google | Ian M Rountree

The Power of Immediate Collaboration

February 12, 2011 by Ian 2 Comments

One of the things I love about the web is it’s asynchronicity.

I can send you an email, or address a tweet your way on Monday morning and, unless it’s something urgent, you can respond as late as you like – right through to happy hour the following Friday. Based entirely on our needs, we can schedule our interactions loosely, and have conversations over the course of days, weeks, or even months without losing the thread of things, because there is almost always a meta-data supplied history for everything we do.

We can even consume media asynchronously. Through Google Reader or Instapaper, I can gather up weeks of stories from my favorite blogs,

Another thing I love about the web is it’s immediacy.

If I need to listen real-time for something, I can set up a net of Google Alerts and have them delivered by RSS into my feed reader of choice. I can get the information I’m looking for on an as-indexed basis. I could also use other listening tools, if I needed to, to expand my ears and make myself into a super-hero quality observer. I’d never miss a thing.

I stopped actively checking my mail years ago – there’s an app for that. I also stopped worrying over content management and coding the text of each page on my site a long time ago – there’s a plethora of apps for that

Need a quick response? Find me on Twitter.

Want to host a distributed chat event? Again, see Twitter – this time just make a hashtag and let people come to you.

Need to edit a document at the same time as I do? Let’s share a Google Doc and work on it at the same time.

When it comes time to publish my book, I’ll barely need a publisher at all.

I also stopped relying on online chats and tools like IRC a while ago. Through tools available now on the web, I’ve almost entirely eliminated the need for destination-based communication in my work.

Recently, I also moved much of my collaborative writing into Google Docs specifically, and have completely abandoned the last remaining web chat I’ve been using for the last ten years. No more need of it. Sure, I’m losing some serendipity – the possibility that a new player might randomly stumble into a game I’m running – but I’m gaining curatorial control, synchronism, and the benefit of a closed platform for speed and focus. And when the aim is to pump out large volumes of high-quality writing in short periods of time, that’s a huge benefit.

How amazing is this: In less than three hours on a Google Doc, my writing cohort and I managed to churn out 3000 words of content between us. Single paragraphs, in cyclical production, with a fully functional back-channel right in the window with us, and the option of Skype if we wanted to really dive into the meta side of the work.

Two days’ worth of NaNoWriMo-class writing in just a few hours. Neither of us were tired, neither of us concerned with running out of data or inspiration. We only got through about a chapter and a half, after all, of plot. If we manage to keep working the plot hard enough for a few weeks, we may have a mini-novel to do something with. No planning, no strategy. Just the work, instant and simple reference, built-in editing, and some otherwise idle time.

Imagine what people working with intention might do?

Two people working on a book could churn out a manuscript (conceivably) in just a few weeks, working full-time. That’s with time to do research, collaborate on structure, set up a framework, and get all the facts checked at the same time.

However you need to work with someone remotely – whether in the same room or across the world – the web provides.

And the means are always improving, for everyone using them. Not just because of the advances in the tools themselves, but also because of the way people use them for increasingly ingenious things.

What do you do on the web with others that totally blows your mind?

SEO for Bloggers – Simple Discovery Tricks

December 21, 2010 by Ian Leave a Comment

One of the things analytics nuts love to obsess over is the effectiveness of our posts.

Which ones have the most clout, where did they get it from? Is it better to have more comments, or more tweets? Does traffic help?

The answer is yes; all of this helps. Comments, traffic, tweets, inbound links – there are a lot of things that give pages weight. But, as our sites get more traffic and tweets and so on – how do we tell, in an ongoing way, which of our pages is doing better than the others over all?

Here’s a trick; do a google search for the headline of your blog. In my case, it’s my name.so I searched, no-caps, no-quotes. Here’s what I got;

Interesting, yes? A post about Google Buzz (which happens to be riddled with musical references) that got a sidelong mention on an industry podcast, followed by one about Facebook which has seen a decent amount of mentions, followed by the most spam-addled article on my site.

