Did news of J.C. Penney successfully gaming Google to deliver its website No. 1 search results disgust you? How about news of the New York eyewear merchant who used cyberbullying to get top Google rankings and more business? Now you—and the wisdom of the crowd—can take matters into your own hands to stop content farms and websites using shady black-hat search engine optimization (SEO) methods from appearing high in Google search results. Thanks to an … [Read more...]
Video Clip of the Month: Anti-Genocide ‘Paparazzi’
January 1, 2011 by
My January 2011 video clip of the month is a MSNBC news report about an unprecedented plan to use crowdsourcing to stop war and war crimes in their bloody tracks. The plan, the brainchild of American actor George Clooney, is using commercial satellite images and the Internet to monitor the border between northern and southern Sudan. Oil-rich South Sudan is set to vote Jan. 9 on a proposal to become independent from North Sudan, a move the former U.S. Director of … [Read more...]
Google Mini Wave Quietly Washes Ashore
December 19, 2010 by
Have you ever received an e-mail with critical information about an event but an unrelated subject line? If you didn't flag it and needed it a few weeks or months later, you could end up wasting quite a bit of time digging for it. Solving this problem by keeping all related conversations in one chronologically organized spot was the genius behind Google Wave, the social networking platform Google launched with much fanfare last year. While many saw its … [Read more...]
Google Wave to Live on as Apache Wave
December 8, 2010 by
Remember Google Wave? Last year I was pretty excited to get an invite to join what was suppose to be Google’s hot new social networking platform. With Google Wave, collaborators share—in real time or over time—e-mail, instant messaging, wikis, and social networking merged into topical waves (kind of a cross between chatting and threaded discussions on a blog). Like many people, I didn't end up doing much with it (in my case due to a lack of collaborators), so I … [Read more...]
Cyberbully Seeking High Google Rankings Arrested
December 8, 2010 by
I was glad to read in the Huffington Post today that cyberbullying is no longer helping New York eyewear merchant Vitaly Borker get top Google rankings and more business. Instead, Borker is behind bars charged with, among other crimes, fraud, interstate threats, and cyber stalking. A Manhattan judge has denied him bail. Accordingly to the New York Times, Borker intentionally created a customer experience so vile, his customers would rant about it on the Internet, … [Read more...]
Google Says ‘Good-Bye’ to Google Wave
August 6, 2010 by
After a little more than a year, Google is waving "good-bye" to Google Wave. Google Wave was supposed to be the hot new social networking platform and for a time you were considered special if you had been one of the lucky ones to receive an invite. The only thing is many people, including me, couldn't find a pratical "real work" use for it. With Google Wave, collaborators share—in real time or over time—e-mail, instant messaging, wikis, and social networking … [Read more...]
My Membership in ‘Exclusive Club’ Ends
May 21, 2010 by
My membership in the "exclusive" Google Wave club is over. Google announced yesterday that it is making the invite-only, real-time communication tool available to everyone, including Google Apps users, at wave.google.com. Like last year's Google Wave introduction, the announcement took place at the Google I/O Conference. With Google Wave, collaborators share—in real time or over time—e-mail, instant messaging, wikis, and social networking merged into topical … [Read more...]
Living Stories WordPress Plugin & Theme Released
April 30, 2010 by
Google released a Living Stories plugin and theme for WordPress yesterday enabling anyone who publishes through WordPress to organize coverage of an ongoing event on a single dynamic page. Living Stories is an experimental format for displaying news coverage that Google created in partnership with the New York Times and Washington Post. Google software engineer Eric Zhang wrote about the process of developing the plugin on the Google News Blog. "Our next step … [Read more...]
A Peek at the Google Wave Extensions Gallery
March 13, 2010 by
Remember Google Wave? Last November I was pretty excited to get an invite to join Google's experimental real-time communication platform (which is still in preview and not released to the public). After I got the invite, I immediately logged on and played around a little bit—but largely by myself. With Google Wave, collaborators share e-mail, instant messaging, wikis, and social networking merged into topical waves. Since I didn't have any collaborators, or at … [Read more...]
Your Brand: Taking Social Media Seriously
December 16, 2009 by
Now that Google has added live results from Twitter into searches, you need to face the fact once and for all that you can no longer control your organization's online reputation. Negative comments on blogs, Facebook, or Twitter have the power to tarnish your brand overnight in ways unimaginable a few years back. Even a small business should take social media seriously and try to influence conversations about its brand. A common concern, however, is managing … [Read more...]
Your Brand: 10-Minute Social Media Monitoring
December 9, 2009 by
Google is adding live results from Twitter into searches this week, forever changing the nature of brand management. Now more than ever, you need to monitor your organization's social media presence. You need to know right away if the live Tweet results include "worst service" or "sucks," so you can diffuse these conversations and "push down" negative tweet search results. A common concern, however, is that monitoring social media takes too much time, especially … [Read more...]
Google Wave Developer Preview
October 15, 2009 by
I hope I can get a Google Wave invite. Google Wave is "a personal communication and collaboration tool" announced by Google at the Google I/O conference on May 27, 2009. It is a web-based service, computing platform, and communications protocol designed to merge e-mail, instant messaging, wikis, and social networking. About a million people were extended invitations starting Sept. 30, 2009, with the initial 100,000 users each allowed to invite from 20 to 30 … [Read more...]
Follow me on Twitter
Subscribe via RSS feed