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I first noticed the change when I went to click on my Social Media and SEO folder.  The folder icon was less detailed and was a solid shade of gray rather than then usual tan color.  My first reaction was thinking it might have been a loading error.  After refreshing, I discovered it must be an update, and then realized the overall layout was slightly different as well.  The easiest way to describe the update is that it is less cluttered, which in my mind is a good thing.  Everything is more spaced out, aesthetically pleasing, and easy to follow.  There is also more space between each item on the news feed.  Here is a screenshot of my “all items” feed.

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One concern I had was whether or not it would still be useable on the Kindle 3 with the new update.  When I first purchased my Kindle, I came across an article on Wired about how to effectively use Google Reader on the Kindle with its built in shortcut keys, and I have been doing it ever since.  To my dismay, I discovered that with the update, Google Reader does not automatically adjust it’s dimensions to fit the Kindle screen.  This basically makes Google Reader useless unless you want to sit around and wait for each individual website to load on the Kindle browser.

Google has been working on updating the appearance of all their web apps in a similar manor, so it will be interesting to see what rolls out in the future.  It is possible that this Google Reader update may just be a test run, but I suspect it will stick around.  If not, we still have a glimpse of what’s to come.

I am not sure how the updated reader works with the latest versions of the Kindle, but for Kindle 3 users like myself who do not plan on investing in a new Kindle any time soon, we will probably just have to wait it out and see if Google makes its feed reader more functional on the Kindle 3.

What sets iGoogle apart from similar tools is its ability to be customized to the liking of each individual user.  No two iGoogle platforms are identical, unless it happens to be intentional or a MAJOR coincidence.  However, the tradeoff is that it takes awhile to get everything set up.  This is why most people opt for something like TweetDeck, where you can be ready to go in 5 minutes.  Of course another factor that cannot be ignored is that there are usually multiple “gadgets” with similar features, and some of them are a bit finicky depending on what web browser you are using.  It often takes some effort to experiment and find which ones work properly.

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Nonetheless, I was still able to get everything I wanted working properly after about 30 minutes, and now all I have to do is sign in and its there.  Facebook and Twitter were the two sites for which I had the most trouble finding working gadgets.  There are a lot of options out there, but for most of them I experienced difficulties such as huge delays in recent tweets and missing updates from my Facebook newsfeed.  To save trouble for those of you using Chrome as your browser, here are the Facebook and Twitter gadgets I am currently using:

Facebook for iGoogle

TwitterGadget

iGoogle’s Gmail gadget is another one that I highly recommend.  Even if your primary email is not a Gmail address, you can forward it to a Gmail account.

While it does take time to set up, I like having the freedom to choose which gadgets and features I like best.  If in the future I decide I’d like to have Pandora on my iGoogle platform (which I will probably add very soon now that I though of it!), all I have to do is type “Pandora” into the gadget search box. Then, I have a variety of Pandora gadgets I can try out and decide which one I like best.  I can also drag my new Pandora gadget to wherever I want it to show up on my iGoogle platform.

Additionally, iGoogle does not limit you to the tiny window for each gadget on the main page.  There links for most of the gadgets that will pop out whatever website it is getting its feed from in a new browser tab.  There is also a sidebar with links that enable you to view a larger version of each gadget individually.

In the future, I hope to see iGoogle become even more innovative, and for developers to continue creating convenient gadgets that work efficiently.  If you know of any useful gadgets for iGoogle, please share!

Google has evolved over the years to become much more than a white page with a search box, but they haven’t abandoned finding new ways to innovate what got them started. The search giant recently unveiled a few new ways to search the Internet from the world’s number one website. The first new way, voice search, allows users to click a small microphone icon in the search box and say what it is they want to search. Google simply translates the audio into a searchable term and does a search as if you typed it. The second way allows users to upload a picture by dragging it into the browser. Google will then analyze the picture and bring up relevant information to what it is.

