The first few weeks of college can shock your system. Many students are living away from their parents for the first time and their roommates are strangers. They may have visited the campus only once or twice before school started, are eating unidentifiable residence hall meals with the terror of gaining the “Freshman 15″ and they are entirely responsible for their own well being. And whether just starting college in a traditional campus setting or opting for the convenience of online education classes, there are ways to cope with the education transition.

Compared to high school classes, college courses require more independence. Students need to study more on their own than they did in high school, and assignments may come with less guidance from the instructor. Students are expected not only to answer the questions, but also to figure out, without necessarily being told by the professor, where to find their information. Suddenly, you’re supposed to be an expert researcher.

That may seem like a formidable request, but the good news is that it’s feasible. Even better, your transformation into a true researcher can be quick and fun. Your participation in social media can be excellent training for collaborating with your classmates to develop college-level research skills.

Common Research Difficulties

Many students are not even aware that their research techniques are inappropriate, or that they are not coming up with the most reliable information. Many students may not be using Google properly. They may not use the proper search filters or keywords, and search results are limited or from paid or unreliable sources. Students are also unfamiliar with academic databases.

Hard versus Soft Research

A great trick to help you figure out what research approaches to use is to determine whether you need soft research, hard research or both. Soft research is what you probably already do all the time when you need to look up a general idea. It is also appropriate when you need to write about people’s opinions that you might get from blog posts. In college, assignments often require hard research. Facts need to be specific, and you need to be able to point to a credible source for each fact that you include in your work.

Where to Turn

Librarians, online or on-campus writing centers and professors are all good resources for help with research. Students can also use social media to help each other improve research skills. They can create web-based files, such as in Google Docs, to compile helpful tips, resources and links to share with each other. Video chats and instant messaging let them brainstorm for resource ideas before starting their assignments.

Don’t let the thought of intimidating assignments prevent you from enrolling in college. If you’re already in college and you feel like you’re struggling, don’t get discouraged. Plenty of options are available to help you master the research skills you need, and one of your weapons can be to join forces with your classmates using your experience in social media programs.

In the mobile operating system war, Apple’s iOs still dominates Worldwide but Android gained significant momentum in the last year. Android app downloads passed 10 billion mark and Android has become an important platform for developers.  Android is already the world’s most widely-used operating system. The operating system now spans more than 400 devices on 231 mobile carriers in 123 countries, Google says, and the sheer number of eyeballs landing on Android screens is making the platform more appealing than ever.

Android has a volume advantage over iOS but it has an important disadvantage:

Fragmentation. Its open nature means dozens of manufacturers and more than 200 carriers globally can distribute Android phones. So different versions of the software on phones with different screen sizes, user interfaces, and capabilities all operate in the wild at once. Android users can choose from Google’s official Android Marketplace, carrier app stores, and other independent venues—each with potentially different rankings, reviews, and standards. While consumers get more choice and developers more opportunities to share their apps, the overall experience is inconsistent and potentially complicated.

In order to make it easier for Android developers to get started with creating robust applications, the Android team announced an Android Development School site: Android Training. The tutorials, or classes, are very well put together, with splits into logical steps to make them flow well, along with sample code you can utilize to “do your homework.” Thanks to Google, all the content is free and waiting for Android developer candidates.

Here’s one more surprise from Google to celebrate holiday season. Type ‘let it snow’ in Google search, and you’ll see snowflakes falling down the page. Don’t miss out the opportunity to write your name in the frost. Enjoy and have a good holiday season

In just its second year, the Small Business Saturday initiative managed to pull 103 million customers through the doors of small business establishments. This Thanksgiving weekend frenzy surpassed the projected number of 89 million and showed that the bourgeoning “shop local” movement is gaining traction in a real, measurable way. What’s most interesting about the push to shop local is how much of its success hinges on social media marketing; this is particularly interesting considering the two industries developed almost directly alongside each other, at least in terms of sophistication and popularity.

