John Cusack © by Gudlyf

John Cusack: A Mild Obsession

I love John Cusack (as an actor/writer). I will see every movie he’s ever in, forever. I don’t care what the reviews are,  I’ve seen enough of his films to know that he is one of my favorite actors and anyone who disagrees with me can suck it. He works for me.

What works for you?

What this has to do with blogging: micro-fanaticism. Everyone has their fascinations that for business or personal reasons, they want to keep reading about, seeing images about or hearing conversations about. You have something that, if someone gets you going talking about it, you won’t shut up, and you’re probably the smartest person in the room on that subject.

If you aren’t the person that people have decided to fixate on, you can be the curator of best of the topic that  certain people are fixated on. If you’re really good, you can turn the things that go with that into a career, or leverage your knowledge on a related topic into a boost for your current career.

What this has to do with Google rankings: as we will discuss shortly, consistency is often a key element to recovering a slipping ranking. Obsessive consistency to be exact. Think about it – is there anything you used to do that you aren’t doing now? Why?

Have you made changes to your site that might be the culprit? Even design changes may be responsible for a change in results. I once had a very lovely client who sold timeshare resales. At the time we met, he didn’t know the difference between a page view and a hit.

After he changed his web design, hits went down. I pointed out that page views were consistent and that hits were down because technically, a hit is any request for an element on the page, including images.

A page view is what it sounds like – a view of a page. So since the new design had fewer images, of course hits were down.

Of course, hits were as irrelevant then as page views are becoming now. But he didn’t know that.

The point is: for all you know you might not have a problem at all. One ranking may be down while another is up, leaving you with more targeted visitors. If your rankings go down and sales go up, do you really have a problem? Consider all the elements.

GIGO: No One Is Obsessed with Crap (Well. No One Sane.)

Oscar the Grouch Graffiti © by bixentro

I learned this one when I was first learning about computers. GIGO stands for Garbage in, Garbage Out.

The relevance to our discussion is that in order to be knowledgeable enough on a topic that people want to listen to you, you must be consuming the cream of the crop of thinking on the topic or at least a related one. Success in the blogosphere and social media is as much about consuming content as it is creating it.

You have to know how to pore through the yawn of empty, senseless, pointless random yammering to find the sweet golden nuggets.

So many elements are attached to the quality of your content.

Whether anyone will link to it, talk to friends, come back again, bounce back to the search engines – and some of these end up impacting search, particularly in the case of Google.

Now, you don’t need a Bieber-sized fan club to make it online, or for your business to get a steady stream of leads from the web. But a few hundred or thousand coming back every month and buying/subscribing won’t hurt your bottom line. That core repeat business group can also be referred to as a group of fans.

Name ten fans of garbage.

(Oscar the Grouch doesn’t count.)

Blogging:  A Bit More Important All of A Sudden (again)

will write for chocolate © by caparica

If you’ve been watching Google’s last few algorithm changes, you may have noticed that it’s not only the frequency of updates that seems to have saved certain blogs from a dismal fate. It’s the perceived quality of updates, partly the fact that they’re attached to known authors.

For now, I won’t say more than that on this topic. Let’s go back to what that means to you and your Google strategy: content production. Not just in quantity but in quality.

The smart bloggers, writers and authors know that they can’t necessarily spin gold out of straw every day. That is: most of the time, there’s no remarkable news, discovery or observation for you to draw on that’s relevant to what you want to talk about, even when the other content on the web in your area is absolutely stunning. And yet, your job, each day, will be to create this constant stream of readable, actionable, consumable content, day in and day out.

One of the many things bloggers who have either recovered (or never lost) their rankings have had in common has been consistency of quality content, on a tightly structured topic. (Yes, if you have a copy of my Evergreen Traffic System or Rescue Your Blog, I’m repeating myself.)

