Google Paranoia and the Tin Foil Hat Club
How many times have you seen on forums
“Don’t use the Google toolbar!”
“I don’t use analytics, I don’t want Google knowing what I am up to”
“Guess I can’t use FeedBurner now”
“There is no way I am getting a Reader account”
… and so on.
What is it with all the Google Paranoia?
These are otherwise sane webmasters not wanting to use services because Google might use their data. What do they think Google is going to do with it?
Now if we are talking about spammers, well they have good reason to not want Google to see their data. One click and their business could be impacted. For the rest of us, surely we want Google to see our stuff?
What is the biggest issue people have with Google? Not giving our sites enough credit. What could help Google see we have quality sites? All that analytics and feed data!
If Google sees that this blog has so many subscribers, so many get the feed via email and so many sites send traffic, that should put us above the spammer with the tricked and mislead traffic, right? We should rank higher than the sites with bought links that never get clicked and the machine-made content that gets no subscribers.
So for me, bring it on! Use everything, I have nothing to hide!
Is there something I am missing?
Nanaimo, the Capital of Google Earth

Where would you guess would be the most data-rich place on Google Earth?
I expect you would take a stab at Mountain View California, where the headquarters of Google is located? Silicon Valley, Redmond or perhaps New York?
No, it’s a small port town in British Columbia called Nanaimo!
How Google Earth Ate Our Town - TIME
Beating San Francisco in the e-stakes is a big deal for an old coal mining city of only around 78,000 people, nestled about an hour north of Victoria. What Nanaimo lacks for in size, it has tried to make up in sheer volume of raw electronic data.
I love Canada, and often like to do my virtual tourism using Flickr. Nanaimo was one of the many places we had been eying up on the real estate sites like MLS.ca. This stuff just takes our research to a whole new level.
They have added mapping, terrain, points of interest and even every single business. If you are hunting for a starbucks, never fear!

Many key places have virtual tours so as well as flying over and virtually driving the roads, you can get a sense of being there too.

It’s not just tourism this is useful for either
The Google fire service allows people to avoid accident sites by tuning electronic devices to automatic updates from the city’s RSS news feed, says fire captain Dean Ford. Eventually, Nanaimo plans to equip its grass-cutting machines with GPS devices, so residents piqued by the apparent shabbiness of a particular park or grass verge can use Google to find out when last it was groomed by the city’s gardening staff. And the city’s cemeteries will soon be mapped to allow internet users to find out who is buried in each plot
You can get the Nanaimo date here, and get an idea of what it will be like when your town is wired into the nets.
Why it is Not Advertising that is Broken, But Advertisers
If you were reading this article at Techcrunch quickly you might think that advertising is a waste of money. The article reports that a study by comScore reveals some interesting facts about the demographics of ad clickers.
Apparently around half of all the clicks made on ads are generated by only 6% of the total web population. That is an interesting statistic in itself. While we are all familiar with the 80-20% principle, that is extreme.
But really, when you look at your own stats, is it really that surprising that many clicks are “wasted”? A lot of ad clicks are mistakes. Some are curiosity. Many ads are misleading so conversions are poor. People mis target ads or leave ad placement to media buyers who just want to boost their kick back percentage and delegate to low grade staff who don’t know what they are doing, are counting the hours down to clocking off time and certainly don’t care about your campaign.
The news from the survey gets worse:
The average heavy clicker is 25 to 44 years old, earns less than $40,000 a year, spends a lot of time online but not a lot of money online, and likes to frequent auctions, gambling sites and job boards. Sounds like a lot of these heavy clickers are out of work and have nothing to do.
The implication is these people are just idly surfing and have no intention of spending money with you or really taking any notice of what you have to say.
This really isn’t that big a revelation! Really, if you haven’t been measuring ROI then you only have yourself to blame. If you have been measuring ROI you can sit back smug in the knowledge that despite all these conclusions matter not a jot to your bottom line.
If your best campaign strategy is to simply spend money on likely looking sites then you deserve all you get. You do not have to be happy with this default demographic. The targeting tools at your disposal are getting more sophisticated. Microsoft in particular are putting in a lot of effort into demographic targeting. You can do your own research and testing. Of course, that takes more effort than simply lining up a budget and pulling the trigger, which is perhaps where this problem comes from.
The fact is clicks alone are a poor way of tracking campaign success but are an easy metric to fall back on for lazy marketers or unscrupulous agencies. Clicks are not equal to performance but can be argued as if they are.