Small business has almost always relied on word of mouth to succeed. There are very few national TV spots and building-side ads trying to pull you into Daydreams Comics in Iowa City, Iowa or Homespun Crafts in Indianapolis, Indiana. Unfortunately, word of mouth for a lot of businesses can only go so far. Social media is essentially a rebirth for word of mouth in a digital age. Platforms like Facebook allow small bookstores to broadcast events to an always ready audience, reaching them on their cell phones as well as computers. Twitter is used by many “pop up shops” and mobile businesses to let consumers know where in the city the business can be found that day. Given the incredible success social media has had on small businesses this year, how should these businesses proceed moving forward?

Word of mouth has always been an important part of marketing, both because it is free and because, almost always, the words are going to a person from someone in their life that they trust. This gives credence to the brand and service, as well as giving confidence to the overall purchase decision. If you’re looking for what to do in Chicago, for instance, you are more likely to take the advice of a person you know and trust who has experienced it than from a kid who once saw a movie about Chicago and thought it was okay.

The massive shift to digital has opened up new avenues of marketing, which are ultimately cheaper and hold lots of promise for small businesses who have limited advertising budgets.

Google AdWords Express

In an effort to give small businesses a bit of an edge in catching the attention of customers, Google launched a service called Boost, which would later become AdWords Express. The idea here is that you register your business with Google and when someone searches for stores in your area, you stand out from the usual suspects (read: international corporations show up as red tabs and you show up as a blue tab that automatically sets you apart).

SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is emerging from the dark shadow of its past to become a massive force in Internet marketing. Large corporations use it to boost their rankings in search engines, but smaller business can use SEO to deepen their potential customer base. SEO is beneficial for one simple reason: people can’t go to your site if they can’t find it. Targeting keywords specific to your business and location will help more people find your site and hopefully walk through the doors of your storefront.

Mobile Marketing

After this past Black Friday and Cyber Monday, there are considerably more smartphones and tablets out on the market. That number is growing as people move away from stationary computer setups toward mobile Internet devices. Companies like Groupon have launched local services that allow small business owners to create offers and deals in real time and beam them to cell phones of customers who could be in your neighborhood. Your deal that day might win you a new regular customer.

The shop small revolution has a lot of support behind it in the shrinking world. People are starting to reject the convenience afforded by huge corporations and re-invest in their communities by shopping small. The movement will likely grow in the coming years and businesses looking to harness the increasing public enthusiasm for “small shopping” will have to evolve their marketing methods with the digital methods cropping up and leverage them to succeed in the current economic landscape.

Google announced that Android app downloads have passed the 10 billion mark in a short time. Thanks to Android users around the world, Android Market exceeded 10 billion app downloads—with a growth rate of one billion app downloads per month.

Apple just passed 10 billion app downloads in January. But thanks to the fast growth of the sale of Android phones, Google’s app downloads are growing fast. The first billion installs took 20 months, the second billion installs took another 5 months, and the third billion took only 2 months. The next billion took only about 7 months.

With these numbers, Android is already the world’s most widely-used operating system. To celebrate this milestone, Google partnered with some of the Android developers who contributed to this milestone to make a bunch of great Android apps available at an amazing price. Starting today for the next 10 days, we’ll have a new set of awesome apps available each day for only 10 cents each.

Whether you’re designing a website for personal use or to help build your business, you undoubtedly understand the importance of showing up in search results—the higher, the better. Whereas this was once accomplished with “black hat” tactics like keyword stuffing and spammy links, Google has made most of these tactics ineffectual at best.

Google’s Panda Update was unofficially aimed at “content farms”: “We’re evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content. […] As ‘pure webspam’ has decreased over time, attention has shifted instead to ‘content farms,’ which are sites with shallow or low-quality content.”

In essence, Google can now read at a 10^th grade level and is able to differentiate original, quality content from poorly written content with irrelevant links. When you add to this the newest algorithm update, tentatively called the Google Fresh Update, which rates pages based upon how fresh and up-to-date the content is, along with how often the page is updated, it becomes apparent that having your page rank highly in Google is no easy feat.

So what can be done to improve your site’s chances of success?

The first step to creating an effective website is to be sure your page is aesthetically pleasing, and that the words flow well. The best way to do this is to create a rapid prototype of sorts of your page, in order to be sure that it is easy to navigate and that all of the links are in working order.