What’s missing; the most mentioned post I’ve ever had, the most commented post I’ve ever hard, and the most linked-to post in my archive.

Then, I tried something different. Because we’re looking specifically for my site, rather than the various higher-powered social media sites carrying my name through my profile, I searched for my name – and added my domain behind it.

Notable: the layout is much the same, but now carries some additions; namely, the Screwdriver article which is still my top search driving piece, my most recent non-throw-away post (this review of the awesome Standard Theme 2), and a very thoroughly-commented on post about Google and China. All of these have seen strong authority signals – but none of them have had the same mix of reaction.

By searching your way through your Google Analytics (you DO use an analytics program, right? Don’t make Uncle Avinash angry), and your blog’s admin interface, you should be able to pick out the weight and mix of things lending authority to the top pages these kinds of searches return.

Verdict? The mysterious ether powering your page ranks relies on a clearly diverse mix of authority signals.

The things we bloggers think of as clear indications of “victorious posts” are not the same as what search considers a winning mix of authority. Taking advantage of easy metrics and hacking your analytics are both important to figure out what’s working from more angles than just the social media connection.

Now – grain of salt time. A one-off experiment like this tells is very little, other than that some unexpected pages have high authority metrics. What will prove more interesting is, in 2 months, I plan to repeat the experiment with some better recorded metrics about the posts I’ve written between now and then. If the same unexpected results appear again, then we’ll really have something to think about.

Your assignment; replicate my experiment, report what you find. You’ll probably be surprised.

Monetizing Blogs

December 9, 2010 by Ian 1 Comment

The important question is this: Do you want to make money from your blog, or because of it?

I don’t often agree with Bill Boorman, but when he said this, it resonated. Here’s why.

Let’s start with how to effectively monetize a blog. There are a lot of ways – and I’ll leave a giant caveat right here; I’m not an expert. I don’t do blog monetization for a living. So we’ll stick with the most common, fly-by-day ways to generate money.

Affiliate programs like selling ebooks, downloadables and subscriptions.
Ads like Google Adsense, adbrite, Chitika and so on.
Box ads from networks like [find some]
Virtual products you develop yourself.

And then there’s the drop-dead simple way you can generate business – rather than extracting money – from your blog.

Use your blog to generate business by demonstrating worth, knowledge, and care for potential clients and community members.

One of these approaches is far more simple than the other. Any guesses which one?

Oh, and why do I care?

I avoided ads on this blog for years. It’s never been my primary focus – making money from my web presence was just never something I considered. Sure, the idea of “passive income” was appealing, but I know better – having been blogging actively for half my life, I know there’s no such thing as just setting up a website and letting the cash roll in. Even super-adified blogs need content – and in order to make more money, better content is needed all the time. Dropping in some Google Adsense boxes on a mediocre blog isn’t the answer.

That being said, if you look to the right, you’ll see some ad boxes.

No, I’m not a hypocrite – let me explain.

I have no problems with affiliate marketing or advertising on blogs – I just believe it needs to be done well or not at all. Part of where most people fall down is defining what “affiliate marketing done well” is.

Me? I’m picky about the things I support publicly. I’ve written less than half a dozen book reviews in the last year. I’ve written no movie reviews. I’ve written no software or online service reviews that contained buy-this-now suggestions (though this is going to change soon). I don’t have Adsense boxes on my blog – I did, by accident, last week, but they’re gone now because someone pointed them out. Yes, there are some ad boxes – but every one of them relates directly to something that helps me get work done online. For example, Digging into WordPress helped me make the most of Standard Theme when I redeveloped the site recently. I believe that anyone who has the interest should pick up both, and get better work done.

