The only two articles you’ll be able to read on Wikipedia today describe the Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House. The rest are unavailable due to a widespread blackout on the Internet. You might have noticed Google’s logo expressing their support, shown below. Google didn’t go as far as to shut the search engine down, which may very well put the Earth off its axis at this point, but they do have a SOPA/PIPA petition you can sign.

If you’re unfamiliar with this new legislation under review, it’s worth knowing about. The short version is that it has the potential to violate the First Amendment, censor and cripple the Internet, impose harmful regulations on American business and threaten whistle-blowing and other free speech actions. It is thoroughly documented, so I will point you to TechCrunch’s SOPA coverage for the latest.

Fellow tech entrepreneur Ben Huh, CEO of Cheezburger, has been fighting this battle for months. Go Ben! People took notice when Ben threatened to move his 1,000+ domain names away from GoDaddy if they continued to support the bill. Today, if you try to pull up one of his websites, FAIL Blog, you’ll see the following message before entering the site:

Ben is not alone. While Facebook hasn’t officially joined the ranks, Zuckerberg has. I haven’t been extremely vocal about this for various reasons, but not because I support the bills. I generally feel that ridiculous measures like this written by people who don’t truly understand the consequences will blow over in time. But that doesn’t just happen by accident. It happens thanks to thousands or millions of people who make a stand.

And it’s always a useful reminder of the power lawmakers have, and the attention we must pay to our own power to help them craft policies that positively influence our lives. Someone once told me that technology moves much faster than the law, and this is one of those points of conflict that can emerge.

If you want to help and have about 10 seconds, this SOPA/PIPA petition from Avaaz.org is a good place to start.

Comments(0) - Join the Conversation

Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, Technology, Web

Standard Google Analytics gives you a lot of basic data about how people are interacting with your web-site: visits, pageviews, bounce rates, it can even measure the time it takes to load your pages if you enable that option.

But what makes GA really flexible is a little feature called Event Tracking which allows you to report almost ANY type of information that’s  from your site back to Google and they will record it for you, and allow you to graph it alongside the other data you’re collecting.

Some possible metrics you could track using Event Tracking:

- How often do people click links that take them out of your site and which links are they
- Which PDFs are being downloaded the most
- How many people click the play button on your videos
- How many people start filling out a contact form and never finish/send it
- What percentage of your articles do people scroll through

The only thing you need is a bit of JavaScripting to catch the events when they happen, process them (if needed) and pass them along to GA.

Let your imagination run wild: what sorts of information would you like to collect from your website?

Comments(0) - Join the Conversation

Tom Hickey Categories: General, google

You might have heard about Google’s announcement to purchase Motorola Mobility Holdings for $12.5 billion. On the surface this would seem to be a move to solidify the Android ecosystem and cult by starting to build and distribute their own mobile hardware (cell phones and tablets).

That’s part of it. Apple has demonstrated the market power and profitability that a proper cult following can generate and continues to demonstrate this commitment by practically giving away their newest operating system, Lion ($29), and actually giving away their upcoming iCloud service to all Lion users. Not a bad way to get people to buy the latest and greatest.

Not too far beneath Google’s surface brews a tempest that has significant implications for all mobile technology innovation in the years to come. Google’s main interest in Motorola is 17,000-plus patents that allow them to enter the patent wars currently underway. In this war, patents are conglomerated legal cards to be played as part of an ongoing legal strategy for each company vying for market share.

Patents were designed to fuel innovation by rewarding someone’s original idea, allowing him or her a specific period of time to capitalize monetarily on that idea. Technology moves much faster than the law, and we’re quickly seeing the limitations of copyright, trademark, and patent law as they currently stand.

On the heels of reports saying Android phones occupy nearly half the market, one might wonder how such a deal could get through anti-trust court. To Google’s credit, this does represent a new business sector for them as they wisely licensed the Android OS (classic Microsoft strategy) rather than building hardware (Apple). Now how do you think those dozens of hardware manufactures feel about competing directly with a company owned by their licensor?

While Larry Page states that the deal will “enhance competition and offer consumers accelerating innovation, greater choice, and wonderful user experiences,” I’m not convinced. The little guy doesn’t have the legal muscle to enter the patent wars, and is often only brought in unknowingly after he’s had some success.

