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.

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

 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 :)

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.

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!

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.

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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.

As computers become a bigger part of our lives, information technology consumes an increasing amount of energy. IT technologies are responsible for 2% of the world’s CO2 emissions according to CIO insight. A 2003 study published by MIT estimated Internet usage responsible for 3% electricity consumption in the U.S. Because of the huge Internet usage growth rate (2008 Internet Usage Growth : 305.5 %) , electricity consumption of the Internet usage must double every year.

Google is the biggest player in the Internet search industry. There are 100 millions of Google search queries occur daily. This means a lot of job for Google datacenters. Data centers consumed 61 billion kilowatt- hours of power in 2006, according to a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) report last year to Congress. That’s 1.5 percent of all power consumed in the United States – at a cost of $4.5 billion. Moreover, some people don’t memorize website adresses and searches Google to reach what they want and  for these people, Google = Internet. Google strives to reduce the energy consumption of its datacenters and use clean sources of electricity.

Google’s five step plan to be a crabon neutral company:

1. Minimize electricity used by servers
2. Reduce the energy used by the data center facilities themselves
3. Conserve precious fresh water by using recycled water instead
4. Reuse or recycle all electronic equipment that leaves our data centers
5. Engage with our peers to advance smarter energy practices

This official blog post of Google tells the energy consumption of a Google search query.  In their own words:

• A typical search returns results in less than 0.2 seconds.
• An average search consumes 0.0003 kWh energy.
• One Google search is equivalent to about 0.2 grams of CO2.
• During the search, Your computer use more energy than Google uses to answer your query.

Google’s non-profit arm, Google.org invested $45 million in clean energy technologies. The world is changing and we need to take action to abolish the use of carbon based fuels. I think the abolition will be possible only when the number of giants like Google, which strive to use socially and enviromentally sustainable energy, increases. Sustainability is good, but it creates an economic advantage to Google, too: “Run the datacenters with a low energy bill”. A win-win situation…

Domain parking refers to the registration of an Internet domain name without that domain being used for a website. This may have been done with a view to reserving the domain name for future development, or to protect against the possibility of cybersquatting or to trade the domain name.

There are several companies that specialize in serving adsfor domain owners of parked domains. The ads are relevant to the domain names being used. Most widely-known  companies in the domain parking market are GoDaddy and Sedo. Now, the companies in the domain parking industry are facing a big competitor, Google.

Google have finally opened up its Adsense for Domains service. The service is still available for U.S. domain owners only. This service of Google was available for domain owners with 1+ million monthly pageviews. This shows Google is searching every possible way of earning money from the Internet. You can look at this interesting presentation on our post Everything About Google to learn more about Google’s increase revenue policies.

Mobile Internet usage continues to rise. The number of unique mobile Internet subscribers has reached 102 million for the second quarter of 2008. This means 32% increase in year over year growth. This growing market attracts attention of all advertisers. Google is interested in mobile advertising and launched Google Mobile Ads about a one year ago.

Google  Mobile Ads team has added an option to AdWords for those who are targeting mobile devices with full HTML Internet browsers. IPhone, Android, N96, N9, Samsung Innov8 and mobile devices capable of running Skyfire browser have full html browsers. A new iPod and Android campaign-level option is added to AdWords. Unlike standard Google mobile ads, you won’t need to modify your desktop ads for mobile devices anymore. Setting a campaign which targets Android G1 and iPhone users has become as easy as setting a regular Adwords campaign. You can read more about this topic at Google Mobile Blog .

Google’s new action shows us this niche mobile advertising medium is becoming more important for advertisers and publishers.

3 weeks ago, i listed 77 Google Services which has become the most popular post on SiteBoat. I understood how people wonder anything about Google. I saw an interesting post on TechCrunch about a presentation on Google prepared by FaberNovel, a French IT consulting firm. This is an interesting and very informative presentation which you can watch below.

This presentation informs you about some questions all the Internet people are curious about. For example:

• How want Google to compete with Facebook?
• Why won’t Google be touched by the crisis?
• How does Google buy traffic?
• How did Google capture the offline advertising market?
• Why isn’t PageRank an efficient obstacle against rival entries on the market?
• Why doesn’t Google monetize all of its services?
• Why does Microsoft fear Google?

Google’s revenues 2008 is predicted about Bn$20 and revenues 2012 is projected Bn$ 35 in the presentation. There is an interesting slide titled “Why is Google stealing our voices?” telling that Google is creating a database of phonemes, recorded during Local Voice Search calls. This database is used to better its speech to text technologies.

In summary, Google’s now and future is very well summarized by FaberNovel in this presentation, this is a well done job.

As i told you yesterday, Google updated the mobile app for iPhone with ‘Voice Recognition Search’ capability. When the application is on, you can search using only your voice; you don’t have to type. ‘Search with my location’ is also a new feature for Google Mobile App; if “Location Services” is enabled on your iPhone. You can read this Official Google Mobile Blog Post to learn more about this subject.