However – as I’ve tried to explain clearly on the About This Blog page – I’m not selling ads, I’m not selling content. Because part of my work in this space is professionally-based, it should be clear that I’m using this blog as a community tool more than anything else. Of course I want to leave myself open to making money – who wouldn’t? – and for that reason, I’ve very selectively chosen some passive programs I can expend an incredibly low amount of energy on, basing the things I’m supporting (and which have the potential to support my blog) around the kinds of tools I use to get better work done, both for myself and for clients at Modern Earth.

Need a good professional WordPress theme? I’ll recommend Digging into WordPress and StandardTheme if you’re building for yourself. However, for any kind of broad business application, I absolutely believe there’s no substitute for professional quality designs, programs, and custom-built solutions. Modern Earth has some of the best web workers I’ve ever met, hands down.

At the end of the day, you really do have to ask the question – if you’re attaching your blog to your business, how does any monetization strategy fit in? And, when it comes to brass tacks, which is more important – and beneficial in the long run? A few ads – or a few new relationships?

Image by Andrew Magill.

Recognizing A Weakness in Adoption Habits

February 19, 2010 by Ian 4 Comments

Entirely on the suggestion of @modernsusan, I’ve been using Google’s Chrome browser for the last few days as an attempt to streamline the way I interact with the web. Chrome’s compact, blazing fast, now has some interesting extensions, and is almost entirely immune to tab explosions because of the way tabs are handled. It’s an interesting difference from my usual use of Firefox, but I’m noticing I’m having some issues with getting my head around the use of it that have larger scope than just Firefox versus Chrome.

What I saw in Susan’s use of Chrome was a hyper-efficient method I hadn’t seen before.

Watching Susan use the web was almost mystifying, at first because the methodology was so foreign. I thought I had it figured out – but seeing Firefox open with six or seven staple tabs almost entirely as a background process, and then Chrome up with so many tabs all you can see is a Maginot line of favicons… You’d expect navigation paralysis, but it’s not there.

Then I looked at my own browsing habits. For the sake of screen real estate, I use a bunch of Firefox add-ons that shrink the browser’s chrome, as well as a faviconize tab feature, and a permanent tab add-on, which basically leaves me with a half dozen utility tabs hidden at the left edge of my screen (email, reader, Wave, Project Bubble and so on) and then there’s the tabs I actually jump about the web with, as many as needed, which I attempt to keep below about six.

Where’s the disconnect? It’s simple; while I can adopt just about any skill given enough time and exposure, shifting gears between these two methods of browsing is difficult. Firefox is great for accessing whatever you put in front of yourself very quickly, but Chrome is a multitasker’s godsend. It’s not about accessibility with Chrome, it’s about an instant, wide, systematic approach to tasks on the web.

Now that I’ve recognized this, Chrome just became my best friend.

This isn’t because I found a new extension for it, or because it’s a better performing browser; it’s because I’ve switched gears now that I know what the gap was before. If I had a tab up in Firefox, I felt obligated to do something with it. With Chrome, the tabs are just there (I now have twelve and counting) and, now that I know this, I feel a little more comfortable not worrying about tab explosions, monitoring my time on single pages, or any of the other junk that – for reasons I can’t even express – the reductionist usage of Firefox led me to worry over.

But what does this have to do with real life problems?

Like a lot of other people, I get caught up in minutiae when I’m researching a new thing. It’s great that someone showed me a toy, gave me a few features to check out, and did a slick demo. But until you can bridge the gap between how you’re accustomed to doing things, and a practical approach to whatever the new tool is, you’re not going to be able to make full use of its capabilities. Either you’re running into the problem of trying to hammer screws into a wall, or thinking a good screwdriver can pound nails because it’s heavy and blunt.

There are few replacements for seeing a real life use of a skill, or a tool, or a process.

This is why so many attempts to teach people anything fail. We know so thoroughly the things that we know, that unless we’re willing to help prepare people to see what a new thing really is at its core, the demo will just look shiny, and you’re risking dissatisfaction with whatever wisdom it is you’re trying to impart to those you’re trying (and, if a dose of reality is lacking; failing) to teach.

