogs), from all around the world. It was captured by Google and refashioned as a mirror for the fairy’s hideous ogre sister Naked Self Interest, which the ogre (a publisher using Google Analytics) thought made her more beautiful and rich with pageviews, but which really only made her uglier and more vacuous every day.
I can’t believe they are killing Needlebase and the Social Graph API. I can believe it, of course, but I’m thankful that my cynicism is still thin enough that it hurts every time something like this happens again. There are only so many more tools like this on the web left to kill, though.
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6 Tips for Being A Good Blogger in 2012
Jan 19th
Obviously, as the managing editor at SEJ I read a lot of articles. I read tons of blogs, online news sources and I read posts people send to SEJ. I also have been around enough to see all the strategies people use to try and write “headlines” and posts that people will read. Some stuff [...]
Follow SEJ on Twitter @sejournal
View full post on Search Engine Journal
YouTube Tries to Make “Doing Good” Part of its Everyday Routine
Jan 19th
One of Google’s earliest YouTube employees is now leading a new charge at the company: Trying to figure out how to make YouTube a better service for social good – focusing on nonprofits, education, and free expression/activism.
YouTube has long worked with nonprofit-types to help them spread their causes and raise money. About 16,000 organizations are currently in its program for nonprofits, which gives them access to special YouTube features and support, Google says. And YouTube, the video service, is already a tremendous mouthpiece for activists.
But a new team, led by former YouTube product head Hunter Walk, is designed to integrate the notion of “doing good” into everything YouTube develops, from product features to support to broader vision. With the extra support, there’s no reason YouTube shouldn’t have 100,000 organizations in the program, Walk says.
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This isn’t the equivalent of “YouTube.org,” Walk says, referring to Google’s separate nonprofit arm. Instead, he’s trying to “align vision and accelerate development of product, policy, and programs” around social good - within YouTube’s everyday routine.
Sounds good, in theory. But how will it work practically? Some examples include:
- YouTube will continue to help nonprofits in the ways it already has, plus new resources, like a how-to “Playbook Guide: YouTube for Good,” which it’s releasing today. This 25-page guide covers topics including “Storytelling for Causes” and “Campaigning on a Shoestring.”
- Internationalizing. Right now, YouTube’s nonprofit program is only available in the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Australia. But YouTube’s impact is felt around the world — it’s arguably more important in places where it’s a rare source of free, unfiltered information. (On a per-capita basis, Saudi Arabia is actually the biggest consumer of YouTube content, Walk says.) Google needs to figure out how to recognize nonprofit accreditation in other countries, give them the ability to collect money, etc.
- Help match nonprofits with people who can help them make videos — film schools, digital agencies, whoever.
- Get features built into YouTube that serve the unique needs of nonprofits. For instance: How can a video view turn into someone doing something, whether it’s giving money or time or trying to call for policy change?
- An “innovation week for good” sometime in the next few months, led by YouTube Europe engineering director Oliver Heckmann, during which YouTube employees can spend the week hacking on these types of projects.
Walk has already assembled a small team within YouTube — 10 people — to focus on driving the project. But much of the work will be led by several times that many people within their functional teams at YouTube, Walk says. Remember, the goal is to make this part of the way YouTube does business, not a special cause.
Will it work? It’s easy to get cynical or skeptical about something like this.
Is this just Google trying to make itself look good as it draws more scrutiny from governments and the tech industry? Is it really fair to expect a public company to put the planet before its profits? Is this just a sneaky way to lock more groups into the YouTube and Google ecosystems?
Google is, of course, hardly the only tech company that puts time and money toward the greater good – Apple, for instance, is holding an event tomorrow in New York focused on education.
But the fact that such a prominent Google employee – Hunter Walk – is leading the effort, and is staking some of his reputation on the project, suggests YouTube is serious here.
And for a tool that can be such a powerful mouthpiece for organizations and societies who need a louder voice, that’s a development worth supporting.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Google Launches Good to Know Campaign for Web Safety
Jan 17th
Google has launched a consumer education campaign called Good to Know, which is designed to teach new users of high tech about safety, security and data management online. It’s a walk-through with four sections: Stay safe online, Your data on the web, Your data on Google and Manage your data. Each section contains an organized brochure of topics with some instructional diagrams and videos.
Google calls Good to Know its “biggest-ever consumer education campaign.” It began with ad campaigns in the U.K. and Germany last fall. The ads highlight security tips like using Google’s 2-step verification and checking websites for secure HTTPS connections. The campaign will now be extended to the U.S. with print and Web ads, as well as display ads in New York and Washington D.C. subway stations.