This is an amazing application for iPhone and i think Apple will make a profit from this achievement, not Google. I defend the opinion that Google had to release this app for the Android phones first. Because commercially, we know that some consumers buy high tech devices for only extreme innovations like “voice recognition search”.

Google is out of control; it diffuses everywhere. But don’t take my words the wrong way. I find every service of Google useful and want to thank Google, because they share their applications’ APIs and helps the Open Source community. This means, Google both develops Web 2.0 applications and lets other entrepreneurs to develop their Web 2.0 applications easily. Google Search, Google Maps and YouTube have become inalienable for us in our daily lives. There are lots of other Google services: I could count 77 of Google services and made this list.

1. Google Search
   

   The logos and the trademarks are the property of Google.

2. Gmail
3. Gmail For Mobile
4. YouTube
5. Google Blog Search
6. Google Image Search
7. Google Mobile Search
8. Google Experimental Search
9. Google University Search
10. Google U.S. Goverment Search
11. Google Local Voice Search
12. Google Web History
13. Google Scholar
14. Google Desktop
15. Google Toolbar
16. SearchMash
17. Google Trends
18. Zeitgeist
19. Google Analytics
20. Google Movies
21. Google SMS
22. Google Video
23. Image Labeler
24. Google Adsense
25. Google Adwords
26. Audio Ads
27. Android
28. Google Click-to-Call
29. Google Groups
30. Orkut
31. Lively
32. Blogger
33. Google SketchUp
34. Google Book Search
35. Google Health
36. Google Flu Trends
37. Google News
38. Google Labs
39. Google Translate
40. Chrome
41. Google Earth
42. Google Maps
43. Google Mars
44. Google Sky
45. Google Moon
46. Google Ride Finder
47. Google Transit
48. Knol
49. Google Calendar
50. Google Alerts
51. Google Mobilizer
52. iGoogle
53. Google Reader
54. Picasa
55. Google Notebook
56. Google 3D WareHouse
57. Google Docs
58. Google Spreadsheets
59. Dodgeball
60. FeedBurner
61. Friend Connect
62. GrandCentral
63. Google Page Creator
64. Jaiku
65. TextCube
66. Google Webmaster Tools
67. Google Web Toolkit
68. Google Apps
69. Google Code
70. Google App Engine
71. OpenSocial
72. Google sites
73. Google Base
74. Google Checkout
75. GapMinder
76. Google Answers
77. Google Coop

Google announced a new service, ‘Flu Trends‘. Influenza, commonly known as the flu is a serious infectious  disease caused by the Influenza RNA viruses. Flu spreads around the world and in some years, it kills millions of people. Three influenza pandemics occured in the 20th century and more than 10 million people died.

Health 2.0: Expansive definition “New concept of health care wherein all the constituents (patients, physicians, providers, and payers) focus on health care value (outcomes/price) and use competition at the medical condition level over the full cycle of care as the catalyst for improving the safety, efficiency, and quality of health care” – Last updated on May 25, 2007 (Source: Scott Shreeve, MD – January 24, 2007)

Google uses the data from their popular ‘Google Trends’ service to predict the flu trends. Google Trend analyzes Google web search queries to compute how many searches done for a term, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. (Source: Google Trends – About) Last year, a small team of Google engineers began to explore if there is a correlation between Google search trends and real-world happenings. When they met with the Health Gurus’s on Google.org’s Prevent and Predict Team, they decided to focus on outbreaks of flu. The team found that certain aggregated search queries tend to be very common during flu season, each year. They compared these aggregated queries against data provided by U.S. CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) and found a very close relationship between the frequency of the flu-related searc queries and the number of people who are experiencing flu-like symptoms.

The CDC does a great job of surveying real data to track the flu, but traditional flu surveillance systems take more than 1 week to collect, to release and to interpret weekly surveillance data. The first graph is from CDC website and the second graph is from Google Flu Trends and they show us the similarity between Google’s estimated trends and real-time trend.

(Image courtesy of the U.S. CDC)

Image courtesy of Google Flu Trends

Google search queries can be counted very easily and making flu estimates available each day. This system provides an early warning system for outbreaks of influenza. Early detection of a disease is very important to reduce the number of people affected. You can read the Google.org blog post here and ‘How we help track flu trends‘ post on Google official blog.

As i mentioned in the ‘definiton of Health 2.0′ , Google Flu Trends is a new concept for improving efficiency and quality of healthcare. Google Flu Trends is a brand new Health 2.0 application and a pioneer for preventing infectious disease outbreaks and shows us the increasing power of the Internet in our daily lives. Google Flu Trends has offered us an innovative – preventative way instead of treating the disease. Google Health was launched in May, 2008 and we will review Google Health service later.

* I caught flu and  Whilst writing this post, i’m still sick; i haven’t been able to go to work for two days. I’ll get vaccinated and follow Google Flu Trends to protect myself against catching flu