So if you’ve lost your rankings and you’re already blogging, think about those three things:

1. What’s your John Cusack as it relates to business blogging? Are you still talking about him/her/it or have you wandered off topic too much?
2. How much can you reduce the garbage that’s coming in to your brain on the topic and simultaneously expand the amount of quality content you consume?
3. Can going back to basics fix your ranking problem?

Now, keep in mind this isn’t the only possible solution to recovering a good ranking, nor are these the only possible set of problems you have with your rankings. An algorithm is merely an extremely complex formula when you break it down – so there must be a way to reverse engineer, from positive outcomes, how to fix your rankings.

However, remember that there are hundreds of variables going into this equation, and that what fixed another site may not fix yours. At the same time, re-committing to what worked before is not to be discounted as a solution to a re-occuring problem.

When I wake up each morning, my breath is not exactly fresh as a spring breeze. So I brush my teeth. It fixes the problem. If I stopped brushing my teeth, I wouldn’t be surprised that my breath stopped being fresh.

Sometimes the simplest thing is the solution.

And if it’s not? Come on back and talk to me, and we’ll see if we can avoid jumping off that bridge.

Now that the furor has died down some over Search Plus, let’s talk about it.

What is it? Google says:

We’re transforming Google into a search engine that understands not only content, but also people and relationships. We began this transformation with Social Search, and today we’re taking another big step in this direction…

Pay particular attention to the fact that they specifically said “another big step”. Not THE step. Not FIRST step.

This is significant but not life-altering, not if you’ve been integrating social into your overall plans. Even if you haven’t ever been to Google+ or started a profile yet, it’s not over for you and your site, because this race will not go only to the swiftest.

That’s not to say you shouldn’t get on the ball though.

Of course there are some who think Search Plus is no big whoop:

The average Joe is still on Facebook. And my prediction is they’re going to stay on Facebook.

After someone publishes content, and puts forth the effort on Google+ to get it ranked, the average non-techie reader is more likely to go and share that content on Facebook.

That’s not a bad thing, of course. It will get you the exposure you desire. But I don’t think Google+ has advanced their standing as a mainstream social network here.

Well, I partly agree with them – Google going social itself? IS a big so-what.

Not for the reasons in the article though. I’ll be back to that in a minute.

Here’s the point you need to really think about.

My wildy theoretical speciulation is that the Google+ element of this news is just a Kansas City shuffle (“A Kansas City Shuffle is when everybody looks right, you go left. “) Maybe Google is being intentional with its misdirection, as they did back when they launched Google Social Search on a known Apple Product launch day.

The Two Reasons The Google+ Component Is a Big So What

1- It’s old news.

They’ve been going social for 2 years. This is just another step in a huge plan – if you were at our Google 2011 Webinar last year you remember our various discussions about Google in social, and Google social search.

Chris Lang has been telling us about the changes we were going to see over at Google in the social space since 2008 at least.

My point is, this is part of a metamorphosis, not some huge leap forward. It looks that way because it’s a significant design change. But it’s just a further implementation of something that was already in progress.

Personal results, profiles in search, people and pages? Already existed. Google’s first moves towards search included much of this. What changed was the priority, and to an extent, the sources.

If you’ve been following along so far, you’re gonna be fine, just continue to pay attention. If not, I suggest you go back and look at the repeated themes about Google social search in the news over the past few years.

Especially if you lost footing during the last round of Google algorithm updates.

2- I know I keep bringing up this point. But this update really isn’t about G+. It’s about what the updates impacts for most businesses, and that’s your overall Google strategy.

What is Search Plus Really About? SEARCH. Not Plus.

Google has brought the search engine back to the forefront, even though it looks like it’s pushing Google+ to the forefront. What is driving the new push of Google+ though? Google search.

It’s a statement, intentional or not: you have to care about our side mission (Google+) if you care about your organic Google search rankings.

The enhancement to Google’s search, whether it’s a bug or a feature, has only one bit of relevance, how it will affect your business. Focus on that point and everything else will be clear.

Part of the reason we build custom solutions for businesses is that there isn’t one blanket strategy for every business. Should G+ be part of your strategy? It’s too soon to be 100% sure where it fits, there isn’t enough data.