Clicks are just one metric out of many. When someone clicks they have only taken one desired action in a chain. There is a complete journey from how many see your ad all the way through to those you get to the point of charging their credit card and hopefully being a happy return customer.
Those days of “I know half of my advertising is a waste but I do not know which half” should be long gone. Unfortunately there are still many advertising strategies out there that rely solely on having a fat cheque book.
Is Google Toolbar Hijacking 404 Pages?

I logged in this morning to see a message from Wendy pointing me at this article.
It seems the new version of the Google Toolbar detects a 404 error code and serves up Googles own “helpful” replacement 404 page.
Why is this “helpful” behavior bad? As well as a link to the domain root they provide a prominent search box pre-filled with search terms. The temptation is going to be to hit that search button, effectively taking away your visitor.
How many people are going to be affected by this? Probably a small number. Not sure how many people have the toolbar installed but I don’t think the impact will be huge, the issue is more about Google again putting their own needs before those of the webmaster. Biting the hands that feed them just one more time.
You can see more discussion over at DigitalPoint and other forums. Some webmasters are very upset by this.
From what I understand this is still beta software, perhaps in the final version Google will make this optional or remove the feature if the backlash heat gets too much?
Do you think Google is going too far? Is Google putting their needs above webmasters? Are Google “evil”? Please share your views in the comments …
Questions About Google Knol
Since the initial announcement from Google about their Knol project I have been reading the discussions to try and clear up some thoughts. If you don’t know Knol yet, here is how they described it:
Earlier this week, we started inviting a selected group of people to try a new, free tool that we are calling “knol”, which stands for a unit of knowledge. Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. The tool is still in development and this is just the first phase of testing. For now, using it is by invitation only. But we wanted to share with everyone the basic premises and goals behind this project.
It seems I have more questions than answers, in particular the following three:
- More or less trustworthy than Wikipedia? - Google is pushing the fact that authors will get full credit for their content, so there are both advertising revenue and ego benefits. At the same time though they say:
Google will not serve as an editor in any way, and will not bless any content. All editorial responsibilities and control will rest with the authors. We hope that knols will include the opinions and points of view of the authors who will put their reputation on the line. Anyone will be free to write. For many topics, there will likely be competing knols on the same subject. Competition of ideas is a good thing.
So potentially Google is going to rank something, with the Google good name attached, that is no more reliable than any other content on the web (ie. not). At least at Wikipedia you can go in and try to edit something that is incorrectly claimed about yourself or your company, it’s not clear what recourse you will have in this case.
Despite any disclaimers, you know there will be people who say “it’s from Google, it must be true”. Hopefully as well as having alternative points of view they have a way to make it clear these are just opinions.
- Wikipedia dupe content? - As Techcrunch say, Knol will show advertising, which will attract lots of Wikipedia contributors, but also as they point out Wikipedia content is free to copy:
Very soon we are going to see a lot of Wikipedia content moving wholesale to Knol. Wikipedia content is basically free to use, redistribute, copy, whatever, under the GNU license
How much of Knol is going to be dupe content, and as this is a Google product, will any of this copy and paste content outrank the original?
- SEO heaven or hell? - Which brings us to my final question. If Knol ranks, and especially if it outranks will it turn out to be a spam magnet and a draw for SEO’s looking for a ranking leg-up?
What do you think? Is Knol going to cause spam and plagiarism, or will it be great for competition and users?
Should Google Have a “People Search”?
I was just reading Aarons comment on my last post and it got me thinking. First, in case you missed it, here is what he said:
while Google makes it pretty easy to find someone, I think the search engines are going to get even better at this. They’re going to have to with millions of people starting their own sites on domains that don’t sync up with their real names.
Why hasn’t Google already done more in this area?
Search Google for my name right now and you get the usual mix of sites and personas.
Anyone who has been on the web for a while will probably also have a mixture of various profiles, their own blog, perhaps their employer, etc. What you do not see is my Facebook, LinkedIn, etc profile. While those services are, at least in part, meant to be “people discovery systems”, I have no motivation to send them “search juice” by linking to them.
Google sates as their mission:
to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
I think having a useful interface for finding people online would not only be cool, but incredibly useful. While others have attempted this in the past, Google could actually do it.
Yes, they have a phone book, and Yahoo! has their equivalent, but those are hardly what I am wanting, and not particularly useful for the majority of the world either.