Voice search isn’t anything new, as Google made it available to mobile users in 2009 with an update to its Android mobile operating system. Nowadays, Android gives its mobile users many options for searching with their voice. Simple, preset commands followed by a subject will trigger your phone to start playing your favorite song, find directions, text someone, email someone, or many other things all from your voice. These commands have become a part of my everyday life while I’m trying to multitask, but I’m not convinced these same features will be as useful on a full-fledged web browser. Right now I can type an average of 75 words per minute. While this is a bit more than the average user, I would be confident in saying that most people can type reasonably fast. Typing a word or short phrase in a search box would probably take the average user four seconds, max. So what is Google trying to accomplish with voice search on desktops? The only reason I can think of, beside just glamming search up, is to say a word you’re not quite sure how to spell. Many people have a hard time spelling long, complex words, so being able to say them instead of typing them will be great. But wait, Google has suggestions. When you start typing the first few letters of a word, chances are the word will show up in a drop-down list. Users won’t be getting any more help than they already receive. A much more practical use of voice search on a desktop is Google’s Voice Search Chrome extension. This extension adds a button on your browser that, when pressed, you can say a term or phrase and a new tab will open with the results. This makes more sense. It will help those people who often have many tabs open and need to search something quick.

There is one more reason voice search could be useful, and that is for people who have a hard time typing due to age, disability, or any other reason. These people are important too and they need to be able to search the Internet just like every other person in the world. For that, Google, I say good job and thank you, but I can’t see this as much more than a gimmick for the average, everyday user.

Credit

Unlike desktop voice search, picture search is a little more understandable. This too has been around on Android for a while with the use of the Google Goggles application. With Google Goggles, a user takes a picture of something and Google does a search of the object based on what their analysis thinks it is. The desktop version works the same way. A user drags a picture onto the search bar and, after it gets automatically uploaded, Google provides search results on what they think it is. I tested this with a picture of a platypus, and sure enough the results thrown back at me were of a search for “duck-billed platypus.” I could see this being much more useful than the voice search option detailed above. For example, if you go on vacation and take pictures of several landmarks, you might not remember what each one is called. Uploading one of your pictures to Google search will quickly (and hopefully accurately) give you all the details you need. You could also go on a hike and take pictures of mysterious animals, and use Google to find out what they are. While Google Goggles might be the better option for instant feedback, many people still don’t have mobile phones with those capabilities.

While Google probably isn’t trying to change the world with either of these features, it is nice to see that they are adding fresh updates. I don’t foresee either one being a part of my everyday use, but I could be wrong. Perhaps this is the future of search, or just the beginning of a voice automated world that goes beyond mobile. What are your thoughts? Will you use voice and picture search in Google, or stick to old fashioned typing?

One thing that caught my attention was the “How to remove unwanted content” page.  The first two sentences on the page is a disclaimer which addresses the misconception that Google controls the internet:

“We run into a lot of people who think that Google runs the web and controls all the sites on it, but that’s really not the case. The sites in Google’s search results are controlled by those sites’ webmasters.”

Notice that Google does not mention who controls their search results.  It seems that the objective is to implement that they are not responsible for unsatisfactory search results, but we all know Google decides what results show up on its own search engine.  We cannot point the finger at Google for including results that some individuals may not be happy about.  Even if they removed results instantly upon request, the content would still be easily available elsewhere online. Everyone would have to use a different search engine to discover things like “The Star Wars Kid,” and Google would be out of business.  It would also lead to some very unpleased webmasters.

The “How to remove unwanted content” page has a tutorial on what to do to get unwanted content off of Google’s search results.  Google advises the user to first contact the webmaster of the content and ask them to either remove it or indicate that it should not be crawled or indexed.  If the webmaster is not available or unwilling to cooperate, Google provides a link to a page located in Google Webmaster Central on “keeping personal information out of Google.” Users are advised to “try to reduce its visibility in the search results by proactively publishing useful, positive information about yourself or your business.”  Since Google said it themselves, I suppose this means it is not considered a form of “beating the system” to publish loads of content in order to cover up what you don’t want people to see.  What do you think?