Does that mean don’t create an account and tinker around? Of course not. Just don’t make that your main focus – focus on perfecting what’s already working for you before you change the direction.

So I want on a hunt for these iGoogle social features mentioned in a post from earlier today. It looks like it refers to the gadgets like the ones found here, which you can add to your home page to keep up with friends.

To be clear, I’m wildly speculating at this point.

There’s no warning on the iGoogle gadgets directory page stating that these gadgets have an end date, although it very clearly states in Google’s fall sweep announcements that the features have an end slated for January 2012.

But if I’m right and this does apply to the gadgets I have built, that would suck.

Especially since my favorite is one that I used to rally a small network of 75 allies  to a given link when we need each other’s help. Not a lot of people, but these are some of my most active folks, a group that can create a firestorm of attention if they are so inclined.

And it’s so convenient – we all check the page when we log in, and there’s the link of the day.

There’s no mention of a replacement or an upgrade to the social gadgets either. I hope there will be, but this announcement on a Google code page doesn’t make that sound too likely.

iGoogle’s gadget platform added support for social interactions several years ago. The web has evolved a lot since then, and we recently announced open signups for Google+, our new product for bringing real-life sharing to the web. As indicated in our blog post, we’ll be removing iGoogle’s social features on January 15, 2012. Therefore, you will need to remove any use of social features in your gadgets. This document walks through the process, including ways to re-implement some features in other ways.

If you’re interested in developing new social applications and games that use Google+, please keep an eye on our Google+ Platform Blog.

via Removing social functionality from iGoogle gadgets – iGoogle Developer Home – Google Code.

So, this might make my last rant start to make sense – moving from Facebook to Google is one thing. That’s maybe a once in a lifetime move that I won’t have to make again. Even if it’s a hard transition, it would be one I only had to make once.

IF. I were inclined to move.

Having to move things I built in Google – beta products or not – from Google to… Google… to Google… well it really makes me believe that the recent Google employee point that the company needs a platform built underneath it sound more valid by the day.

Google should be able to talk to itself so that when something I used and love is kills or dies due to lack of use, whatever it becomes is an easier transition. Otherwise it’s like asking me to get married with the full intention of leaving me at the altar – why waste my time, Google?

And when it’s over? I don’t feel great for the fun times we had together. I feel stupid for thinking it could last, and wary of ever trusting you again.

Even that title feels over long and complex – but as I learned in a conversation with Google+ expert Chris Lang, people who have this issue get it immediately. People who think we are under the mistaken belief that we’re going to lose our contacts don’t necessarily get what our actual problem is, understandably. To business…

Love that Google Reader is going to be part of Google+ – hate that Google didn’t find a seamless, automated way to migrate the way my current connections in Google Reader go to Google Plus all at once.

Now as it stands here alone, this is not a big deal.

However, this is made more complex by the fact that I keep the set of folks I want to migrate on a separate account, for organization, but want to use Google+ from one central account.

I am, by far, not the only one with this problem. I am not a beautiful and unique snowflake.

I’ve got one friend who is on their FIFTH move from a previously separate GMail account in the name of an attempt to merge all their identities on to one Google+ profile, only to find out later that Google reversed their position on pseudonyms, which is what this painter/singer is known best by outside of his day job.

From what they said, there’s no indication that Google Reader’s current friend view as a subset of Google contacts will be available from Google+, although it looks like you could get an archive of your stuff:

As a result of these changes, we also think it’s important to clean things up a bit. Many of Reader’s social features will soon be available via Google+, so in a week’s time we’ll be retiring things like friending, following and shared link blogs inside of Reader.

via Official Google Reader Blog: Upcoming changes to Reader: a new look, new Google+ features, and some clean-up.

Well, bully for that, but I invested time in getting my Google Reader connections set up a certain way and they were like that for years. Now I have to reinvest time because you think Google+ is sexier? And I have to do it in less than a week?

