beatnic - just wondering

• What the Google Intranet Looks Like
  Google inside.

  Via tracking “intranet” on Twitter.

  (tags: google intranet)

How do you keep on top of everything everyone’s saying about East Dulwich, or any other subject, online?

In this series of short articles I’m going to run through a few things you can set up quickly and for free to follow what people are saying about the things you’re interested in.

This article looks at Google Alerts.

[Also in this series: Part 2 - Technorati Watchlists, Part 3 - Twitter tracking]

I’m using East Dulwich as an example, but you can do this for any number of subjects.

As well as for personal interest, these techniques are useful if you want to keep an eye on what people are writing about your industry, company, product, service, or your competition, not to mention your favourite sports team, tv programme, pop singer… So if you work in marketing, product development, corporate communication, the press office, public relations - to name but a few - take note.

Google alerts

Google Alerts is a service which emails you when it finds a new mention of your chosen subject.

So rather than you having to search for East Dulwich every now and then, you can get Google to do the searching for you.

You can have alerts sent to your preferred email address, but you’ll need a google account (free and quick to set up) if you want to edit and manage your alerts.

Here’s what you have to do:

1. Visit google alerts
2. Type in the subject you want to track, e.g. East Dulwich or SE22
3. Choose the type of search you’d like. The choices are news, blogs, video, web, groups or comprehensive (an aggregate of recent results)
4. Select how often you’d like google to email you. The options are as it happens, once a day and once a week.

That’s it. Now you’ll never miss another mention of your chosen subject - as long as google picks it up of course.

You can set up as many alerts as you need.

The alerts are in the same format as the search results. They highlight where your subject is mentioned and link to the original source.

I’ve just been having a bit of fun with this… The Blog Readability Test. What level of education is required to understand your blog? - as seen on David Cushman’s site.

Apparently you require a “high school” education to read this blog.

I haven’t dug around to see what, if any, algorithm is being used to calculate readability.

Rather worryingly when I put http://news.bbc.co.uk in it came back saying you needed to have a college postgrad education to read it, and to be able to read www.google.com you need to be a Genius. Something fishy going on there methinks.

Google says “the web is better when it’s social” so it must be true.

OpenSocial from Google. Not another social network.

Is this a nail in Facebook’s coffin?

It’s funny, I’ve become so accustomed to consciously ingnoring google ads on web pages that the little box promoting the opensocial blog on the homepage nearly escaped my attention.

Last week it was 3700 MB or so…

That’s a mighty fine amount of free (as in lunch) online data storage.

Occasionally I search for my name on the web in the vain hope that one day I will no longer be buried beneath hundreds of thousands of prices for network interface cards (NICs).

And to my great astonishment that day has arrived (at least on Google anyway)!

I had to capture this as no doubt tomorrow the search algorithms will be adjusted to counter vanity attacks like this (ok and the search spammers as well).

If you add in every small business in the world - and believe me, Google is thinking that way - you can sum up Google’s ambitions in the commercial world as this: the company would like to provide a platform that mediates supply and demand for pretty much the entire world economy.

John Battelle in his new book The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture

And from Battelle’s blog last week a post about base.google.com…

Word is ripping around the web that Google is testing a new subdomain called base.google.com. A screen shot - the site has been up and down - shows a Google database of sorts where you can “Post your items on Google.” It’s a tagged database of stuff that heads directly into the world of Paul Ford’s classic “Google Takes All” essay.

It’s weird. Even though lots of the time Google’s search doesn’t bring back what I want, and even though they’re starting to take over the world, my overall experience of Google is positive. I don’t feel the same sense of “can I trust them?” I feel when I’m using (or thinking of using) products and services supplied by other global brands.

I’ve been trying out the newly launched Google reader, which I was alerted to via my Bloglines subscription to a Google blog - oh my aren’t we just sooo post-modern ;)

You need a Google account (gmail address) to use it.

Like gmail it makes extensive use of ajax for screen-based rather than page-based interactions.

On the plus side it’s as jargon free as you can get with something like this. A healthy thing that should take the feed reader beyond the realm of the somehwat geeky.

You have “subscriptions” and a “reading list.”

The user interface lets you focus on articles and behaves like the “Preview Pane” in Outlook so you can move up and down the list of titles and the content will appear in a larger area of the screen to the right.

But in doing so it strips the content of any of its original personality and makes everything look the same.

You can label your subscriptions so you can find them later, in the same way you can label emails in gmail.

It mixes keyboard shortcuts with mouse clicks - I still haven’t figured out how you’d add a Star to an article without a mouse.

But I don’t get a sense of community from it and I can’t see how I’d share stuff other than being able to blog it (if I was using blogger) or email it (if I was using gmail). It doesn’t feel like a two-way thing.

I’m sticking with Bloglines for the time being.

I’ve been looking for some open source calendar software to sit alongside my blog for my own personal use and to share if useful one or two event categories with friends and family

Having just read that a google calendar might be with us within a month, I might just wait and see what it looks like.

Several times recently I’ve been describing walks and runs to people and thought wouldn’t it be great to be able to plot them out on the amazing Google maps service.

It already does a great job with routes from A to B (say East Dulwich to Marylebone High Street - my current daily bicycle commute).

Imagine being able to put a shape (circle, say) on to a map and then drag its edges to particular co-ordinates or landmarks until you’ve mapped out your route.

Then you could save this route and send it as a link to someone or link to it from your website.

I was just wondering if anyone has any info on anything like this being developed anywhere?

When I search Google for tat gallery…

…and it says “Did you mean tate gallery?”

I’d like to tell it “No”

Today Microsoft launches MSN Search which it hopes will give Larry and Sergei a run for their money.

Looks like the folks behind it have taken a leaf out of the minimalist design book, and the results are delivered in a very familiar style to Google’s.

However good it is, personally it would take an awful lot to make me switch.

Even though I don’t always get what I think I want from Google, it’s built up one hell of a lot of loyalty points with me over the last few years (I think that alone will help keep them ahead of the rest for quite a while).