By “rapid prototype”, I mean a tangible recreation of your page that can be seen from all angles, and moved around if necessary, without having to constantly rewrite code. Some do this with charts or graphs, while others prefer the more rudimentary Post-It notes on a whiteboard. Whatever your choice, by viewing your page in this manner, you will be able to spot flaws that may drive potential consumers away.

Once you are certain your site has met these standards, then it’s time to start taking the various Google algorithm updates into account. Is your content well-written and error-free? If there are links that have been placed in your text, are they relevant, or might they be construed by Google as spam, thus lowering your standing in rankings? If your forte is not writing, then it might behoove you to find someone to write your on-page content for you, in order to ensure maximum success with Google.

In addition to that, have you had the same page design and on-page content since your site first went up in 2005? The Fresh Update will demote your page for this! Take the time to re-do your page whenever you start to feel the itch for something new. Also, stay up-to-date with news that is related to your product or page, and add fresh, relevant content whenever you can, in order to rank as highly as possible.

Finally, once you are certain your page is at its best, request that Google recrawl your page in order to have the changes you have made noted accordingly. This way, you don’t have to wait to start seeing the fruit of your labor (even though this is a slow process that requires patience).  Over time, you will start to notice that your site is gaining traffic and rising in search results.

 As the world’s most popular search engine, Google has access to massive amounts of user data. Add to that the popularity of Gmail, Google’s email service, and the growth of Google’s social network, Google+, and it becomes clear that Google knows more about its users than nearly any other service in the world. Google uses this information to serve ads based on location, the content of email messages or the context of the page being visited.

Another action taken by Google based on its user knowledge is the tailoring of search results pages to specific users. Someone who has frequented the Klipsch website, for instance, will be more likely to have it return as a high result when searching for “home audio system.” Google+ is starting to have an effect on search results also. If someone’s friend shares a link to the Klipsch website, that fact will show up in a search engine results page for “floorstanding speakers.” Google knows that users are more likely to follow a link they have previously visited or was recommended by a friend.

Google+
Facebook’s ad network enabled businesses to target specific demographics, something that has not been available to Google because of its lack of pertinent user information. But the rollout of Google+ could mean big changes in advertising. With the phenomenal growth of Google’s social network, the search giant’s pool of data in its users is growing exponentially. Advertisers on Google’s network can already target specific keywords, but when users are signed into their Google accounts, they may soon be able to target specific users as well.

Search Results
In a TED talk in March 2011, Eli Parser gave a talk about online filter bubbles in which he pointed out that Google looks at over 50 different cues to determine what results to display. Even if a user is not signed into their Google account, their location, browser, computer and other information will be used to tailor search results to meet what Google feels they want. When a user is logged in, this allows Google to go even further in their SERP tailoring. A user who has recently purchased home entertainment equipment via Google Shopping will receive a different set of results when searching for “low distortion speakers” than someone who regularly searches for information on professional audio equipment or someone who has never made that kind of search before.
The potential information that Google can collect on its users is staggering and the ways it uses that information are mind-boggling. The future applications of the company’s ever-expanding reach are incredible. All of the uses can be a little frightening and give rise to many concerns. How much information should users be giving to one of the largest technology companies in the world, the gatekeeper of the Internet? What if Google’s database was compromised somehow? Though Google’s intentions seem to be to provide a wealth of useful, free services to users, the potential for something darker is always there.

A freelance illustrator Beatriz Torres, best known as Zirta has drawn the ongoing competition between Google+ and FaceBook in a funny way.

I think the most ironic part of the illustration is MySpace Founder Tom Anderson’s advice for Mark Zuckerberg to sell FaceBook before it’s too late. Tom Anderson actually  shared this comic and his thoughts about  the question of “when to sell” on his Google+ account :)

Thanks to Designer Manu Cornet, he has drawn how major tech companies are organized in a funny way.

Google releases new products or features frequently. As we listed before, Google has more than 101 services and every month, at least one new service is added to the list. Most of the serious Internet users even don’t know half of the Google’s products and Google didn’t have a page for their new products or features.

At last, Google has rolled out a new feature to keep you updated with everything new that’s coming from Google, aptly named Google New. With Google New, you’ll easily keep track of all the changes to your favorite Google services. You can also filter the new products or new features of existing products by filtering out your area of interest or a specific product name.

