Google’s own webmasters help site recommends microformats and RDFa structured data to improve indexing and usefulness of the data. Review metadata appears to have full support, while people, product, and business data are in beta.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Above is Peter Linsley speaking about Google Image Search at SMX West in February, 2009.

Meanwhile, Stefan Juhl suggests some JavaScript to break your site out of the image search result pages:

Many Google image search users are quickly clicking on to the direct image URL and thereby not seeing the page with the image. Also, it seems that many of the users don’t hesitate to click back to the image SERPs when they don’t see the image “above the fold” – probably because of Google image search framing the page with the picture and thus making it almost too easy to do so.

<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript">
if (top.location != self.location) top.location.replace(self.location);
</script>

After adding this to the one of my websites I saw a quite big increase in pageviews. It turned out that the visitors happily continued to browse around the website.

What happens when one of Google’s street view camera vehicles encounters a low bridge or a muddy Australian road?

New releases from Google Labs: Similar Images and News Timeline. I count it as a failure for Google that the news timeline doesn’t show future events.

Google yesterday introduced video chat to the web-based version of it’s Google Talk app (think GMail), but doesn’t appear to interoperate with any of the many existing video chat apps, iChat and Skype tops among them.

From The Register:

Inspired by a recent New York Times piece that questioned whether the Mountain View search monopoly is morphing into a media company — which it is — Finnish blogger Timo Paloheimo promptly unveiled Google minus Google. Key in the word “YouTube,” and the first result is Wikipedia.

It’s not truly “Google’s own,” but the internet giant will get exclusive use of the images for mapping purposes, according to Reuters:

GeoEye Inc said it successfully launched into space on Saturday its new GeoEye-1 satellite, which will provide the U.S. government, Google Earth users and others the highest-resolution commercial color satellite imagery on the market.

Of course, Google doesn’t need a satellite to watch us all very closely.

Aaron Swartz’s Bubble City, Chapter 8:

He sent the report to his superior and wandered off for a bit to dwell on the power he had as a faceless person deep inside an office park in Mountain View to know every detail of another person’s life. He wondered what it would be like if he came across that person on the street, he would know every detail of his life, his household budget, the secrets he confided over IM, even what he looked like naked.

Google’s always been in the awkward position of claiming that PageRank is algorithmic, not editorial, while also explaining that they’re constantly adjusting their algorithms to ensure that PageRank reflects editorial judgments of quality. Here’s a peek inside the machine.

Following news that Yahoo! is joining the OpenID fray, it appears Google is dipping a toe in too. While those two giants work out their implementations, others are raising the temperature of the debate on IDM solutions. Stefan Brands is among the OpenID naysayers (David Recordon’s response), while Scott Gillbertson sees a bright future. Let’s watch the OpenID Directory to see how fast it grows now (count on January 19 2008: 446).

I’ve been thinking about it since Troy mentioned to me that he thought Google was ruining his memory. And I thought I found confirmation of it when I read Gladwell’s description of Daniel Wegner, et al’s Transactive Memory in Close Relationships:

When we talk about memory, we aren’t just talking about ideas and impressions and facts stored inside our heads. An awful lot of what we remember is actually stored outside our brains. Most of us deliberately don’t memorize most of the phone numbers we need. But we do memorize where to find them — in a phone book, or in our personal Rolodex.

You’d think this is where I say Google fits, but I’d argue it goes deeper. Gladwell continues:

Perhaps more important, though, we store information with other people. Couples do this automatically. …Wegner argues that when people know each other well, they create an implicit joint memory system — a transactive memory system — which is based on an understanding about who is best suited to remember what kinds of things.

This joint memory, claim Gladwell and Wegner argue, is part of what intimacy means.

So, perhaps there’s a continuum between phonebooks and life-partners. Not withstanding reports that 24% of Americans say the web can replace a significant other, where does today’s internet fit?

Before you answer that, consider eBay Fever and Anne Muxel’s Family Memory, a Sociology of Intimacy:

Family memory is also and above all a presence inside us which recalls itself to us on the basis of images, impressions, and sensations. When it opens up its doors, it lets out, as if by magic, a burst of odors, sounds, an anecdote, a familiar joke, an object, a photo, the voices of familiar characters, the memory of their bodies, of their gestures, like an image of a childhood place, a recipe, etc., all of these evocations working as cues to bring the past back into the present.

memory, intimacy, search engines, google, transactive memory, shared memory

Google Gears: create web apps that work offline

google, offline ajax, web development, ajax, offline, google gears

Thanks to Ryan Eby for tipping me to this. Go try it out.

Whatever you think of them, they do keep delivering.

I wonder if people will ask for stack-level photos of our libraries?