“Me on the web” also has a link to a tutorial on “how to manage your online identity.” It consists of four steps: search for yourself, create a Google Profile, remove unwanted content and the associated search results, and get notified when your personal data appears on the web.

It is interesting to see this type of tool coming from a company so focused on creating natural and accurate search results.  Is this a way for Google to demonstrate its acknowledgement of the growing privacy concerns the internet has generated?  Perhaps Google is trying to appeal to those who are uncertain about getting actively involved with the numerous social media sites and online communities.  The web is developing rapidly and is still fairly new, which is why many people have their suspicions about it.  Some people avoid making any type of social profile altogether in order to prevent any risks to their reputation or the possibility of being cyber-bullied.  What many fail to realize is that just because they avoid the internet does not mean there won’t be any content online about them.  Google’s “Me on the Web” tool provides a safety blanket for those who are uneasy about the idea of having information about them online.  Setting up a Google Profile and utilizing the features and information on the “Me on the Web” tool is a great first step that I recommend for anyone getting started with online reputation management.

Even though the tool is part of the Google dashboard and not everyone has a Google Account tied in with their business, its resources can be directly applied to a business or organization.  All of the tips for managing online identity and removing unwanted search results can be applied to any search subject on Google.   Instead of setting up Google Alerts under the “Me on the Web” platform, you can set up alerts on any search term you desire through the Google Alerts main page.

It is nice to see a company like Google releasing a tool that addresses the common concern, “What happens if there is something online about me or my company that I don’t want people to see?”  It will be interesting to see what will come of internet privacy and online reputation issues in the future.  Will it become easier or harder to control what shows up in search results?  What online reputation management tools will be released in the future, and how will they affect search engines?  Will there be an increase or decline in the number of lawsuits concerning the matter?  Will new laws be implemented in attempt to “control” what is published online?  Only time will tell…

So far, Yahoo I think has the biggest news.  In a blog post it announced a ton of big updates, include Rich ads in search, Network Distribution reporting (to show which websites are actually serving your ads), and my favorite, the Yahoo Desktop Publishing tool.  FINALLY!

Y! Desktop Publisher

I’ve been part of the beta for quite some time, and it’s been killing me not to talk about it due to NDAs, but now that it has been made public, I can go into a little detail.  It runs on the Adobe Air platform, which makes it look really pretty, but runs fairly slow.  Yahoo makes great use of the real estate with expandable tabs for research and side windows to display secondary–yet still important–data about the campaigns and ad groups.  It’s almost too busy with as much data displayed as possible, but I see that as a feature more than a bug.  In fact, there is so much data being displayed I couldn’t even show screenshots without making it look like a declassified government document that’s been blacked out that it’s virtually useless.  The downside is it’s slow, and still acts more like a Yahoo bulk sheet instead of Adwords Editor.  It’s still a huge improvement over having nothing, but my main warning is to check the error sheet in the upload section of your Yahoo account, because I occasionally find stuff that doesn’t pop up as an error in the Desktop Publisher.  Oh well, it’s still in private beta.

Google Mobile Search & Local Search

There has been a ton of announcements this week surrounding mobile search.  Adsense will allow website publishers to post mobile ads (Adwords has allowed iPhone/smartphone targeting for some time now in the campaign settings), and announced an Android deal with Verizon. This means that Verizon will be the largest American network to carry Google Mobile OS phones.   This also opens up the realms to much better location-based advertising.  However, for any of this to mean anything, Google’s location-based advertising needs to stop sucking.

Meta Keyword Tag is Dead

If you remember search in the 90s, relevancy was often no more than how often the keyword showed up on a page.  This led to someone trying to get to the top of a SERP for the term “shoes” to write a page that went something along the lines of “shoes, shoes, shoes.  We have lots of shoes. We have blue shoes, red shoes, old shoes, new shoes.”  Then they would stuff their meta keywords tag with all those same keywords so engines knew that’s what keywords you thought were important to the page.  Google was the first to stop using it, and even told people to stop sueing each other over it.  Well, during a SMX panel this week, Yahoo said that they stopped considering meta keyword tags for search rankings several months ago, which means none of the big 3 players use it.  What this means to you is if you have a limited time to do your own SEO and can’t afford a pro, don’t bother with the meta keywords tag.  It will literally be a waste of your time.

