TechnoCloud

Ah, the annual tradition of the April fool practical joke. The Telegraph and Mirror are featuring alleged BBC footage of flying penguins tellingly voiced by Python Terry Jones, TechCruch gets in on the act with a well constructed spoof, but Google has caught the eye with two efforts.

First up is a fake joint venture between Virgin and Google to setup the first colony on Mars, complete with a toe-curlingly awkward video from Google’s founders themselves (embeded below).

Second, is actually a pretty amusing and bold effort from YouTube who are RickRolling all of their featured videos in the UK and Australia to redirect them to Rick Astley’s cheesefest ‘Never Gonna Give You Up‘ complete with his hypnotically strange dancing.

A good day to throw off the corporate shackles and show you have a sense of humour.

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Google has introduced a new recommendations feature to your homepage in Google Reader. This analyses your feeds list and presents a series of blog that it recommends. It’s unobtrusive and doesn’t flood your Reader with new posts to process.

However, it may still need a little work…

I was more than a little surprised to see the top recommendation coming from the delicately named, Arseblog. Even more delicate was the description (hopefully the blog editor’s not Google’s): ‘It’s f**king excellent’!

Fortunately, further explanation is at hand with the additional descriptive text identifying it as ‘an Arsenal blog’. Oh.

Among the work feeds, I also subscribe to the BBC Sport feed, so I can understand how it may have picked out a football blog for me. Leaving aside the question of picking out a specific club’s blog (notoriously dodgy ground), you’d hope that Google would invest in some kind of swear filter to protect the minds of innocents.

As for me, the swearing I could cope with, but the recommendation of club was the real insult!

See below for the offending screengrab (’oops’ icon added by me).

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Having experimented with several feed readers over the years, I’ve finally settled on Google Reader. The shortcuts, clean design and viewing options meet the majority of my needs. However, there were two major sources of annoyance - number of posts display and no search.

Quite why a search company like Google wouldn’t include the ability to search your feeds as feature no. 1 was as baffling as it was ironic. Finally this has been addressed (but no explanation as to why it took so long) with a simple and effective search field at the top. Job done.

Another source of frustration was with the number of posts display. Once it got to over 100 on an individual feed or on all items, it simply said 100+. So after more than a few days away, half an hour’s feed reading through the likes of Mashable and Techmeme refused to make a dent leaving me wondering just how long I should persevere. A source of stress when you don’t want to miss any nuggets, but do have a finite time to do research.

This has also finally been addressed ramping it up to 1000+ leaving it perfectly clear just how many posts I need to plough through to catch up. Perhaps ignorance was bliss after all…

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Google often tests variations on the search engine results page locally before releasing them to all users. Today I noticed one such variation with ’searches relating to’ appearing at the bottom of the search engine results page.

Others have reported seeing this earlier in the year, but it’s the first time I’ve come across it as a UK user.

The results are not the search suggestions that Google provides on the likes of the browser toolbar, but contain some tangents, e.g. ‘dogpile’ under a ’search engines’ query.

I’m not signed into Google, which was my first thought, but clearly Google has records of users searching for ‘x’ who then search for ‘y’, possibly due to failing to click on a search result. This would explain why the results are found at the bottom of the page and highlight yet again the importance of being on the first page of results.

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Good post from Danny Sullivan breaking down what Google’s forthcoming Universal Search means in visual and descriptive terms.

In short, Google will be incorporating into the default search engine rankings page results from across it’s various search engines, e.g. video, images, books… This presents all kinds of challenges in terms of user interface, information overload and access to the nugget(s) of information you were searching for in the first place.

Web users have seen these changes coming in various guises for some time as Google has tweaked the interface in various markets. At different times I’ve seen images, maps, blog and news results dripped into the results page. The next evolution looks to make those tweaks live across the search engine.

It’s Google’s own version of the wider widgetisation of the web where different data sources are pulled in from across the web customised to the user’s individual needs and preferences.

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Google Personalized Homepage, now surprisingly renamed the unoriginal iGoogle, is opening up gadget production beyond developers with ‘make your own gadget‘.

Now people without development or web design skills can use a wizard to create a series of personalised gadgets to embed into their iGoogle and share with others. Gadgets (or widgets depending on platform and prevailing wind) are being democratised across the web.

We’ve progressed from fixed content elements, to select your own ‘official’ gadget, to add/create a developer gadget, to now add/create your own ‘laymans’ gadget, it’s all part of reducing the barriers to entry of contributing and sharing content that we are seeing across the web.

Expect to see the wizards grow in number and sophistication across gadget (and other) platforms as web users grow more and more comfortable with personalising content consumption and the tools that enable them to do so become easier to use and build.

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Interesting to see that Google is moving into StumbleUpon’s serendipitous discovery territory with the addition of a recommendations button to its toolbar.

In a twist from StumbleUpon’s social discovery approach (people like you, like this), Google’s dice icon will take you to its recommendations based on your own search history.

Another step in Google’s personalisation of the web, following the likes of custom search and the personalised start page.

As a fan of StumbleUpon I hope that their critical mass in terms of community and more social method of discovery will help them survive the competition from Google and many others.

How long though until Google incorporates social search into the service - after all aren’t inbound links just that?

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Handy link for playing with Google mobile search via a computer browser when you’re not actually on the move…

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The likes of Commission Junction and TradeDoubler should be stirring their tea nervously, with news that Google is moving into the world of affiliate marketing. The AdSense blog reveals that they are now ‘accepting applications for new referrals beta’, leading to a flood of chatter in the blogosphere .

Cost-per-click advertising has been one of the great success stories of online advertising and has fueled the Google Advertising juggernaut. It’s strikes a satisfactory balance between the advertiser’s desire to pay for actions only and the publisher’s desire to get paid for branding. It has its critics with regards to ongoing problems with click fraud, but it continues to thrive because it works.

While the move into cost-per-action won’t threaten the cost-per-click cash cow anytime soon, it’s an interesting play to control yet more of the world’s online ad inventory.

It does make it harder to conduct click fraud (although the fraudsters will try), but will the returns be big enough for publishers to gain sufficient take-up? The beta is US only at present, so I will have to read about other’s findings to see if the numbers look likely to add up. I’m not so sure they will.

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Up to a couple of weeks ago very few visitors were coming through to this site from the search engines. In fact it took a couple of months for Google (MSN Search and Yahoo were more accommodating) to even offer up the site as a result for a direct search on ‘TechnoCloud’.

I’ve semi-dilligently built up inbound links and populated the site with content, but Google refused to send even a dribble of its endless traffic TechnoCloud’s way. This started to change thanks to inclusion in Dmoz.org, the Open Directory Project, which Google uses as one element of its ranking system. After that you could search for ‘TechnoCloud’ and find the site.

I’ve read before about Google ‘Sandboxing‘, but not experienced it first hand. The theory goes that Google will place new sites for around six months into an equivalent of internet purgatory.

Around six months after making my first post on TechnoCloud, it appears that Google has given the thumbs up to the site. As if a switch had been flicked all of a sudden, I started getting through a regular stream of visitors from the search engines on the likes of ‘Facebook mobile’ and interestingly the ever popular ‘Make your own Supermodel’.

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