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The campaign supports Google’s existing resources, such as the Google Security Center, the Family Safety Center and Teach Parents Tech. By dedicating one chapter of the Good to Know website to Google’s services, the rest of the document serves as a good general guide to using the whole Web responsibly.
These resources are available at google.com/goodtoknow
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Google’s SPYW, Kenya Imbroglios An “Ink Blot” Test For Google As Good Or Evil?
Jan 13th
I woke up this morning to discover some fairly outrageous allegations against Google in Kenya. Local search/directory startup Mocality says that Google crawled its site for local business sales leads and then falsely claimed in cold calls to those businesses it had a partnership with the publisher…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
View full post on Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
The Good News About Google’s New Search Plus Your World
Jan 13th
Google launched a major new feature this week called Google Search Plus Your World and many people are incredibly upset about it. The feature presents search results from your contacts on Google’s social network, Google+, and the things they’ve shared. It’s clutter, critics say, it’s unfair, it’s a violation of a sacred contract between users and Google.
Be that as it may, the feature can also be pretty awesome. Below I’ve listed 5 examples of search queries that were fabulously improved by the availability of the new search results. What do they have in common? They surface timely and opinionated content, shared by people I know and trust. Search super-expert Danny Sullivan has shown with a long list of examples that some queries suffer at the hands of the new feature. I’d like to offer some counter-examples.
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Sullivan offers evidence that a search for Britney Spears will never be the same and that only a few ambitious brands are highlighted in a search for the word cars.
I don’t know about you, but when I want to find Britney Spears, I know where to go. And I’ve never found myself grunting the word “cars” at a search engine, either.
But look for business or technical terms and if you’ve got friends like I do, the new Google search feature is great. The UI? I agree with ReadWriteWeb’s Jon Mitchell – I think it’s incredibly non-invasive.
Ok, here are some examples of the new search being a big win.
Last night for example I Googled for the phrase IBM Social Business, because I’ve still got it on my mind after writing about it this week. When I search for that phrase in the new social search, I find a months-old Plus post from analyst Jeremiah Owyang adressing the term social business in August. Specifically, he had just completed an extensively researhed report on the topic. That was a very useful thing to find, among other social search results. I wish I would have seen that before I wrote the article I did.
I also found my own article there too in those search results, it was an easy way to search my own content. Blogging hacker Pete Warden says he’s already found the new search to be the best way to recall content he’s written himself. He thinks of it as Memory Augmentation and that could be said just as easily about the streams of content shared by your friends that you saw (in theory) but that you couldn’t previously recall.
One of the blog posts that showed up in that search was from giant PR firm Edelman. Reading that post stirred my interest and made me search for Edelman and Social Business.
That search brought back a full page of official content from Edelman.com, but in this case a social result was inserted at the top of Google’s list of results. What was that result? It was a critique of the larger trend of PR agencies inferior to Edelman trying to do trainings on social, written by one of the world’s leading social media marketing consultants, Jay Baer. Way to sneak that critique in at the top of an otherwise very offical page, Google!
If I search for Jay Baer’s name, by the way, I get a page full of social results in the form of links that other friends of mine have shared about the man himself. The world’s best-known nonprofit technology consultant Beth Kanter shared a Baer blog post on Google+ and says it’s terrific. If Beth vouches for someone, I can’t think of better validation. Amber Naslund, former VP Social Strategy for Radian6 and now startup co-founder at SideraWorks is goofing around with Jay on Google+. And Francine Hardaway, a tech investor and pundit, says she’s known Jay for 20 years. I feel like the social search results contributed a lot to a search for a person’s name. I had no idea that so many people I know knew and interacted online with Jay Baer.
Then I search for “reviews of SuccessFactors” the giant HR software upstart that SAP paid $3.4 billion dollars this Fall. If I search for Successfactors SAP on the main Google intereface, I get news stories from Venturebeat, Forbes and the Wall Street Journal. Those are big general interest business websites. But when I select Social, then I’m delivered news stories from enterprise technology specialists. Those are the people I’m connected with online, not people from the WSJ.
If you’ve got a well-stocked set of people you’re following on Google +, then there’s a lot this can do for you. Speaking to blogging hacker Pete Warden again, Warden says searching for technical topics works very well with Plus. That’s probably because he’s following a lot of technical people on the Plus social network.
A search for Scala and Play in Google proper, Warden points out, returns all kinds of information about these two web frameworks from official sources. “I just wanted to know if it [Play] was any good,” he says. The new social search returns the kind of opinion-based content that Warden is looking for.
Those are all great use-cases, if you ask me.
It seems clear to me that if you’ve got the right contacts and you think about it the right way, then you’ve really got something valuable in the new Google Search Plus Your World.
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