On a more humorous side, I got a kick out of this admittance from Google’s CEO about how sometimes Larry and Sergey buy companies and don’t tell him until after the fact. Apparently Sergey found Keyhole (now Google Earth) on the web, bought the company, then later walked into Eric’s office and mentioned it.  Eric’s response: “‘for how much, Sergey?’ And it turned out to be a few million.”

For more SMX coverage, you can check out Search Engine Land’s daily recaps for Day 1, Day 2, and Day 3.

Google is normally very proud of its tools, and has good reason to be.  With a monopoly in the marketplace and easy-to-use tools, they make it easy for new advertisers to find keywords to spend money on, and hopefully grow everyone’s business.

Google has had a keyword tool of one form or another for years.  Back in July, 2008, Google took a huge step forward and announced that you could see average monthly search volumes with advertiser competition details.  Even just yesterday, Google announced updates to their popular search-based keyword tools to be available in more areas.

So why wouldn’t they announce an update like the one that rolled out Wednesday morning?  Instead of simply stating monthly averages it gives you a rounded total of searches for that keyword!  That’s very similar to the old Overture tool that SEOers loved so dearly.  It does this locally and globally!  How cool is that?!

But wait–”local” in this case means your home country, and states the number from the previous month.  “Global” means global, but instead of a rounded number it is an average of 12 months.  This means that it will be very common for your local monthly number to be higher than your global number due to seasonality of given terms.

Why no announcement?  This change should at least be worth a quick blog post. My speculation is because it’s not ready for primetime.  To explain why, I need to let you in on a little budgetary PPC secret:

My biggest and most popular terms are separated into separate campaigns based on match type.  For example, if I’m bidding on the term “shoes”, my “shoes” keyword would have three campaigns that I control separately: 1 for broad match with tons of negatives, 1 for phrase match with lots of negatives, and one for exact match.  I do this so I can be sure to place my largest daily budget emphasis on my most relevant match type: exact.  By having them all in one campaign the broad or phrase match can eat up a lot more of the budget at a higher CPC than my more relevant exact match. (More on this to come in a later post.)

This method has one other huge advantage: you can get some campaign-level reporting detail that you can’t get on a keyword-level report, namely impression share.  The impression share feature tells you how many of the available queries delivered your ad in a percentage.  So, if my campaign featuring the exact match for my “shoes” keyword has 100,000 impressions and a 45% impression share, then by multiplying 100,000 x (1-0.45), then I know that there were 155,000 queries for the term “shoes”.  (Two side notes: 1. These numbers are made up to make the math easy to follow, and 2. You should rarely expect this number to be larger than 90%, due to variances in quality score, daily budgets, and number of competitors).

So what happens when I go to the keyword tool and plug “shoes” as an exact match into the tool?  2.74 MILLION queries.  Now, let me reiterate that my shoes impression number is fake.  I don’t even bid on the term shoes.  However, when I did this same experiment with real keywords, the numbers were similar–as were the results.

Something isn’t right here!  Google’s AdWords reports tell us one thing, yet Google’s keyword tools tell us another.  I hope that this tool begins being reliable one day, because this information can be wonderfully helpful for every level of search marketing, but in its current state I hope you review the data cautiously and don’t make too many business decisions based on this information.

Chances are you understand the basics of Google’s click auction.  If you didn’t you probably wouldn’t be interested enough in PPC to do research, read blogs like this one, or try to maximize your performance on the search engines.

To help you understand, Google’s Chief Economist, Hal Varian, did a video that explains in simplistic detail of how Google’s ad auction works, and why quality plays such an important role.  If you haven’t seen it already, I urge you to take 9 minutes out of your day and watch it here.  ROI Revolution does a great summarizing the data in ther two-part blog posts that can be found here and here.