How about some forethought here? How about not alienating people who like Google Reader and Google+ by making it the transition harder than it has to be?

If you’re not having this issue, you can pretty much stop reading here, because this will get long.

It will get ranty and then there will be some instructions you will hate following but are your only option.

Your take-away here, if the rest of this has nothing to do with you is: how does the ordinary person grow comfortable trusting their information to a company that keeps getting rid of things they like?

Or merging them with other things in a non-seamless fashion? Especially when they make the move as difficult as possible?

Hard moves kill platforms. They do.

Right now it’s only affecting the margins. I didn’t understand what the big deal was for people who wanted to move from Facebook to Google+ before. I thought “you can’t possibly know that many people that this is such a big deal.”

I get it now.

I really hope I’m premature in speculating that the transition will be manual and unpleasant but with the change set to roll out within 7 days of the announcement, which was last week, hoping for the best doesn’t seem to be a great strategy.

It seems like there should be an automated way on the software end to turn my Buzz/Reader contacts into a circle,  then invite the ones who aren’t on Google+ yet to join. And of course, Google Reader is not listed in Google Takeout.

The only options in Google Takeout currently are to either download an archive of my Buzz posts (unhelpful, and the links were converted to plus.google.com links anyway) or my contacts.

Downloading my contacts as they now stand is also unhelpful because I hadn’t put my Google Buzz people in a separate group – I don’t want to invite EVERYONE that I know on Google to the new Google Reader, I just want to keep the subset of people who I used Google Reader with as its own group without having to manually rebuild the group.

This seems very poorly thought out, or a tiptoe around the privacy issue. I’d have a lot more respect for them coming right out and saying either – we don’t have a migration tool for reasons of privacy/other than for there to be no real explanation for this omission.

At the very least, some way for me to mass add all of my Google Reader contacts to a separate contacts group, export that group of contacts to a file and then upload that into Google+  would work. But in Google reader, you can’t even get them on one screen. Maybe it’s the privacy issues but again, it seems like software could address that.

No. Instead, if all the contacts are on the same account, you have no choice but to:

• Create a Circle for your Google Reader people.
• Toggle back and forth between Google Reader and Google+ to see what GR people are in the G+ circle you want to create one at a time, and
• Create a circle for them manually.

My writer’s account has 2000 real world contacts. And I’m sorry, I’m not going to send an email to a major publishing house editor who I haven’t spoken to in a month on the phone to please put themselves in my Google+ circle. That’s ridiculous.

Now, I could just use that profile whenever I want to talk to writers on Google+, if it were that simple. But who wants to toggle back and forth between two Google profiles, or have to constantly answer the question “which Tinu account should I follow?”

Not I.

So, of course you’ll want to merge all your identities into one, which is even MORE fun.  And even after you do all this, remember, you can’t just turn a contacts group into a circle. You have to do that part manually as shown above. You can probably pay someone to do this. If you have an assistant or can budget for someone to do this, that’s my suggested answer.  It is a bunch of tedious BS.

1. In Google Reader settings, change your sharing settings from Public to private – if you try to create groups with  the public sharing setting on you cannot group your contacts.
2. Go to Google Contacts and create a separate group for the people you want to put into a circle (NO you can’t do this from within Google Reader).
3. Manually add your Google Reader contacts into the created group. Yes, if you have other contacts in that account other than the people you interact with in Google Reader, you MUST put them in a separate group if you want to be able to export JUST those people. It only shows about 25 per screen, so you have to keep pressing more or whatever at the bottom.
4. Go back to Google Contacts.
5. Export those contacts, then upload them into Google Plus.

It also seems stupid that we only have a week to make this work. I only use Google Reader about once a week – I could have easily missed this news and the migration, and then been really stuck.

If you know of an easier way, please let me know.

Now as it stands here alone, this is not a big deal. If this is the one and only sacrifice you have to make to use Google Reader the way you’d like to in Google Plus, we should all be so lucky, despite the tedium, it’s not like it’s once a year, it’s once for life.