Google primarily provides search and advertising services, which together aim to organize and monetize the world’s information. In addition to its dominant search engine, it offers many  tools and platforms including its more popular products.

There are more than a hundred Google services & products and some useful ones are little-known. We prepared a guide for Google’s services and products to show you how big giant Google is. If you want to add a Google service or product that  doesn’t exist in this list, please feel free to comment.

We arranged Google’s services and products (only 130 of them!) into  10+1 categories:

Search, Advertising, Location, Communication&Publishing, Online Shopping, Personal Productivity, Business Solutions, Mobile, Development, Social Responsibility and Other.

All the Google Logos, trademarks, graphics and other material related to Google are properties of Google™.

This Site Is Not affiliated with Google™ .

References:

1. Google Company Profile on CrunchBase
2. Official Google Help Pages
3. List of Google products article on Wikipedia
4. Jooit’s Google Index

Today, September 27th is Google’s 11th birthday and Google has a special logo to celebrate its birthday.

Google is using its logo in marketing for both social and commercial purposes. What Google does with its logo is a good example to use company logos as a valuable marketing tool for free.

Google has changed our lives and still changing; even why we use logos. Happy 11th birthday Google!

Yesterday was September 9th, 2009 (09/09/09) and a special Google Logo appeared at Google’s homepage. Google has different and interesting logos for special dates and i think these surprise logos represent the  social side of the company.

The dates like 09/09/09 are exaggerated by some people. For example; in Russia and China thousand of people flocked to marry on ‘lucky 09/09/09′.

Numerologists and marketers alike share a fascination for dates like 09-09-09, which might explain why computer giant Apple, the distributors of Beatles music and filmmaker Tim Burton are all peddling new products. Tim Burton’s new movie premiered yesterday. It’s simply called “9.” The Apple Event was held at San Fransisco yesterday.

*Also, 09/09/09 was my wife’s birthday and she became 27 years old which equals  “3 times 9″. It was a lucky date  for me , because i gave her “9 gifts”.

This is the first colorful logo of Google. Google’s first name was Backrub. Backrub’s logo was simply a scan Larry Page’s hand from a flatbed scanner. Larry and Sergey decide that the BackRub search engine needs a new name. After some brainstorming, they go with Google – a play on the word “googol,” a mathematical term for the number represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros. The use of the term reflects their mission to organize a seemingly infinite amount of information on the web. After the name change, the new logo is designed. The first logo looks like a ‘Wordart’.

The screenshot below shows how Google was in 1997.

]]> http://siteboat.com/the-first-google-logo/feed/ 3 http://siteboat.com/google-brand-worth-100-billion-these-days/ http://siteboat.com/google-brand-worth-100-billion-these-days/#comments Fri, 07 Aug 2009 21:19:21 +0000 Erdem OZKAN http://siteboat.com/?p=2266

WPP subsidiary Millward Brown Optimor released its highly regarded annual brand ranking BrandZ Top 100 (PDF) back in April.  It identifies the world’s most valuable global brands as measured by their dollar value.

Topping the list were Internet giant …

In January, one of the top stories of the Internet was that a single Google search generates 7 g of CO2. The story came out from an article published in The Sunday Times of London which focused on the enviromental impact of Google searches.   Google responded to the article very quickly, stating a Google search is actually equals to 0.2 g of CO2 and the efforts & supports of Google to further Green energy.

Google reminds us  how green it is, often since accused of being a energy hog. According to this official Google Blog post, Google engineers calculated that a cheeseburger emits as much CO2 as 15,000 Google searches and Co2 emissions of an average daily newspaper equals the amount of 850 Google searches.

Here are some other comparisons:

There’s no doubt that Google is polluting the earth less than its competitors per search, but Google should take into consideration that the total number of Google searchs are mind-blowing and these numbers continue to rise at the speed of light. Google has the most efficient datacenters but nobody has more datacenters than Google.

I think the only way for Google to protect itself from future “global warmer” accusations is to generate and use noteworthy part of the energy required for its datacenters from green resources and to show that to the whole world.
For the rest of us, we should think again about eating a cheeseburger

There’s no doubt that YouTube is the biggest player in online video industry. YouTube outperformed its competitors and has become a winner in video sharing. YouTube is one of  the most succesful web stories of all time, since 2006 and still growing very fast.