Remember that while these posts focus exclusively on Google, as market leader it forms as the benchmark that Microsoft and Yahoo are aiming towards, and they run similar systems.

Music is a tough sell online, especially in the PPC realm.  You’re taking an item that doesn’t have any distinguishable difference between your version and a competitor’s version, and trying to give the customer reason to buy yours.  Like grain, gold, and oil before it, music is now a commodity, and selling commodities online is a totally different game than selling another type of product.  So how do you do it?  You have two main options:

Play the numbers: If you can’t add value to the product, you have to know your limits on what you can afford to pay for the sale and stay profitable.  Let’s say you sell a CD for $10 retail, and you make $4 in profit.  You only want to use a portion of your profits for marketing, say $2, so this becomes your maximum acceptable cost per sale.  If you know you can convince 1 out of 10 visitors to buy from you instead of the other guy, then you can afford to pay $0.20 per click.  This is your maximum allowed cost per click.  However, you can go lower.

Using all your PPC skills and knowledge, you can bid lower and still get the quality levels of traffic by having really creative ad copy that grabs attention, or ignore the expensive engines like Google and only use Yahoo.  Have you considered shopping feeds?   There are lots of options here, and some might be cheap compared to what you might be paying

Add value: Instead of buying a transaction, what if you create a recurring customer?  Get them to the site with the CD, but give them reasons to stay.  This may be through background information on the making of the album, embedded videos of the best songs, interviews with the members, or tweets from their most recent concert via Twitter, etc.  If you’re able to offer the visitor an experience instead of just a product, then you have the opportunity to make future sales and pay a lot more than only $0.20 per visit.

It’s really a lot of fun meeting someone for the first time in person after only speaking with them online.  Such was the case in meeting Mike Campbell aka Louisvillesoup on Twitter.

We had a chance to meet over coffee at one of my more favorite places in town.  If you’re in Louisville, you’ve probably been to the Starbucks on Hurstbourne.  What’s really special about this location is that it was previously a bank.  So, the bank vault is now a meeting room! Coolest war room around to plan your next heist

but I digress….

Back to Mike.  Mike’s a really sharp guy.  CPA turned social media ninja, Mike had been in attendence to one of my speaking events several months ago.  And he credits me for getting him hooked on Twitter.  So I suppose that I owe an apology to Mike’s friends and family for this addiction, though he assures me that he’s received significant value and productivity from the great microblogging platform we all know and love.

We spoke about the benefits and drawbacks of social media in the workplace, and how some social media tools (blogs, intranets, wikis) can be great for productivity and collaboration.  I look forward to speaking with Mike and the rest of you out there soon!

Remember, you can win an iPod Nano by traveling the furthest to meet me, sponsored by Geeks.com.

Previous 10 in 10 posts:

• Week 6 – Meeting Erin McMahon aka Firestar9s
• Week 5: Meeting Scott Hack
• Week 4:Week 4 – Todd Mundt from NPR
• Week 3: meeting with Jaime Mack
• iPod Nano / Geeks.com sponsor announcement
• Week 2: meeting with Kevin Mason
• Week 1: meeting with David Finch
• Taking it to the Streets: Initial post

But to simply label Stumbleupon a social network where you can find other amazing websites belittles its other amazing potential. For example, I have noticed it starting to influence search engines such as Google and Yahoo. Could Stumbleupon’s human-filtered search results be the beginning of the next evolution of search engines that could see the all-powerful Google algorithim be made redundant?

If you switch on the relevant feature in the Stumbleupon toolbar and then go searching in Google or Yahoo, you will then see this in your search results :

I chose “Garfield” as it was the first thing that popped into my head!

But you’ll see that there are now Stumbleupon factors in the search index. There are thumbs up, indicating a positive reaction from a Stumbleupon user, a speech bubble (indicating there are reviews available to read), the name of the Stumbleupon user that recommended the page and the category that the website appeared in Stumbleupon.