Google Maps, gmaps, Google, street-level photos

There it is in The Guardian:

Internet giant Google has drawn up plans to compile psychological profiles of millions of web users by covertly monitoring the way they play online games.

Yep, “do no evil” Google has filed a patent on the process of building psychological profiles of its users for sale to advertisers.

Details such as whether a person is more likely to be aggressive, hostile or dishonest could be obtained and stored for future use, it says… Players who spend a lot of time exploring “may be interested in vacations, so the system may show ads for vacations”. And those who spend more time talking to other characters will see adverts for mobile phones.

Google claims it has no immediate plans to to use the technology, but the company did spend $23M to acquire AdScape, an in-game advertising company.

Adscape Media offers dynamic delivery of advertising with plot and storyline integration — making its solutions a truly interactive marketing platform. Adscape Media supports sophisticated demographic and geographic targeting and also provides a robust reporting interface for marketers.

And The Guardian also reports the patent application goes beyond psychological profiling:

Not all the inferences made by monitoring user activity rely on subtle psychological clues, however. “In a car racing game, after a user crashes his Honda Civic, an announcer could be used to advertise by saying ‘if he had a Hummer, he would have gotten the better of that altercation’, etc,” the patent says. And: “If the user has been playing for over two hours continuously, the system may display ads for Pizza Hut, Coke, coffee.”

Siva Vaidyanathan quips:

While it is violating gamer privacy on behalf of advertisers, will Google collect and disclose data about gamer sexism? And would this convince the folks at Linden Labs to integrate into their product dependable, remunerative employment opportunities for Second Life players who don’t want to do sex work?

(Via Discourse.net.)

Also interesting, but not from Google: METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR OBTAINING REVENUE FROM THE DISTRIBUTION OF HYPER-RELEVANT ADVERTISING THROUGH PERMISSIVE MIND READING, PROXIMITY ENCOUNTERS, AND DATABASE AGGREGATION. Permissive mind reading!

profiling, psychological profile, google, evil, advertising, online gaming, world of warcraft, second life

O’Reilly’s Where 2.0 Conference isn’t until the end of May, but Google just released two sweet new map-related features: GeoRSS support and MyMaps.

The GeoRSS support means that any application that can output it’s geocoding — as simple as <georss:point>45.256 -71.92</georss:point> — can now be linked to a live map with no more effort than it takes to paste the feed URL into Google Maps’ search box. Google holds this up as the exemplar, but I’m a fan of the cheese photo map here. (Here’s some notes about GeoRSS feed validation.)

And if that isn’t easy enough, the MyMaps feature that allows anybody to start marking up a map in their browser.

The really cool part, however, is Google is now indexing all this data and supposedly will be making them part of their local search. The result? Geo mashups have now gone from peculiar examples of the new technology to the loosely linked nuggets that made Google search and the web magical in the first place.

Expect more, way more.

(Also worth noting: with these announcements, the release of the 1.0 version of the Geo Mashup WordPress plugin, and Cliffy’s experience, I’m now formally throwing in the towel on my own bsuite_geocode plugin.) (Tip o’the hat to Ryan for telling me about the GeoRSS support.)

mashups, maps, mapping, loosely linked, local search, google, georss, geocoding, geo, mymaps

I was supposed to go to the what I think is a Google Apps roadshow this morning, but I was also supposed to be at code4lib this weeks and be doing a dozen other things that didn’t happen.

So, in lieu of that I’m reading up on the company’s first new business strategy since Adsense.

Phil Wainewright is skeptical, even mocking at the likely prospects for the premium package that Google is offering for about $50 per person, per year.

Microsoft Office killer it may not be, but then nobody really expected PCs to replace big iron (and they didn’t, but golly, look what did happen). The real frontier now isn’t in formatting single-author-print-it-and-file-it-(then forget it) documents, but in tools that support collaboration throughout the life of the document. Technology has fast outstripped our ability to integrate its affordances into our work, but we might be ready for something new. I’m not predicting a paperless office, but we might be looking at the evolution of office technology and communication, moving beyond the notion computers as elaborate typewriters (which happen to be networked), to applications that truly leverage the network as a business tool.

Google Docs’ collaboration features are emblematic of that change, allowing anybody with a web browser to participate in real time in the writing of a document.

For example, when Alice in New York enters something into her project, Meredith in Los Angeles can see the changes in real time, and respond to them immediately. Both work from a single document or spreadsheet, instead of having to laboriously compare and consolidate individual documents or spreadsheets, and editing is possible from any computer with internet access — whether in an airport or at a friend’s house.

collaboration, google, google apps, google docs, office communication

At a time when people are still wowing over the Google-YouTube deal (and wondering why their 2.0 company didn’t get bought for $1.6 billion), it’s good to know that Marc Cantor is dead down on it. Not because of the copyright issues or “limited” advertising potential of YouTube that others cite, but apparently because he just doesn’t like Google anymore.