When Google acquired Youtube for $ 1.65 B, Google was criticized for paying huge amount of money for a website without a business model. Everybody except Google was thinking that YouTube was overvalued. Video sharing sites have the biggest costs in Internet World. They need really fast servers and huge storage space and the bandwith costs are the highest. Because of the high costs, ROI (return of investment) of online video businesses are very slow. It’s hard to monetize broadband video and the only ways to monetize this type of business are showing ads and subscription.

According to the YouTube Blog, YouTube’ s 1 minute is worth 20 hours. In mid-2007, 6 hours of video were uploaded to YouTube every minute and in January ’09 it grew to 15 hours per minute. Now,  20 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute and we’ll see 24 hours – a day’s worth of video uploaded to YouTube, very soon.

YouTube dominates the statistics of online video industry, but doesn’t make Google any money. YouTube streams more than 5 billions videos in a month but less than 5 percent of those videos have ads.  YouTube serves one-third of  all online videos. Industry experts predicts US Online Video Ad Spending as $ 750 M in 2009 and rising to $ 5.8 B in 2013.  Undoubtedly, YouTube will get a big part of this pie if it’ll survive. YouTube’s operational costs are rising and bandwith costs are estimated about $ 470 M for this year alone. Day by day, it’s getting harder and more expensive for Google to support YouTube.

Hulu, a smaller and newer competitor of YouTube made a head-to-head US revenue (about $90 M) with YouTube. Hulu is focusing on exclusively on professional content and held by NBC Universal, News Corp and Disney which are also very important video producers for television. Hulu’s advantage is its professional content without copyright problems. But because of some copyright restricitons, Hulu is a U.S. only service. YouTube proves that there’s a big market for user-generated content but Hulu shows us that advertisers want to spend money for professional content.

* YouTube had more than 77 million unique visitors in April when Hulu had about 7 million unique visitors.

Industry experts estimate  an average value of $15 CPM for video sites and $40 CPM for focused video sites like Hulu and Heavy.

Other video sites will never be able to grow as much as YouTube, but their revenue can surpass YouTube’s in the future. YouTube (and Google) must find a way to monetize its content effectively and reduce the costs. I think the only way to do is to serve more professional content as quickly as possible and find an innovative way to monetize user-generated content. Maybe, sharing the revenue gained from user-generated content with the users who created the  content can increase the quality and the chance of the user-generated content to get ads.

It’s true that YouTube has mind blowing satistics and  the third most popular website in the world. YouTube’s one minute is worth 20 hours; but we really wonder how much is YouTube’s one minute worth in US $?

The long time awaited the public beta version of Google Analytics API is finally available. The API will allow developers to extend Google Analytics in new and creative ways that benefit developers, organizations and end users.

Developers can develop applications that access Google Analytics API and integrate Google Analytics API into their existing products and create innovative dashboards for end-users. Developers hae already developed very good examples of how-to use Google Analytics API. You can check out examples and learn more about the API from this official Google Analytics Blog post.

Google finally launched its venture capital fund. Google Ventures welcomes startups from a broad range of industries; including consumer Internet, software, hardware, clean-tech, bio-tech and health care.

The FAQ of Google Ventures tells all the vision and targets of the fund. Google says that they are looking for entrepreneurs who have solutions for problems in creative and innovative ways. They also say that they are also able to invest amounts ranging from seed funding to tens of millions of dollars, depending on the stage of the opportunity and the company’s need for capital and they welcome the opportunity to co-invest along with outstanding venture or strategic partners. I think they don’t want to seem as a competitor only, also a potential partner for other investors.

TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington  sums up Google Ventures as:

Is this a good investor for your startup? The cachet of having Google behind you is great for marketing. But if you think you have the next new Google-killer search idea, you may want to bake it a while before showing the technology to these guys.

I think the same as Michael Arrington except the last part: Google would love to invest in the next new Google-killer search idea and then acquire it!

Google Ventures is now open and ready to fund your startups, but i think you will have to wait in a very long queue.