Now for Garfield, it’s no big deal whether someone likes him or not. But if you’re looking to buy something online or you’re looking for facts online, it helps to have pages that have been recommended by actual human beings, rated by human beings and reviewed by human beings.

Google may brag about its all-powerful algorithim but the one thing the algorithim doesn’t have is its ability to smell a scam or its ability to work out when a fact isn’t a real fact. Only real human beings can do that and that’s what makes Stumbleupon users with their ratings and reviews stand out from the crowd.

I’m very fond of calling Stumbleupon the “fledgling web democracy” because that is precisely what it is. It isn’t just a bunch of people looking at stupid websites and making profile pages. It’s a democracy of web users filtering out webpages and voting them up and down. That part, I think, is often overlooked by others and now that Stumbleupon has integrated itself into Google and Yahoo, that web filtering can start to influence overall search results and all the bad sites can now be voted to the very bottom. Something an anonymous computer algorithim can never do. Stumbleupon is the “Quality Control” of the World Wide Web.

If you want to take part in this web democracy, all you need to do is download and install the Stumbleupon toolbar and then switch on “Highlight Recommended Search Results”. Then start stumbling and voting!

But feel free to look at some LOLcats every now and then.

Written by Mark O’Neill

[Today's guest post is brought to your by Wayne Smallman. Wayne Smallman is the man behind the Blah, Blah! Technology blog: a focal point of his passion for technology, and a hallmark of his business mentality, writing style, and adeptness at making complex technology issues approachable and accessible.]

In providing a search service, Google have an obligation to ensure their service does not knowingly or willingly cause harm to us. So imagine my dismay to see malware being paraded in front of me after an innocuous and totally unrelated search…

Think of it this way, if you bought a magazine on the subject of fishing and it was full of premium rate telephone numbers to companies that looked like legitimate fishing and tackle supplies, but were really fronts for eBay scammers, you’d be pretty well annoyed, right?

So what’s the difference when Google sit back and allow malware to persist on their search engine? There is no difference.

To help cement my point, I’ll be playing Devils Advocate with myself, highlighting the various points and counter-points, to make it a much more nuanced discussion.

Talking about Malware on Google

“Don’t we see people selling booze and smokes on Google? Isn’t that stuff harmful?”

Of course, but for whatever reason, these items are subject to laws. And are ostensibly not made to harm people, despite more recent findings highlighting otherwise. They’re only harmful in excess, while alcohol specifically is mostly harmless in moderation.

The things that Google lists as harmful are essentially constructed with the explicit purpose of causing harm, or at the very least, some level of disruption.

“So what about guns and knives — they’re legal, right? We see people selling them and they’re legal here in the US.”

If we use weapons as another example, then people are buying these things with the intention of inflicting harm, obviously. Or, at the very least, to defend themselves.

However, when I type a search for: “Steve Jobs ‘I like options’”, as I did, then I’m certainly not looking for guns, knuckle dusters, pepper spray, knives, Mace — or malware.

So why am I even seeing these things? If it’s the case that Google can’t guarantee the specificity of a search result, then those things are clearly not related, or offer something that is obviously in conflict with the search query should not be present.

As you’ll probably hear if you were to find yourself in a court of law, there’s a balance of probabilities to be considered, as well as degrees of harm.

But because Google are needlessly placing irrelevant search results in front of me, when I’m clearly looking for something that’s totally harmless, then the degree of harm they’re placing in front of me and everyone else is negligence on their part.

“Google places a warning next to the link. What more do you want?”

You’re making a perilously callous defense for Google here, which I find troubling.

That’s like letting me perform brain surgery, which inevitably kills the patient, then claiming that because neuroscience is still in its infancy, I’m not really to blame.

Not a particularly sound basis for any business, which on the balance of probabilities would suggest heavily that Google are acting with the interests of their business model first and the personal safety of their users second.

Shall we add pedophilia, or necrophelia to the list of things you think should be allowed on Google? Question is, where do you draw a sensible line? Of course, pedophilia is outlawed, but then so too are most of the things that are resultant of me clicking on some item of malware.