I can see it being a tab, like “Images”, to differentiate between trying to find the person/profile/site of versus places that mention the phrase “Chris Garrett”. Multiple results could be listed showing either profile photograph or website snapshot along with whatever contact or bio details they can find.
What do you think?
Get Google Maps Phone Directions and Locations Without GPS
It’s funny. The same week I buy a GPS-enabled phone, Google releases a beta of Google Maps that can find your location without the use of satellites.


Yes Google Maps for Mobile now has cell tower triangulation built in so your location can be guessed to within a range of around 100 meters or so. If you have not tried Google Maps on your phone, it is well worth a look. Here is what they describe as the key features:
Real-time traffic — See where the congestion is, and estimate delays in over 30 major US metropolitan areas.
Detailed directions — Whether you plan to walk or drive, your route is displayed on the map itself, together with step-by-step directions.
Integrated search results — Local business locations and contact information appear all in one place, integrated on your map.
Easily movable maps — Interactive maps let you zoom in or out, and move in all directions so you can orient yourself visually.
Satellite imagery — Get a bird’s eye view of your desired location. (It’s like you’re there, we swear.)
Now for me this is a great improvement in many ways over Nokias own product that comes free on the n95. There are however a few things you need to be aware of:
- It is quite data intensive, unlike Nokias product you can’t pre-load the maps you need to use, which means you will be using up your data tariff pretty quickly
Just like the standard Google Maps/Earth, the data is out of date. Don’t expect it to show you recent road changes. Right now it thinks I am sitting 100 feet up in the air above an empty field.- The directions are only really useful as a passenger or on foot, if you want a voice telling you which direction to take use Nokias subscription or buy TomTom.
That said it is a great addition to be used as complimentary, if only for local amenities searches and the detailed (if dated) satellite imagery. Try it out on your phone now.
Google Android: The Least You Need to Know
Well the GPhone is here … kind of. As with any announcement from the big-G, there is a buzz around the media and the blogosphere but strangely the reaction to this news is quite muted. Is the Google magic fading? Could it be expectations were raised too high?
This is a high profile endeavor for the company, especially as they are going up against the current darling of the telephone market, Apple.
Many people have been disappointed to hear that it is not quite the iPhone-killer they were hoping for, but rather something quite different, and still quite exciting.
What is it? Read on to find out everything you need to know!
- It’s not a phone … yet - While the demonstrations and developers obviously have their hands on real hardware, you won’t be able to get your sweaty palms on any of the gadgets for quite a while.
- Multiple Vendors - Rather than being “a phone”, it is a platform and alliance bringing together technology and several vendors, lead by Google. You can see more at the Open Handset Alliance pages.
- Operating System and SDK - Google has developed an operating system based on Linux, and a software development kit. $10million up for grabs for developers, so get thinking of your best application ideas!
- Java -Unlike the iPhone, this baby will come with Java, allowing familiar developer access for a whole existing community of programmers.
Webkit Web Browser with Zoom - As you could expect from Google, a browser features prominently, along with a nifty “coverflow-esque” way of browsing your history. The browser is based on the same code used to create Safari on the Mac, so it is a capable and standards compliant real web browser.- Touch Screen - In a post-iPhone world you would have to expect it to have a touch interface and of course it does. How much of the innovative gesture-play they will be allowed to ape is probably a matter for their legal team ..
Video and Accelerated 3D Graphics - One of the sexiest aspects of the device is the 2d and 3d graphics capabilities. The demonstration makes a point of showing off a familiar first person shooter game.- iPhone + - A few of the things they seem to have right that Apple missed, at least from initial impressions from the publicity materials, is 3G rather than iPhones lame 2.5G EDGE, GPS and compass (to integrate with Google Maps I am sure), and intriguingly an accelerometer (Wii style control anyone?)
See more and watch it working in the Youtube Video.
So there it is, lots of interesting geek-toys but as yet nothing tangible to put money down for. Even if this does not turn out to be the market disrupting product people were wishing for, it should put a fire under the Apple team and create some competition.
More coverage: Engadget Techcrunch Gigaom Scoble
What do you think? Something to give iPhone a run for their money or is it too little too late? Let us know in the comments …
A web 2.0 Song
Guy Ruvio is a dear friend of mine, which I have been trying to persuade to blog since I learned about blogging. Imagine my horror when I found out he started blogging in Hebrew. How will the English speaking world read his brilliant stuff? And then it dawned on me. I can steal his work in the guise of “translation” and get all the credit.