Certainly Google has offered much innovation to the world, and some see as a defensive move. I have a limited amount of trust for any large corporation, and these days that includes Google and even Apple. If you’ve been watching this game awhile, it may seem somewhat ironic to see Apple and Microsoft banding together to sue Google. The enemy of my enemy and all that.

This situation makes me squirm the way much of our stock market does. What was created as an institution to allow anyone to invest in a company, hitching his or her star to the success and failure of that company, has become an abstraction that allows people to place bets on the success or failure of anything or nothing. We’ve seen how well that played out in recent years.

Comments(0) - Join the Conversation

Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, Gadget, Technology

Are you on Google+ yet? What people are calling “Google’s take on Facebook” is already at 10 million users in the first few weeks of its full release. After digging into it myself, I have to say I’m really liking it. Personally, I am not the biggest fan of Facebook. That doesn’t mean I’m not on it, but I primarily use it as feed for people to see all the articles I write and stuff I post, etc. As for status updates and conversation – I leave that to Twitter.

Let’s start with the basics. You can create a Google+ account by going to plus.google.com. There you set up your profile which basically takes the place of your existing Google profile if you already have one. I set mine up similarly to my LinkedIn Profile actually, considering that not only can you find people to connect with through your address book, but also by searching for keywords. So for my ‘headline’ I entered in the keywords that apply to my industry and my interests in general.

As soon as I added all my web profile links and synched my contacts, it was time to start playing with Circles. Yes, Circles. Instead of putting your friends in a series of lists, Google+ has you put your contacts into different circles. They have the basic defaults of Friends, Family, etc., but you can also create your own. For example, I created a Social Media / Digital circle. I also created circles for different Twitter groups I’m involved in, a circle for my blog, a circle on fashion, etc. etc. Then when you are on the home page of Google+, you will see a stream of updates from people in your circles (very similar to your Facebook Wall). What’s really cool though is that you can select which circles you want to view, and when you update your own status, not only can you tag an individual but you can also only share it with that one person (again, ONLY that one person) or with just a select circle or two. And if you add someone to a circle who’s not on Google+, they will get an email from your account so they can still see the information you want to share with them!

The privacy settings are very well-tuned on Google+ versus both Twitter and Facebook. However for those of us who have 1,000+ pictures on their Facebook profiles, never fear, there’s a plug-in for that! If you use the Chrome browser, you can download the plug-in, Move2Picasa, and move all of your Facebook photos or just a few selected ones into your Picasa and/or Google+ account! Mine transferred with the click of a button!

There’s also a sort of ‘newsy’ portion of Google+ that I equate to either the LinkedIn news and headlines and also some Twitter lists you can make or even categories in your Flipboard iPad app. Instead, Google+ calls them Sparks. Sparks provides you with topics of interest that you can follow and glean from based on whatever topic you decide to follow.

And probably one of my favorite functions of Google+ is their Hangout platform. By starting a Hangout, you can actually video chat with up to ten people at a time, and see each person as sort of thumbnails on your computer stream. Talk about taking Skype to a whole new level!

On the mobile side (this is one instance I’m so happy I have a Droid vs. an iPhone besides the Google Maps turn by turn directions), the Google+ app features a GroupMe type quality with its Huddles function, which is essentially group texting to members of your circle. Definitely ideal when coordinating with a group of individuals.

There are many other features to Google+ including some shortcuts, typing tricks and even plug-ins to create your own Google+ vanity URL! For lots more tips and tricks, check out this handy topic guide via Mashable.

How are you using Google+? Thoughts? Ideas? Let’s compare  notes!

Comments(6) - Join the Conversation

Rachel Yeomans Categories: How To, Social Media

How do you Google? Chances are you start most of your Internet research at Google.com. You might also have a Gmail account or use Google Calendar to manage your life. And it’s a safe bet you’ve used Google maps and have your own opinion about the street view trucks making sure everyone can see your house. But there is much more to Google than meets the eye.

Google is many things to millions of people. What started as an innovative way to search the Web back in 1998 has grown into one of the world’s largest and most successful companies, now delivering results for more than one billion searches every day using its highly guarded secret sauce. Put simply, Google is what makes the Web usable.

