Tim Gregory » Google

Google Wave makes me feel stupid

Tim — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 17:42:23 +0000

I feel a little like an ape in “2001: a Space Odyssey” staring up at the monolith when I look at Google Wave.

It’s shiny.
Undoubtedly clever.
Technologically advanced.
But what does it do? What is it’s purpose?

I kinda get it… it’s a bit like email, but collaborative.
A bit like a shared workspace/whiteboard.
It’s a persistant online collaboration area.
It’s got some IM features.
Does some of the stuff that Webex and Fuze Meeting do.
Maybe a bit of Huddle in there too.

But apparently this is a game-changer, and people are offering their organs and unborn children for invitations to the service.

I’ll say it out loud – I don’t ‘get’ it.

I can’t see myself using it productively.
I have loads of collaboration and communication tools, and I’m not sure where this one fits in.
When I send email of any importance, I give it a quick proof-read, check that my meaning is clear, delete the superfluous stuff, and then hit send.
I don’t really want people to see what I’m writing, letter by letter.
Even IM gives me the chance to construct my ideas 1 line at a time.

As an experiment in collaboration I have used Google docs to co-author an academic document for my studies.
We were a distributed team creating an 8000+ word marketing plan, and we thought we needed real-time collaborative tools to create the document.
It didn’t work.

For serious work, where complex ideas need to be constructed and detailed in a document, it just doesn’t work to have 7 people all working in the same doc at the same time.

I see I am not the only one who thinks that there may be a bit too much hype around Wave.
Much smarter guys than me don’t seem too impressed so far.
Gigaom weighs in, saying that “Google climbs to new heights of arrogance with Wave”, and Scoble writes that Wave will kill your productivity.

Have you used Wave productively, in your personal, professional, or academic life?
Can you see yourself using it beyond the “oh, cool!” stage?
First 8 comments get Wave invites.
Post comments using your Gmail account.

Google Wave Hands-On Review (techie-buzz.com)
Cutting through the LA Times hype over the Wave hype (inquisitr.com)
Google’s Coming ‘Wave’ (seattlepi.com)
Google Wave – The Future of Email? (maketecheasier.com)
Initial Reviews of Google Wave; Neat, but Noisy (developers.slashdot.org)

Google doesn’t think Wave is such a great idea anymore too

SEO Update

Tim — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 12:00:05 +0000

It’s day 4, and I’m in position 6 on a Google search for “Tim Gregory”…. not a bad start (altho I sometimes seem to drop to the second page.

SEO and your personal brand

Tim — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 14:13:56 +0000

I am currently studying for my MBA through Henley Business School, attached to the University of Reading in the UK.
Right now I’m working through the ‘Strategic Marketing’ module. During the course of our module workshop, Professor David James spoke a bit about ‘Personal Branding’, the process of marketing people and careers as brands.
He got a mixed response from the group… some thought it was a practice bordering on deception. His pitch was that it’s important to present the elements of your professional and personal life that were most important in a consistent, understandable and marketable way.

It struck a chord for me, and I started to look more critically at my own personal brand online.

To date, I’ve done a terrible job… I’ve been online for 14 years, a professional in the Internet and Web Publishing industry for 12 years, and yet a Google search on Tim Gregory turns up:

Tim Gregory the actor on IMDB
Tim J Gregory on Facebook
Tim Gregory, the New Spaces host from Ohio
Tim Gregory ,the Associate Director at the Catholic University of America
Tim Gregory, the amateur photographer from the UK

And so on….
You get the picture – despite the opportunity I’ve had, I’ve not tried to ensure that I own my name online and shape the content associated with it.
An even more alarming case than my own of an individual who failed to actively manage his personal brand comes from RJ van Spaandonk, of the Core Group.

Now the Core Group has recently been under fire for their high prices and their public attacks on parallel imports of Apple products through their ‘stopgrey.co.za’ website. Instead of engaging meaningfully with his customers, RJ van Spaandonk launched a bizarre campaign of Twitter posts that made him look like a raving lunatic.

This campaign backfired horribly – his posts were picked up and reposted throughout Twitter and blogs, and further entrenched his reputation as an arrogant monopolist out of touch with his customers. It seems he thought social media was somehow still a one-to-many medium, and he could actively manage his convoluted campaign without anyone responding to the conversation he had started online before he was finished speaking. You can see his actual Twitter posts preserved at The Mac Blog
The result was predictable… the prolific bloggers and SEO experts that he “sought to engage with on their own territory” simply had to repeat his misguided utterances, and now a Google search for “RJ van Spaandonk” returns his regrettable statements in all their glory.

Google search for RJ van Spaandonk on 5 July 2009

Perhaps his first mistake was assuming that “journalists” were somehow different from “bloggers and twitterers”? RJ, a tip – as I’m sure you’re learning, it’s all the same thing on the internet.