To wit, he names Orkut as a failed social network; knocks Blogger as an also-ran; disregards Google Base as pointless; labels AdSense a $5 billion cash machine for Sergey, Larry and Eric; tosses aside Gmaps, Gmail, Gcalendar, Gscholar, Gbooks, and Gtalk as “unrelated, random output of the labs, thrown up to justify their R&D expenditures;” and closes with an ominous warning:

Oh yah–Google values social networks as long as they are THEIR social networks. Lets see how willing Google will be to inter-connect their social networks with others. To give birth to ecosystems which feed off of their social networks. My bet is that they’ll be more onerous than MySpace.

This ain’t open platforms folks–this is new age lock-in. Google ain’t about social networking Bambi–its about new age greed, lock-in and old school politics and business models, just twisted a bit.

It may be too early to talk about the fall of Google, but I wonder what the GoogleWatch folks have to say about all this.

Marc Cantor, deal, google, google video, prognosticating, youtube

When I heard news that Google was to release a spreadsheet companion to their freshly bought Writely web-based word processing app, I got excited about all the things they could do to make it more than just a copy of Numsum. Let’s face it, Google’s the Gorilla in the room here and they’re gonna squash Numsum, but wouldn’t it be cool if…

Well, Dmitry Nekrasovski get’s credit for planting the notion of URL-addressable rows, columns, and cells in my mind with this commentary from months ago:

I just came across this ITWorld article that suggests a simple yet intriguing idea for making online spreadsheet applications like Numsum more than Excel wannabes: make cells and cell ranges addressable with URL’s, and use a standard XML variant to encode them. To the author’s credit, he does not use a buzzword for this idea, but, for ease of meme-peddling, I will refer to it as Spreadsheet 2.0. You heard it here first.

The implications of Spreadsheet 2.0 at the user experience level for a public site could be pretty neat: feeding into a live stream of, say, stock market data could be as easy as copying and pasting a spreadsheet cell. But it could be most valuable in an enterprise environment. Anyone who has worked in a large organization will testify to the pervasiveness of the “spreadsheet mentality” and the difficulty of managing and reusing data once it is buried in a spreadsheet. Could this be a legitimate way for Web 2.0 apps to find their way to large-scale enterprise deployment?

Now, go one step beyond read-only URL-addressability and think about writing to cells with an HTTP post URL. Imagine the way cool apps we could build based on that.

Thanks go to Jessamyn for inviting me.

google, google spreadsheets, office application, office software, spreadsheet, spreadsheet 2.0, url-addressable, web 2.0, web application, web20, webapp

Once upon a time Microsoft was the gorilla to beat. Once upon a time we thought Google could do it.

Perhaps not any more. Amazon has dropped Google’s search results from their A9 search aggregator in favor of Microsoft’s Live search, and while Yahoo!’s on again, off again partnership talks with Microsoft appear dead after Y!’s announcement Thursday of a partnership with eBay, Microsoft still hasn’t given up on the notion.

The Yahoo! news may dull my argument, but look how quickly the board changed, how easily these companies switched allegiances or considered partnering with Microsoft, a company known for swallowing its partners.

Google may or may not truly depend on the goodwill of its customers, but the moment its image turns from all-knowing and happy to big and evil could rearrange the chess board.

allegiance, competition, ebay, google, gorilla, microsoft, partnership, yahoo, yahoo!

It was more than a year ago that Lorcan Dempsey pointed out this bit from The Chronicle:

Librarians should not assume that college students welcome their help in doing research online. The typical freshman assumes that she is already an expert user of the Internet, and her daily experience leads her to believe that she can get what she wants online without having to undergo a training program. Indeed, if she were to use her library’s Web site, with its dozens of user interfaces, search protocols, and limitations, she might with some justification conclude that it is the library, not her, that needs help understanding the nature of electronic information retrieval.

So I’m continually surprised to find people defending our old, broken search systems in the face of pressure from internet search services that we’ve all come to depend on.

Thing is, where’s the greater criticism in this?

Google’s simplicity and impressive search prowess trick students into thinking they are good all-around searchers, and when they fail in library searches, they are ashamed as well as confused.

Does the above serve to emphasize the “laziness” and “intellectual inferiority” that seem to be the theme of so many of our discussions about “today’s students?” Or does it instead show how backward we and our systems are?

I second Peter Binkley’s retort, but I also want to point out the huge wedge being driven between academic libraries and our patrons. We see it in the two perspectives on that quote above. Right now it’s a matter of not meeting patron needs, but I’m also worried about what happens when those students become faculty, and later, administrators. How will they value the library then?

