I must say I thought my computer was playing up this morning - I
went to my Google search page and it went completely black. On closer
inspection I found the line:
We've turned the lights out. Now it's your turn - Earth Hour
Apparently,
Google users in the United Kingdom will notice today that we
"turned the lights out" on the Google.co.uk homepage as a gesture to
raise awareness of a worldwide energy conservation effort called Earth
Hour.
It will all culminate in Earth Hour, where people around the world
are invited to turn their lights off for one hour (8-9 pm on Saturday
night in the UK).
It doesn't look though like Google.com, based in the country that wastes more energy that any other country on earth, is following suit!
An interesting (should it read alarming) stat comes out this week from Jakob Nielsen who says that 24% of people were unable to get to Google in order to perform a search.
On the one hand, 76% is a high success rate. On the other hand, getting to Google is a very simple task. It's not even a true task — that is, it's not something users want to accomplish for its own sake or something we'd pose as an assignment in user testing. Getting a Google search box is the first step in searching the Web, which is only the first step in doing something real (such as, in one of our test tasks, to find "a strong vacuum cleaner that is easy to use, can pick up pet hair, and costs under $300").
All too often we, who work in the Internet industry, take it for granted that what for us are very simple tasks, will also be simple for other people.
I am often guilty of assuming that everything is simple myself. I will ask people on my eMarketing Award courses to type in a URL in the “address bar” or the Google box and am occasionally (not too often!) met by blank stares!
In April of 2005 I wrote an article entitled Tiger Woods Putt Goes Open Source. I write about a putt he did in the Masters of that year but mainly focus on a video that appears on Jaffe Juice: Tiger did it a.k.a. the next Nike Commercial. The article is only one paragraph long but appears in position number one of Google for the keywords: "Tiger Woods Putt".
Why? I think there are a few reasons why this is so.
1. Page Title: Tiger Woods Putt goes Open Source
2. H3 Tag: Tiger Woods Putt goes Open Source
3. Keywords in article: golf, tiger woods, putt, masters, nike
Why mention this now? Well, yesterday I had a huge spike in my traffic and it was caused by people searching for "Tiger Woods Putt" - and trying to find the 25-foot birdie putt that he did in the Arnold Palmer Invitational on March 16th, 2008. If it is this putt that you're looking for, here it is:
Wired magazine has a very good feature on Jason Fried and David Heinemeir Hansson of 37 Signals. It talks about how they got together, the fans of their Ruby on Rails web application network and the applications developed by RoR. It's quite incredible that before Heinemeir developed BaseCamp, the first application created using Ruby on Rails, it was considered by most developers to be too slow and limited to be of much use. It is quite ironic that today Ruby on Rails is recognised for its speed and versatility and according to Wired:
"an adept programmer can create a simple blogging
application in 15 minutes or a photo database in five. Two guys built
Twitter in two weeks."
Apart from Twitter, the popular web applications Odeo, 43 Things and Writeboard were all created using RoR. There are some great quotes in the article which have been lifted from 37 Signals' blog Signal vs Noise. Let me share some of them with you:
"If BusinessWeek wants to say it only takes $50 and an internet connection to be the next mogul they may want to cite a valid example. It's certainly possible, but Digg isn't that example."
"Windows in general has been like a confused and slow person. Vista is like a person who lost their meds and is trying their best to ignore the voices."
"What's with the social bookmarking icons at the bottom of every single friggin' blog post out there? ... The hectoring is tiresome, it results in extraneous visual noise, and the benefits are dubious at best."
"An open letter to people who wear those Bluetooth headsets that blink: ... That blue light that blinks incessantly can't actually be seen by you. The rest of us, however, do see it. And it annoys us. Stop."
"Only in the perverted world of the Web can something as simple and fundamental as making money be in need of a fancy word like monetize.'
It's very rare for me to blog about things outside of Internet Marketing, Marketing or Business but I am Welsh, I love my rugby and today's a big day! Wales play France and, if they win, will win the Grand Slam (having beaten England, Scotland, Italy and Ireland).
Every time I mention Twitter and try to explain what it's about, I get the same sort of replies:
"Don't these people have a life"
"It sounds like an opportunity to cyber stalk"
"where do they get the time to do this?"
Most people just don't get it and can't work out how it will help them develop their social media circle. Well, for all the doubters out there, the good people of Common Craft, whose "plain English" videos make everything logical (check out their RSS, Social Bookmarking and Wikis videos), have now come up with a Twitter in Plain English video.
At present there's a bewildering array of Web 2.0 applications, social networks and social bookmarks available on the web, everything from Flickr, Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook to Odeo, Digg, Basecamp and YouTube. I sometimes wonder how some people keep track of where they're at or where they should be throughout the day.
The way that things are tending to go is that companies have their social side and then they have their business side. At its most simplistic level, the social side builds community and develops loyalty - it often is the area that creates the leads; and the business side is just that - the place where people go to buy, view products, learn and enquire, etc. The social side is the one that interests me and the more I think about it, the more I am convinced that companies need to firstly develop a blogging hub and then create social experiences which can be plugged into the blog. These experiences are basically a way of taking the conversation over to another neighbourhood, whilst still keeping a close eye on it.
Quite often it's possible to create a conversation (or borrow a conversation) and embed it straight into your blog - thus offering visitors a media experience which differs from the usual text and photos. Here are some examples of embedding that you may want to consider for your blog:
YouTube Most bloggers when they experiment with embedded media will generally start by using YouTube. Take a look at what Blendtec did to demonstrate the durability and quality of their products.
Flickr More and more people (and businesses) are starting to appreciate the reach and power of Flickr. Here's a selection of images from a Flickr set (http://flickr.com/groups/11604231@N00/pool/tags/sixnations) which are displayed as a slideshow:
SlideShare If you would like to share your business or personal presentations online, it may be worth considering SlideShare. The presentation below is a favourite of mine as it combines both pictures and sound.
Just saw that the book category on this site hadn't had a post for a while and thought I'd add some books that I am currently reading (all started, none finished):
If you want to get energised about starting your own business or just being best at work, Gordon Ramsay will get you in the right frame of mind!. (Hat tip to Nick!)
Just received this for review from Christine at Penguin Group. The Go Giver is only 120 or so pages but so far is proving a real page turner.
The Starfish and Spider is a great book if you need to know a little more about social media. Enjoying it so far!
I've been delivering some social media workshops recently and Facebook - The Missing Manual is yet another book which I have found useful. It offers some nice tips for using Facebook for both personal and business reasons.
Google is always adding more functionality to its Google Search facility and a couple of days back it announced on its Google Blog that it had been:
testing, and today we have fully rolled out, a search box that appears within some of the search results themselves. This feature will now occur when we detect a high probability that a user wants more refined search results within a specific site.
This provides searchers with potentially better results and is a step further than the "Sitelinks" which often appears for more trafficked sites. The examples that I have seen on the web have primarily been for large US, business, military and government sites. The example below shows that even "local sites" already have this search within a site element:
This now means that with many websites you no longer need to use the command
It's St David's Day today - the patron saint of Wales. And it looks like the good people of Google and their Google Doodler have certainly not forgotten the Welsh this year. Hat tip to Google.
Footnote He is the only native born patron saint of Britain and Ireland. What most people don't realise either is that St Patrick was actually Welsh! If you want more information on St David, visit the religious pages on the BBC, the St Davids' page on Wikipedia or the Catholic Encyclopedia.
