Yearly Archives: 2008

Do You Hear How Google Will Search?

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Virginia Nussey had an interesting interview with Matt Cutts on The Future of Search. Matt Cutts is the head of Google’s Webspam Team and an all-around authority on Google guidelines and practices.

He had a deal to say about spam but the most intriguing section was on Mobile Search.

2009 will be a big year for mobile.

Yes, another big year for mobile — but for real this time! It’s not that the last several big years for mobile were hoaxes, but rather that we’ve been building to this point for a while now, and the time is finally upon us. The Pew Internet Project, an initiative of the Pew Research Center, released The Future of the Internet III report this week and the verdict is in.

By 2020 (and maybe even before that), mobile devices will be the primary connection tool to the Internet. This is a prediction that has rightly scared a few people who realize that this could blur the line between work time and personal time even further. Matt’s concerns lie elsewhere though, focusing on how to make search useful on a small screen and on things like the progress of speech to text, machine translation and face recognition technologies.

Speech technology is the natural way to interact with a small cell phone.  For many, the use of keyboards with incredibly small keys is at the least awkward and in some cases impossible.  There are many challenges in using the rich signals that come from a voice but it must be the eventual winner.  Matt Cutts alluded to this, and I am certain this will prove to be the eventual solution.

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StayGoLinks is now hosted by Hostgator

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Apologies for the hiatus in posts, but our previous hosting service ran into problems, which could not be resolved even though this is a standard WordPress blog.  As described elsewhere, we have now moved to Hostgator hosting  and could not be more happy.  If you would like to check this hosting service out, try this Hostgator Web Hosting link.  (Disclosure – this is an affiliate link, but this in no way affects our unreserved appreciation of their fine service.)

If you would like to add comments, either positive or negative, on your experience with the Hostgator Web hosting service, please do so.  They will be most helpful to our other readers.

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Reputation Management and Social Media

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When Does Reputation Management Become Unethical? That is an interesting question posed by Jeff Quipp of Search Engine People.

There is obviously a great deal of power in being able to hide certain search results from the majority of searchers. With this power however, comes great responsibility. This responsibility becomes even more important if one considers that there are currently no guidelines to help guide us through the murky waters of morality.

It is certainly true that by careful SEO (Search Engine Optimization) one can push negative references down the Google search page, or with sufficient other online properties perhaps even off the top 10 page.  however you cannot make them disappear.  Now with the rise of social media, it is even harder to still all those dissident voices.

The words of Katie Delahaye Paine as recorded by Liana ‘Li’ Evans reflect current reality.

Trying to manage your reputation in a social media environment of today, is just plain silly (and futile), you just can’t.

Both PR Coverage and Social Media (it’s better when they are working together) have a big effect on how companies are perceived and in the end a big effect on what they are doing. The key though, is to measure both what is working and what is not working. Companies also need to understand that people are talking online, they are saying and doing things with brands, products & services, whether you are active in the conversation or not.

The first imperative of course is to try to make sure that the actions of your company are blameless, as far as you can achieve that.  With such a policy you no longer need to hide but can become active in the conversations.  You probably need a blog and may well decide to be active on Twitter. 

One example among many is the CPA advertising network, ClickBooth.  Early in the year, there were a number of negative comments from disgruntled affiliates that could be found through search.  Now there is a ClickBooth blog and you can also follow ClickBooth through Twitter.  The two approaches provide the best possible channels for dialoguing with any who may be dissatisfied.  Now that is the way to do reputation management.

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Tom Clancy’s Endwar Voice Commands

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Voice technology is undoubtedly the preferred input method as the mobile web evolves.  The gaming industry will certainly be the leading edge in this evolution.  Now Tom Clancy’s Endwar from Ubisoft Shanghai demonstrates a robust example of what is possible.

The developer, Ubisoft Shanghai, has cheated a little though. Rather than use the software to recognize actual words, it is used to recognize the sounds that make up those words – the system used looks out for particular sounds that go to make up a word. This cunningly gets around the need for a large amount of training generally required with standard speech recognition software, and also gets around the problem of accents: the main sounds of a word are essentially the same, regardless of your accent. The problem has been simplified even further by only recognizing a handful of words – about eighty or ninety, according to Ubisoft.

Overall the review is basically positive, although there are some reservations:

Tom Clancy’s Endwar has an innovative control method which works surprisingly well; and it has a storyline that is both interesting and pertinent to today’s events. The voice control works excellently, but it works so well because it has a limited range of understanding, and this in turn limits other parts of the game.

For more information about the game there is a paperback, Tom Clancy’s EndWar. Although this may be a work in progress for voice technology, it would seem to be a most promising start, particularly in getting over those accents.

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Abu Dhabi Brand Faith News Flash

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A recent BPWrap post on Abu Dhabi Brand Mastery drew an interesting comment from  Mark Rollinson today.  He said:

A surprising article given the Abu Dhabi brand strategy and identity were created by M&C Saatchi and the implementation was handled by Brand Faith. I don’t recall ever coming across any involvement in the project from the Brand Union.

I replied:

Thank you, Mark, for that correction. I did research the topic and nowhere did the name of Brand Faith come up.  I have now done a specific search for your company name and Abu Dhabi and the only references that come up are in Flash such as http://www.brandfaith.com/news.swf. Such Flash News probably do not rank well in Google searches. Perhaps that’s a useful finding from this.

Although Google does index the contents of Flash websites, they are most unlikely to rank well versus the more content rich HTML websites. For example if you check what Google has in its text cache for the Brand Faith website you find the following:

brand faith 

Since the text cache shows the content that Google is working with, it is clear why unfortunately this site is not very Google visible. This seems to be the way websites in the All About Brands PLC group are constructed. 

News flashes need to be visible to Google.  If not, they are working at 25% efficiency or less.  In addition such websites should have RSS news feeds. That is the way the news flash becomes the headline.

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