But. This is not a one-time switchover for many of us. By about the 3rd move, some of us are throwing up our hands and saying we’ll stick with one of those other platforms we don’t really like but make us happy. After all, when they wanted us to move, they made it so easy.

Theoretically the action of shutting down some services and folding others into newer platforms makes sense. But the application of some of these puzzles me – some appear illogical. Others appear to be vague.

Here’s an example:

Several years ago, we gave people the ability to interact socially on iGoogle. With our new focus on Google+, we will remove iGoogle’s social features on January 15, 2012. iGoogle itself, and non-social iGoogle applications, will stay as they are.

via Official Google Blog: A fall sweep.

Okay. First – what are you talking about? Not everyone knows every feature that was rolled out in iGoogle.

Second, why remove the features instead of making them part of the Google+ platform? Is it because few people use them? If that’s true, could it be due to the fact that few people knew about them? Are you killing useful features due to a marketing failure? How does it affect the long term trust of your audience if you develop a record of discarding tools?

Wouldn’t they learn not to invest time in using and loving things you build, regardless of the “Beta” or “Lab” label, because you’re teaching them through your behavior that you aren’t to be relied on? Isn’t that the opposite of what you want when you’re trying to build a social network, tool, or any type of software that you want to become central to people’s lives?

I wouldn’t have signed up for Gmail if it came out today. Because I’d be too afraid that I’d grow to depend on it and it would be discontinued.

Another is Google Buzz, which I didn’t care about at first- until I remembered how much my Google reader friends help me find and spread news.

These folks  mostly came as a result of Google Buzz integration.

Will the people who are Google Buzz friends become Google+ friends? Literally, yes, of course. From a technical standpoint, if they want to continue using all of this stuff, yes.

I’m more thinking of the people I dragged kicking and screaming into Google Reader, people who aren’t techies, who are writers, who grew to love it, who were using that ONE tool to congregate around an idea. People it was easy to interact with over in Google Reader who I didn’t have to group on the profile I was using. Several hundred people per profile who I now have to manually organize as a sub-set of — that’s a whole other post.

Let’s just say for now that it’s not an easy transition.

I think it would be smart if they could find a way to make those people into a private, pending circle automatically.

I know I can ask them to join a circle. I know I can manually do it. But it doesn’t make sense to me that settings don’t migrate.

Unless you grouped those folks rather than share your updates to Google Reader in public, there’s no pre-configured, automated way to migrate them over. And if it was just this one time on this one Google product, that would make sense. But people who are not techies see Google as one big system and wonder why it doesn’t talk to itself.

For some of them, this is their 3rd move-by-faith with Google. And they’re running OUT of faith.

There’s a long, labor-intensive and ridiculously complex way to do this that I’ll wrote about shortly. It seems like there should be a simple resolution to this that can happen in the background.

In the mean time,  here’s the message I left for the gentleman who wrote the blog post, Bradley Horowitz, Vice President of “Product” at Google, on his G+ profile, where he also shared the news of certain Google products retiring:

Is there a way to turn my Google Buzz friends into a circle?

I’m asking because although I didn’t use Buzz much itself, the Buzz features that are tied into Google Reader were actually helpful to me.

I’d like to maintain those connections without having to start over again. Right now I’m manually turning them into a contact group, then importing them to Google+, but it seems weird to me to have to go to Google Reader to export my Google Buzz contacts to Google contacts  so I can import them to Google+ — shouldn’t there be a software solution to this?

 

You can also go to the page of the announcement left in GMail this morning and leave a Google sidewiki comment, whether or not you have the Google Toolbar enabled. If you’re using Google+ there’s also a +1 button on the same row as the comment button.

If you have a free moment, browse a few pages of the comments. It’s surprising how many people are asking to keep Buzz. And they’re not techie folks either.

How about that.

On Google+ we can now use hashtags -  so says Robert Pitt and Vic Gundotra. It’s already working for me, so I suspect that even if you create them and they aren’t hyperlinked, you can at least use them.