In case I have to spell it out for you, Mr van Spaandonk has lost control of his personal brand online, and he’s going to have a tough time reclaiming it. And instead of showing some humility and seeking to open the conversation with his critics on more positive terms, he chooses to alienate them further, claiming that he “overestimated the wit and sense of humour” of his audience. Poor RJ.
For examples of people doing an excellent job of creating and maintaining their personal brands take a look at Google searches for my colleagues Brendan McNulty and Matthew Buckland. Most of the first page of results for these guys is all about them. Brendan goes as far as buying Google Adwords for his own name, which I imagine costs him very little as I suspect the bidding activity around the search term ‘Brendan McNulty’ is pretty low.

Moving on… So what am I doing about my own poor showing online?

Registered a vanity domain (tim-gregory.com)
Started blogging again. It’s about time I stood by my own thoughts and utterances
Applied some basic SEO techniques, like using dashes in my domain name to show the search engines that those are separate words
Leverage online profiles and social tools – follow Tim Gregory on Twitter, view the Tim Gregory professional profile on LinkedIn and the Facebook profile for Tim Gregory.
Continue to build a strong network of relevant industry professionals through LinkedIn
Start contributing across the ‘blogosphere’, leaving relevant comments against articles for blog posts where I have some industry expertise – most of them allow you to link your own site when you enter your name and email address against a comment. (Can get you some traffic, but not great for SEO because of the ‘nofollow’ command usually given to the search engines in comments)
Set SEO targets – it’s my ambition to knock the actor, host, and amateur photography off the top positions for MY name online
Look for media mentions where possible

If you have any interest in this SEO and personal branding experience, and would like to see whether an outsider can overtake established personal brands in search engine results, please link to my blog using my name, or simple post a link to this article. Feel free to drop comments about your experience maintaining your personal brand online.

If you have a website and would like to help me claim my name, please insert this into your site somewhere:

Tim Gregory Blog

Thanks!

Updated: Marcia Netto sent me a good link – Searcher Behaviour Research Update – “What about the branding aspect? The study found that 36% believe that companies whose websites are returned at the top of the search results are the top companies in their field.” Can we can infer from this behaviour that the top-ranked individual for a given name/term is regarded as a leader?

Misconceptions you might have about blogging (wsioms.co.za)

Hot topics for 2009 – Realtime Web

Tim Gregory — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 18:11:55 +0000

Ok, this one is pretty obvious… you would have to be living in a cave high in the mountains and out of earshot of any internet-using humans to have missed the seismic shift from ‘kinda fresh’ to real-time on the internet.
This is big, really big, and it’s particularly interesting to me that it’s an area that seems to be a bit of a weak spot for Google and until recently some of the other giants like Facebook.
I’d go as far as saying that Twitter is not that interesting by itself, and it is really riding the realtime meme.
Twitter was in the right place at the right time, and pitched itself in the right way -the technology is not particularly interesting, and has existed in various forms for years.

Take a look at this timeline of the spread of news regarding Michael Jackson’s death from SEOMoz.

It took over an hour for a large entertainment site to break the news of the cardiac arrest (TMZ.com).
Another 42 minutes for Wikipedia to pick it up.
A further 18 minutes before CNNbrk tweets that Jackson goes to hospital (meanwhile, TMZ had posted news of his death)
15 minutes after the CNNbrk tweet, Wikipedia freezes the Michael Jackson page after a flurry of edits.
A total of 2 hours after the 911 call, the TMZ story goes big on Digg
By this stage, there are over 2000 mentions per minute of Michael Jackson on Twitter
At 22:40, a full 3 hours after the 911 call, the first mention of Michael Jackson’s death make it onto Google News.

Not hard to see a pattern here… Twitter, Wikipedia, Digg… mainstream news and the mighty Google were slow out of the blocks compared to the social sites.

I won’t bore you with too many links and details, but here’s a quick scan over the topic…

The realtime web is being built on XMPP, the ‘jabber’ protocol.

Everyone is starting to use XMPP, including Google (for Wave), Apple (for iPhone push notification), Twitter (for feeds to Twitter search and a couple of others) and Facebook (promised soon for their chat).

The major IM networks are starting to ‘get it’, and AOL now talks XMPP.

XMPP has loads of great stuff built in, like presence, personal eventing, multi-user chat, federated authentication, publish/subscribe functionality and loads more.

The bridge between the web and XMPP is BOSH.

The development pattern is called Comet , and typically uses the long-polling technique. Holding connections open is better than polling – the latency is lower, and total overhead is lighter.

BOSH and XMPP are typically used in web-based IM clients, but some clever engineers are re-purposing XMPP for multi-player games at sites like Chesspark.

Realtime search is becoming a hot topic, particularly at Techcrunch.

Realtime search is the beginning – I can see us using this at 24.com for content syndication, real-time Sport scoring, multi-player games and a couple of other (top sikrit) apps.