Recently Google has taken great strides to integrate its numerous products and services into a suite of business applications called Google Apps, which can help you with corporate email, shared calendars and documents, groups, websites, and video.

The services are all Web-based, which means you don’t have to worry about servers, maintenance, etc. Just make sure you have a Web connection, get through the basic set-up, and you’re good to go. All the services are seamlessly integrated with each other at a fixed low per-user cost. Google even provides a handy cost savings calculator if you’re using Lotus or Exchange.

As much value as the Business Apps give you, Google’s free apps can deliver even more value. I encourage you to look into:

• Google Analytics to see how your Web site traffic is doing to improve marketing strategy
• Google Alerts to have industry or brand-related articles and comments delivered right to your inbox
• Google Reader to keep all of your blogs and RSS feeds in one place

While Google’s unofficial slogan has emerged as “Don’t be evil,” prominent tech leaders such as Steve Jobs have publicly objected to Google’s claims of holistic do-gooding. Let’s face it, Google is still an enormous company with responsibility to its shareholders. Good and money don’t always line up conveniently in that model, despite the best intentions.

Google continues to face challengers in the search space, such as Facebook, especially as social media continues to fundamentally change the way people access the Web and search for information. More and more people would rather get answers from people they know than the search giant. But stay tuned — Google may just master social search yet.

Keep your eyes open for Google’s latest experiment to revolutionize the way American’s access the Web with the fiber-to-the-home network.

Let me know if you have any questions about Google for Business or increasing your search rankings!

 This post was featured in ePiphany, Astek’s Monthly Newsletter |  Other ePiphany Articles 

 Haven’t experienced an ePiphany yet?  Sign up! 

Comments(0) - Join the Conversation

Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, ePiphany Featured Story, Gadget, Marketing, Social Media, Technology, Web

Real time search is getting to be a quite the buzzphrase in recent months. But what is it really?  The simplest and most familiar example is Twitter’s search feature, which provides almost instantaneous access to anyone’s tweets.  But given the recent implementations by the major search players, Google and Microsoft’s Bing, there appears to be some disagreement on the finer points. This article by Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Land analyzes the concept in a really nice way that I tend to agree with. It also delves into a lot of other specialized tools for real time search, but I’ll stick to the big names here (Twitter, Google, and Bing). Sullivan maintains that real time search is only truly “real time” when its sources come from microblogging services that provide a real time feed of the activity on their networks. For the most part right now, that means Twitter. There is just no single place for search engines to constantly look for updates from news sites or long-format blogs. So they have to depend on being alerted to updates by such sites, or actively crawling around the entire internet looking for new content. Neither of which is reliably real time in the up-to-the-second way that Twitter is.

Read more »

Comments(0) - Join the Conversation

Andrew Crowe Categories: ePiphany Featured Story, Social Media, Technology, Web

Bing recently released Bing Visual Search Galleries Beta.

A way to start with pictures and end with search. I have to admit I was pretty excited to hear that there may be a better way to find stuff on the web…

The premise – people process images and text faster than text alone.

Quoting their Blog, “A study conducted by Microsoft Research shows that consumers can process results with images 20% faster than text only results.”

Seems pretty logical. And who doesn’t want it to be easier to find what you are looking for on the Web? Go Visual! So I tested it out…

To summarize – Not what I had hoped for but my hopes were high.

I realize this is a Beta but there are only five top-level categories that support 39 “Galleries” to start search. So if you have a search that fits into one of the galleries they have – great.

“Start with pictures to find results faster!” They say.

I say – This Beta version works well if you have a picture in your mind say for a movie trailer you saw and can’t remember the name of the movie. Or you were at a party and saw a cool digital camera but can’t remember the name. Or you saw a dog, want it, but don’t know the name of the breed. Or saw a news item about a politician, remembered their face and can’t remember their name. That Bla-something guy – new book, big hair, lot’s of swear.

BINGO!

So what are the pros and cons?

Pros:

1. It’s cool the way the pictures are organized and animate
2. Good consumer product shopping engine – lots of ways to narrow search.
3. Easy to use – very intuitive.