Never Mind the Buzz, Cocks

February 13, 2010 by Ian 27 Comments

When I started Tweeting, I didn’t de-construct the service because I didn’t feel I knew enough about what I disliked or appreciated about it. I also didn’t know what it was actually for. The same thing goes for Facebook – when I joined, I didn’t get it, mostly because all of my friends were using it in such starkly different ways. Dynamic networks are like that – you can’t judge the entire service or network based on the habits of a few groups of users. Much as we like to burn the Midnight Oil, it’s impractical to over-study networks that just came out.

But then Google released Wave. Instant internet-wide love/hate relationship. And now it’s Buzz. And it’s another case, in part, of twenty people using the same services fifty different ways, and no one seems to know what they’re actually for. As much as we like to think well of Google, this is far from The Cure for Social Media.

It’s easy to see why. Buzz interrupts you, something internet marketers have been trying to avoid for years. It makes a mess of your inbox, when its default settings are on, and there’s no real way to get right of it, short of turning it off. This all or nothing approach has a number of people convinced that Google’s off their own kool-aid and making some key errors in product development.

To me it just looks like they’re taking the tactic of Ship-Then-Perfect to an entirely new realm – I wonder what Seth Godin would think about that, actually. But I doubt he’s on Buzz. He’s not even on Twitter, really – which is fine. However, Jeff Jarvis, one of Google’s few scholars, has a great deconstruction of the visible intent of Buzz on his blog; post titled “Google’s Buzz(machine)”

I turned Buzz off after my BlackBerry went ballistic over the first fifty alerts coming in within five minutes. The merging of my inbox was too much – I don’t want that, and it’s easy to see from all the clutter on Twitter and elsewhere, that not many other people do either. Stephen Hodson noted that Search Engine Land completely killed a story about the rumoured split between Buzz and GMail – which may have proven an important point about exactly how much we try to appease El Goog, even when we dislike features of their services.

The important point that many of these de-constructions are missing is that this is a service stil in Beta. Google is well known for their endless cycles of public beta. Christopher S Penn made the first good point when he talked about why Buzz is Brilliant and Deadly for Social Media 1.0 on his own blog – and I agree with much of what he says there. Robert Scoble, Supercurator, made a note about Google’s announcement as well, taking the tactic of talking about why Google won’t go after Twitter or Facebook on their own. The bit that convinced me to look more into Buzz?

Google isn’t willing to piss its users off to get to the next level. [Facebook’s] Zuckerberg is willing to piss off Facebook’s users by changing the platform. He is in the midst of changing his platform once again from something that was only for private friends and family to something that’s more public so that Facebook can effectively compete in search (or, at least, be like Twitter and sell its feeds to Google or Microsoft). Google just isn’t willing to do that over and over.

I think Scoble’s got it right here – the features we hate about Buzz are temporary. Already, people are coming up with stupid Buzz tricks to make sure that the service is usable – and it works. I’ve turned Buzz back on, having followed about three of the tips from AEXT.net‘s article on Undocumented tricks for Buzz. Most important trick there? Convincing GMail not to deliver Buzz notices to your in box. Anyone with a Smartphone needs to use that, just to make the service liveable while Google is still ironing out The Kinks. Tip number 5, on finding a user’s name to @ them with is also very handy for larger following groups and conversations. Props to Mark Dykeman for sharing this one, as well – I would have written Buzz off entirely without these tips.

I’m still not sure how I’m going to use Buzz. Don’t be surprised if you see some posts in the next week about how I actually do use social networks personally – I think some study might be required before I can decide if I really need that extra tank in my motor pool.

What do you think? Is Google off its rocker, or is this another instance of the Big Country saying Yes before it’s time?

UPDATED: Jeff Jarvis dropped a post about Buzz’s to-soon launch.

UPDATED x2: The Supreme Court of Texas Blog also added some privacy concerns about Buzz, especially poignant information for journalists, lawyers and, yes, even bloggers.

Photo by Aitor Escauriaza.