Now, I’m a Google+ lover, not a fighter.

But it seems like if search is working properly, hashtags are redundant. Of course, if you watch the video, you kind of see their point. Sometimes you want regular search, looking for one specific thing. However, if you want to attach something you’re working on to a bunch of other posts on the same project, I can see how hashtag support would be handy.

I also wonder if this will make hashtags a standard across the web in social media sites. Wouldn’t it be nice if, for example, the Women Grow Business hashtag (#wgbiz) could connect us on Twitter and Google+, as well as LinkedIn and Amplify?

What do you think – much ado about nothing or about time?

Just heard about this in a developers email about Android Market and Google TV:

With the upcoming OS update to Honeycomb, Google TV devices will be Android compatible. That means you can build great new Android apps for TV, optimize existing mobile or tablet apps for TV, and distribute those apps through Android Market.

Folks keep saying that Google TV is down for the count but I think it’s early yet. To the point that my title may be misleading – does Google TV need to be “saved” or has it just not caught on yet? Big screen, HD, 3D, none of these things were overnight successes. So who knows?

And even if they screw it up if it brings TV and the web closer, it’s a step in a potentially interesting and profitable direction. At least the IDEA could go mainstream even if that particular technology does not.

(Did you know that if you already have an HDTV that you can get a gizmo from Logitech that gives you GoogleTV for $100? I just saw it for the first time today so don’t quote me. But it sure looks neat – and mainstream – to me.)

What does this mean for your business? Well, if you’re creating applications as part of your business, or even for marketing purposes, it could mean more exposure. Not being even laughingly mistaken for a programmer, I have the unique benefit of not letting what’s actually possible limit my dreams of the kind of application I want built, on mobile or elsewhere.

I’m imagining interactive video apps for my company… on television….

There was a blog post to the Google TV blog about the preview about a week ago, but it didn’t make mention oof the fact that the update would be available later this summer.

Which basically means September, unless there have been upgrades to the Gregorian calendar that I’m not aware of yet. In the meantime… get your app together folks.

(You see what I did there?)

I’ll level with you. On a personal level, I’m nuts about Google+.

Launched on June 28, 2011 to a test crowd, and later released to the public on July 31, 2011, Google+ is, according to Google:

Real-life sharing, brought to the web.

To date, I’ve

• met dozens of wonderful people through lively discussions,
• re-connected to my best friend, who is utterly un-tech-savvy, through Google Hangouts,
• re-connected to several friends from college who I couldn’t quite link up with on Facebook,
• seen five new customers and clients directly from Google+, and
• spent quite a bit of leisure time just hanging out playing games.

But for business, I can’t share in the worship of Google+, nor the condemnation. It’s far too soon to say whether or not it is the Second Coming of Social Media, an absolute failure or anything in-between.

Since Google has announced that

1. Google+ is not finished, and,
2. Google+ is going to have a specific plan for businesses that want to use it,

I would feel like either an opportunist or a fool trying to tell you how to use Google+ for business when even Google says you’re not supposed to be using Google+ as a business yet.

(Though apparently it will be available for all businesses much sooner than expected.)

The only reason to advise you on how to use Google+ for business before this revelation would be to make money off the ignorance of others. The time will come to show a true business case for Google+ soon enough. At the same time, though, I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t help inform you about Google+ at all.

So, instead, I’m seeking to paint a fuller picture of Google+ for you, including resources and alternate views. That’s what this and the next few posts will be about.

In case you haven’t had a chance to play around with Google+, it’s now open to the public, supposedly. (If you have a problem getting in, let me know. I have about 50 invites left from my 150.) Whether you have or not, hopefully something in this list of resources will help you learn how to use it.