And this isn’t the first time I’ve seen such things for innocuous searches, either.

“I don’t need a baby-sitter! Ever heard the saying: ‘once bitten twice shy’? People can look after themselves. If they click on the wrong thing, they won’t do it a second time, will they?”

Thing is, in following your line of reasoning, we clearly place the legality of something second to its availability — which isn’t logical.

In some instances, finding such things as guns, knives and knuckle dusters available to buy is in contravention of laws within the countries where those searches are being performed.

But what we’re wandering into are issues of creating an informational police state. That’s a very different matter all together, one outside the remit of this discussion.

Both you and Google are making the assumption that the average person using the internet is full of scrutiny, endlessly vigilant and the enemy of naivety — the fact is, they’re often diametrically the opposite.

That’s why these ploys work, because some unscrupulous bastard knows only too well people will fall for clicking on something despite the warnings, sometimes just out of curiosity.

And because the degree of harm is set too high, more people with less net savvy will be harmed because people like you are educated just enough to avoid the snares & traps, but not wordly-wise enough to see that such things are wrong.

On the one hand, we have a broadly naive huge mass of people using the internet, who are prone to having their privacy and security compromised. On the other side is a small minority of people who are preying on the aforementioned.

What you’re doing is mounting a defense for Google that effectively places the latter party with equal to or greater privileges than the former. Because the latter party aren’t being dealt with, Google are essentially a market stall to these people.

Google owe it to the people using their search to make every reasonable effort to eradicate malware from their systems. Simply providing a warning isn’t good enough…

There’s now no doubt now that Google is gradually building a social network to rival all other social networks but it all seems to be in dribs and drabs and it’s a bit confusing how they are going to eventually connect it all up. I mean, let’s look at the various strands :

1) iGoogle : Google’s personalised search pages. As yet, still rather underrated (Google is not really pushing people towards it) but it is nevertheless slowly gaining a cult following among Googlers. Developers are becoming a lot like Facebook developers and are pushing out a lot of applications to users. There may come the day however when Google DOES start pushing people by default towards their personalised iGoogle pages and we may not have a plain no-frills Google.com page anymore……but let’s wait and see on that one.

2) Picks For You : Google’s version of Stumbleupon (but without the profiles, thumbs up, commenting and close-knit community that makes Stumbleupon unique). “Picks For You” is a Google Toolbar button that needs (obviously) the Google Toolbar installed and your Google search history enabled. So you need to trust Google a great deal to use this feature. “Picks For You” works by studying your Google search history stored inside the toolbar and then bringing you alternative webpages that it thinks you might like based on those past searches. But unlike Stumbleupon, you cannot specify particular subjects to include or exclude. It just goes by what you have searched for in the past. So bad luck if you previously searched for how to treat your STD problem.

3) Gmail : Many people have commented that with a bit of work, the Gmail contacts section could be leveraged into a social networking area of its very own, especially since Gmail 2.0 came equipped with the ability to add instant messaging usernames. Then Zoopit (not connected to Google) launched its private beta which gives users the chance to show photos from their email in their Gmail inbox (which I eventually uninstalled because Zoopit demanded my Gmail password).

4) Google Reader : and so we come to Google Reader which seems to me to be the jewel in the Google social networking crown right now. They hit a major snag at first when they announced that Reader shared links would be visible to all other contacts and I have to admit this soured me on Reader for a while (it also caused a bit of an uproar in the Google Help Forums) . But I soon decided to forget about it and work around it instead. Instead of worrying about what links people can see, just let them see what you want them to see.

The first hint of a social network in Google Reader is the basic profile and you can invite your Reader contacts to share in your RSS feeds.

This is all old hat though. It’s the new feature that has made me realise that Google Reader is on the verge of kicking some serious social ass.

A lot of the time, while I am stumbling around, I find great webpages that I want to share with my Google Reader contacts but at the same time I do NOT want to subscribe to the whole damn feed just to show off one page. In these circumstances, I tend to think “oh forget about it!” and move on.