(Title graphic from GoogleAlive. Go play, it’s fun.)

google, information, information behavior, information search and retrieval, lib20, libraries, library, library 2.0, library systems, online behavior, peter binkley, search behavior, search engines, search practice, Steven Cohen, web searching

So, the report was released Monday, and it’s actually titled Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources (2005), but the part I’m highlighting here is the results of the question that asked users to compare their experiences with search engines against their experiences with libraries.

Here’s the quesiton:

Satisfaction with the Librarian and the Search Engine — by Total Respondents

Based on the most recent search you conducted through [search engine used most recently],how satisfied were you in each of the following areas?
Base: Respondents who have used a search engine.

Based on your most recent experience seeking assistance from a librarian for help with a search or locating information,how satisfied were you in each of the following areas?
Base: Respondents who have used a librarian.

It appears on page 22 of part two.

Sadly, search engines beat libraries on all four points: volume, quality, speed, and overall experience. These numbers are alarming, and many will see this wrongly. The correct way to see this is how much value search engines can bring to the library experience.

compare, future, google, google economy, internet, libraries, library, library 2.0, library20, oclc, oclc report, perception, perceptions, Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources (2005), report, search engine, search engines, user behavior

According to the recently released Pew Internet report on online activities:

On an average day, about 94 million American adults use the internet; 77% will use email, 63% will use a search engine.

Among all the online activities tracked, including chatting and IMing, reading blogs or news, banking, and buying, not one of them includes searching a library OPAC.

tags: google, google vs. the opac, libraries, library, library catalog, opac, pew internet, pew internet and american life project, report, search engine, search engines

I’m here at the NELINET Bibliographic Services Conference at the College of the Holy Cross today.

The conference is titled “Google vs. the OPAC: the challenge is on!” and there’s quite a lineup of speakers.

My presentation is on “the social life of metadata.” My slides are online, and below is some background.

The Library Catalog…
The catalog is among a library’s most important assets. An unread book offers little value, but the catalog offers the promise that the library’s resources will be found and used, and a well constructed catalog makes the finding easier by offering rich details and easy navigation.

…vs. The Google Economy
One of the most critical differences between the search behavior of librarians search and that of a typical patron is the conscious decisions librarians make to define the question and identify specific resources to search. Many patrons, however, pose their question in simple terms to the nearest search engine, and refine it over successive searches until an answer is found.

Patrons are increasingly unlikely to consider questions of where or what resources to search prior to executing their first search attempt.

The Systems We Build Shape The Search Results We Get
We must remember that search results reflect the resources and metadata indexed by the search engine. Search engines offer us the opportunity for libraries to deliver quality information to patrons who need it, but who have not yet thought to search library systems specifically.

So, in addition to outstanding ease of use and quality search features, a well constructed catalog must optimize the linkability and indexability or our data.

Findability Is Paramount
“What we find changes who we become.” So reads the subtitle to Peter Morville’s Ambient Findability.

The internet and search engines offer our patrons access to more information sources than ever, making our role in the findability equation ever more important. The challenge is to take advantage of how search engines work, to manage the tools that manage our information.

tags: library catalogs, bibliographic services, bibliographic services conference, google, google vs. the opac, libraries, library, library catalog, nelinet, nelinet bibliographic services conference, opac, opacs, social life of metadata, the social life of metadata, worcester, worcester ma

Sometimes the answer isn’t as interesting as the question. Consider this note from Yahoo Buzz:

On Sunday, the day before the nomination became official, [searches for] Alito sprang up a sudden 320%.

Did searches for Alito spike on tips White House staffers, or were White House Staffers vetting their nominee via the search engines?

tags: buzz, google, judge alito, nomination, nominee, samuel alito, search, search engines, spike, supreme court, supreme court nominee, web search, white house, white house staffers, yahoo, yahoo search

Via the ProgrammableWeb: Seattle911.com. It’s another mashup with Google Maps, but who knew anybody could get 911 data in real time? Sure, it’s only for Seattle, and only their fire/EMS servers (no police), but technology wise, it’s cool. Kudos to Seattle, I guess.

What’s my reticence? I don’t know if I should have this data…and putting it together like this hits my privacy funny bone a bit. But then, this data exists…it’s a matter of public record. And I think I rather that everybody have it than only a few.

Now back to the technology question: how long before Google Maps goes real-time to show me firefighters in streets? How long before I can chase ambulances from my living room?
911, 911 calls, 911 log, ambulance chaser, emergency, emergency calls, ems, fire department, firefighters, google, google maps, real-time, realtime, seattle, seattle911