So without further Ado…
A web 2.0 song
Web 2
Do you get the feeling that we will make do?
Is it really over?
Have you noticed all the sites talking about web 3.0?
——–
The Web
In numbers
It feels good to count
It’s a primal need
But everybody keeps ignoring the number 1
Do you see companies saying – we are the solution to web 1.0?
communication 1.0?
It’s just to remind
I left the one behind
——–
I want a domain
Or a blog
Or a search engine,
To call my own
To hold in the night
——–
Alone?
Together?
A sense of community?
Cooped up at home?
In any case, the psychologists will have more work
——–
Web 2.0
Is it a technology?
A Trend?
A Buzz?
A Spin?
Revolution?
Revolution!
——–
I opened a blog
A diary of my own
I am no longer anonymous
Who will read it?
What does it matter?
As long as we push adsense into it
——–
Will pass a billion
Won’t make it
Changed the world
Talented people
I want too
——–
did it
So why don’t we buy
Booble
Or
Doodle
Or
Xooxle
It’s the domain that counts
They’ve all been lent?
Did you stop to think about content?
——–
Mashups
A picture on a picture
A site on a site
A service on a service
Playing with Lego
Does anyone build with bricks anymore?
——–
Software as a service?
Sounds good to me
I get this need to kick it
When the blue screen comes on
Getting a service from the blue?
I’m bought.
——–
Google Docs
Save it all at Google’s
Or on my Computer?
But they know everything about me
Not using Google!
Oh, What the hell,
Google it is,
Now I can work from anywhere
Damn what are these commercials?
How do they know I love Taami**
Enough
Going to the Beach
What does it say there on the billboard?
——–
Programming
I Program
I Model
I Design
I Photoshup
Like Mashup
10 Photoshuppers needed for a successful startup
——–
VCs
Web 2.0
Come on…
At least try to disguise the herd affect
I’ll tell you a secret
Where the herd is, the good grass is already gone
And there is only dead weed
I actually saw a couple of good companies
Where?
At TechCrunch
Or one of its
Mashups
——–
In 98 we built
Hosting providers
In 99 we built
ASP
In 2001 we blow up
In 2005 we woke up
And built
Software as a service
Or
Software on demand
Or
Multi Tenant applications
Hold it!
What?
IS everything the same?
What is changed?
Kids, help me find the difference
——–
Web 2.0
I am there too
I don’t understand what it is
But there’s something there
If everybody’s going there, there must be something (there)
It has to be
If Vardi could at 99
Why can’t I do it now?
——–
Web 2.0
Experts
Isn’t it a contradiction?
——–
A collaboration plant
I am building a collaboration plant
Anyone can water it
And leave a comment
Or a talkback
Their messanger number
Maybe a girl will stop by as well
That would be great
——–
{Censored}
——–
{Censored}
——–
Talkback
I will leave a comment
I have stuff to say
And the world will hear
Let the people know
I am First!
I am First!
I am First!
Damn, who left the comment before me?
——–
Web 2.0
In war time
The one book I don’t want to write!
——–
Big Companies
Small Companies
Medium
And Microscopic
Even for me
There is a place
In the Web 2.0
——–
What will be the next big thing?
Electronic Ink
Implanted Cellular phones
A Bionic Shoe
Or plug-ins?
To the brain
Well come on guys, that’s very easy
Web 3.0
Electronic Ink
Implanted Cellular phones
A Bionic Shoe
Or plug-ins?
To the brain
I Guarantee It.
**Taami is a popular low quality chocolate bar in Israel
Read Professor’s McAfee’s Blog - It will probably make you smarter and happier
It is not a simple thing to do - Reading Professor Andrew Mcfee’s Blog.
Being a Harvard professor, he writes long posts, uses Harvardian English and writes about theoretical issues. But if you are interested in web 2.0 technologies and/or their adoption in the enterprise - this is the blog for you.
I also found that when I read articles that were written by very smart people, I experience a surge in gray matter activity.
And to top it all, every once in a while he writes a piece that makes me feel better about the world we live and work in. Here is the last paragraph from his recent blog post:
“Web 2.0 is empowering all kinds of creators: hacks to be sure, but also craftsmen and artists. Shouldn’t we be truly excited to experience the best of the worlds they’ll put up on the World Wide Web?”
To sum up … Read Prof’ McAfee’s Blog. It’s good for you.