There are also (believe it or not) websites without RSS feeds (gasp!). It’s 2008 but these sites are still stuck in the mindset of 1998. One of my favourite websites doesn’t have a RSS feed which irritates me immensely – The Straight Dope. I have always wanted to share pages from that site with my Reader contacts but how can I when I can’t get it to show up in Reader? But now, thanks to Google Reader, I can!

First, just go “Your Stuff” in your Reader sidebar and then “Notes”. You’ll then find a draggable javascript link that you can pull up to your browser bar with your mouse.

Now I went to the Straight Dope to try out this link. I found this page on tornadoes in North America and decided to send it to my Reader contacts. So I clicked on the Notes link to see what happened.

It opens up a small Reader box in the top right hand corner of the screen, asking you if you want to proceed and it also gives you the opportunity to attach a note with the link. After doing all that and pressing the confirm button, the link then appears in Google Reader right away :

Absolutely neat! No hitches whatsoever!

There is one other new feature as well – the ability to send notes to your Reader contacts. Again, just go to your Notes page and start typing in the notes box at the top of the page. Then click “post note” :

With features like this, you have to wonder what other RSS services have to do to compete to stay relevant. If they bring out similar services, they’ll be accused of copying. If they do nothing, they’ll be accused of giving up. But if you compare what Google is bringing out these days and then look at My Yahoo, Bloglines, or a similar service, is there any real competition in the RSS business anymore?

Someone asked me just now if there is any need for Google to connect all these various services up and what is wrong with them all being disconnected. Well maybe it’s my orderly neat mind but Google has always seemed to me to be a neat organised company and having scattered pieces of a “social network” doesn’t fit their psychological profile. Do you agree? I really am interested to see how it all comes together in the future and how they intend to take on Facebook at their own game.

Written by Mark O’Neill

(image credit: invent)

With all the attention that Google Pagerank is getting now *yawn*… it’s a good time to talk of about the effectiveness of StumbleUpon.

SU has really been on a tear lately. According to Alexa, Stumbleupon has never ranked higher in its history, currently ranked 170 . It is also becoming more mainstream, now having over 3.7 million users (consider they only had 1 million in July 2006).

When I started writing this post, I was only going to talk about the StumbleUpon Toolbar Update for Firefox. If you’ve used Firefox recently, you’ve probably been prompted to install the latest toolbar update. Not sure about you, but I don’t like not knowing about what I’m upgrading. So the geek in me did a little digging and I came across the StumbleUpon for Firefox Changelog.

The update is worth it – see the StumbleUpon Blog’s report on SearchReviews:

You can now see who the friend that thumbed up each page in the SERPS.

Also while doing some research on this article, I came across the Unofficial StumbleUpon FAQ. There is some pretty good information on this page, such as giving premium users the ability to create their own groups (you might be surprised how effective a good group can be).

Here are some further resources to help your StumbleUpon knowledge:

StumbleUpon Help Forum

StumbleUpon Beta Toolbars

Here is a good pictorial on how StumbleUpon actually works:

click on the image for a larger version (h/t arleas)

As social media and (quality) blogging now allow sites to rank very quickly, it will be interesting to see how this all pans out. Especially with a more level PR playing field.

Google AdSense is putting together a very informative Webinar on AdSense features. Anyone interested in monetizing their blog, still learning the ropes, or just not on top of the latest features should attend this Wednesday, 9/19/07.

Also, if you’re not a member already, the Google AdSense group, “Inside AdSense”, you might want to join that as well (even though its activity has been low as of late).

For those of you that are big fans of Google Earth, this should be a big treat for you. Google has released a Beta version of Google Sky yesterday, giving users the ability to look around space in the same familiar Google Earth interface.

To use Google Sky in Google Earth, click on View -> Switch to Sky or click on the Sky button. Here is an instructional video released from Google that goes into further detail about its features:

Move over street view, here comes lunar craft view!