Google+ How To Resources

• Google+ Official Guide
• There’s a Google+ manual created by the user community that you can help edit.
• SocialFish has created an introductory tutorial for Google+.
• I did a Google+ Walkthrough on my AskTinu site.
• In the lower right hand of every page in Google+ is a Feedback button that plugs into Google Feedeback, which is actually available for use with any Google product. Google provides a link teaching you how to use Google Feedback.
• 15 Tips for Google+ Newbies
• Mashable’s Google+ Section
• Everything BNET Things You Need to Know About Google+
• Visual Learner? Here are the 6 Top Slideshows on Google+ According to Slideshare

Additional Google+ Resources

• There’s a rumor going around that there are few women on Google+. If you want to find some, the site Women of Google Plus is a great place to start.
• One flaw of Google+ is that it doesn’t have a good bookmarking system – when you +1 things within Google+, they don’t show up on your +1 list. You can create a private circle to share with just yourself, but it gets hairy, plus it shows up on your view of your profile. Instead, you could follow these instructions through Evernote to save your favorite Google+ posts.
• You can also make a feed of your Google Plus profile posts.
• Google Plus Today is a podcast about Google+ available now on iTunes.
• There are many lists of people you can find on Google+, including people who work at Google, and SEO Professionals

I occasionally make posts about Google+ on my own profile, but no more than once a day. Feel free to add me, so long as you’re willing to talk about things other than work and the Google+ platform.

Next time: Alternate Views on Google+ : Google+ Pluses and Minuses. For now, enjoy what Google has to say about Google+ for Business.

It’s the moment some webheads have been waiting for ever since Google started testing the +1 buttons – the moment when the +1 button would be available to every webmaster.

Why?

Because it’s possible that Google’s +1 button has even more promise than the Like button.

How can that be possible? After all, Facebook is the King of the Like. You click on the button and your preferences virally spread to your friends, whether you click it in or out of Facebook.

Admittedly, at least for the time being, Facebook definitely has the jump on the viral spread aspect of Liking. But that’s an area Google can answer in a relatively short period of time. And there’s one area where Facebook fails miserably, that Google shows signs of getting right from the start.

Google lets you keep track of your +1 history.

That means you can not only share what you enjoy, comment on them and store them, but that you can share that information with the world.

Is it perfect? Far from it.

There needs to be some more organization to what Google is doing, which at the moment is simply allowing you to keep track of your +1 history on your Google profile tab, as a public record or a private one.

But unlike successful social integration, this is not a skill set Google has not already mastered. Google became a verb that means to find something on the web for this reason. And it may not be perfect, but no one else’s site is a universally accepted verb because no other site has figured out how to do this with the same rate of success.

So here’s my wild theory and speculation: this is the year that Google will finally figure out how to use the +1 to help content spread socially and virally. I partly base that prediction on the fact that they got off on the right foot with giving us what some Facebook users have been requesting for some time – what many of us thought their purchase of FriendFeed would result in – a searchable database of our past votes for sites across the web.

The social and viral aspects are important, and I don’t see how +1 could be successful without it.

But if Google figures that piece out, Facebook will have to watch out.

… where party equals webinar.

Google had a live webinar this afternoon that I’m hoping there will be a re-broadcast from, it’s called “How Local Governments Use Google Apps to Improve Productivity and Reduce Cost.”

I’m thinking any tips local government can use, I probably can leverage for my business too. I haven’t made the full jump to Google Apps, but I’m definitely getting there. Don’t want to put all my eggs in one basket, but for business productivity, that basket saved my butt twice in two years, when I couldn’t access mission critical data from a crashed or unavailable laptop.

Only wish they’d given more than two days notice. But I guess when you’re Google, you can do that.

No worries. There’s another webinar coming up yesterday that’s more my speed.

Wait, what?

Yeah.

Um the webinar from Inside AdWords called: “Finding Your Audience – Targeting Ads By Topic” was yesterday. And from what I hear, it was all that and a bag of chips.

Luckily, for those of us who are always finding out about the AdWords training late, you can get to the real point of this blog post all the information you need in the AdWords Online Classroom, and join the AdWords Online Classroom Google Group for announcements of upcoming live video tutorials.