Cons:

1. You have to install a plug-in to make it work on anything but Internet Explorer.
2. There are only 39 categories to choose from.
3. Seems to be set up for mostly “non-work” types of search.
4. Ultimately, the last picture you click takes you to regular old search results page to sort through…

Gallery Review – “MOVIES IN THEATERS”
Just talking non-sponsored links now. I clicked the movie’s picture and with some movies, it took me to a search results page with theater listings that were playing in Chicago. I was not logged in so pretty cool or scary your call.

Sometimes the results pages just appeared random. Could be the “MOVIES IN THEATERS” are not “all” in Chicago yet. I just wanted to learn the UI and have some expectations of what the results would be but they must still be working on that.

I think we all get the concept of filtering search and I think for what they present for the most part is good.

So what will I have to change on my website?

• Do a thorough job of categorizing, naming, and labeling your images.
• Logically categorize your images into like-minded directories if you have a lot of similar images.
• This will make it easy for the search engines to identify your images – IE:

/property-name/
/type-of-digital-camera/
/award-show-name/

Instead of something like: /file1/

• Name your images what is most important for you to be found by – IE:

/john-hancock-skywalk.jpg
/canon-powershot-A630.jpg
/britney-spears-smoking-with-baby.jpg

Not: /image12345aeiou.jpg

• Use descriptive text captions near the image.
• Do not embedded captions in the images.
• Use alt tags to say a little more about the image.

Mouse over any of the images in this post and you will see what the alt text looks like.

These all make it easier for the search engine to see what the image is about and you to be found for that search with your content.

You should be doing this now too because it will benefit your site’s natural search results and traffic with the state of search engines as is.

Though Google is using pattern recognition technology to serve up “similar images” you will do better if they are labeled by what they are rather then what they are not.

This looks like Bing’s answer to Google similar images but it falls short of having full utility for me…

I only look for a digital camera every couple years, I’m not buying Rod Blagojevich’s book (though pretty funny interview on the John Stewart show), and our Belgian Sheppard Heidi wouldn’t take kindly to even the thought of searching for another dog.

So I’m looking forward to the next Bing release and hoping for a more comprehensive solution.

Comments(0) - Join the Conversation

Tom Lynch Categories: Search Engine Optimization, Technology, Web

Starting Saturday at 12:01 a.m. Eastern, Facebook will allow users to personalize their Page URL’s (the web link people use to access profiles and fan pages). Not only is it a nice touch for Web users and brand promoters, it will help with search engine optimization for your brand since Facebook gets so much traffic. Though chances are Facebook is a top hit for your page already. Telling someone how to find you on Facebook will be easier, since you can provide an easy URL rather than telling him or her to search for you.

You must have had 1,000 fans on your page prior to June 1 to be eligible. Be sure to secure your name or brand before someone else does!

Comments(0) - Join the Conversation

Andy Swindler Categories: Fun, Social Media, Web

I’m typically skeptical of new whiz-bang Web sites, tools, and features that set out to “change the way we work” until I’ve actually seen the benefit. Google Wave seeks to do just that. Rather than piling on one more piece of technology or layer of abstraction, they cleared the slate by asking, “How should all of this work?” rather than, “How could what exists be better?”

I’m intrigued because I’ve been having a lot of the same thoughts and discussions lately. Email has existed more or less the same way for well over a decade. People have built new interfaces, ways to tie conversation threads together, and new free services, but fundamentally the idea of sending messages with attachments back and forth in a time-shifted manner is the same.

Google Wave seeks to reinvent real-time interaction and collaboration by treating these interactions in a centralized, consistent manner. This makes sense to me. The more applications we layer on and rave about being “the new thing” (Twitter comes to mind), the more fragmented our communication becomes.

Google Wave may or may not be the answer, or it may just be a step in the right direction. At a glance it seems to be trying to solve something that’s been nagging me for awhile. We are so focused on the tools, we often lose sight of what we are trying to communicate and the value contained therein. At the end of the day, what matters is that we want to share ideas and messages with people who will find them relevant in the most efficient manner possible, no matter when or where they happen. If we’re developing a global hive mentality through our communication technology, it will depend on messages seamlessly interacting across mediums, languages, locations, and context. This is a lofty goal, but it’s one worth shooting for.

Comments(0) - Join the Conversation

Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, Social Media, Technology, Web