July is a time for skeleton crews, as vacations take over the calendar. With Steve in California, Jeff off in a tent somewhere, and Jonathan working on-site with a client, it was down to Astrid, Mike, and me. We still had fun learning and sharing. Here’s what we deemed important to teach this week.
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Today we’re initiating a new series of posts to the YDOP blog that we’re really excited to share with you. Earlier this year, we began carving out a one-hour block once a week for what we call “Resource Friday.” We grab a couple pizzas and then sit down as a complete team to share professional development resources with each other. Here are the expectations:
Resource Fridays inspire and push us as a team, and hold each individual accountable for constantly learning and growing. Now we’d like to share brief recaps of the resources we share with you. We’ll be posting these each week.
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I’ve been noticing a trend in my behavior when I use Google. More and more, I find myself limiting the results to pages that have been created or updated in the past year, past month, or even past week.
It’s easy to do. When you perform a search, simply click “Show Options”:
In the options that appear, specify that you only want recent results:
When are people most likely to use this? When they’re conducting searches for information that is likely to change on a regular basis. Consider just one example. Suppose I’m doing a college-related search about how much it’s going to cost me. Knowing tuition costs from last year (let alone three years ago) does me no good. I only want up-to-date information. Look what happens when I search for “maryland tuition” without a time restriction, versus when I search the same term with a restriction that the information must have been updated within the past year:
The results are completely different. The University of Maryland doesn’t simply lose its number one spot, it gets bumped out of the results altogether.
Optimizing a college website is an ongoing effort, not a once-and-done deliverable. Prospective students today are savvy searchers. They expect accurate, up-to-date information, and they know how to get it. Make sure you’re offering it.
At first (and, OK, for weeks after that), Google Wave is hard to understand. It’s difficult to figure out how to use Wave, and it’s even harder to imagine how it might be truly useful.
Google Wave
At last night’s Central PA New Tech Meetup, I had the pleasure of facilitating a conversation about Google’s latest product with the brain trust of techies in the room, along with the meetup’s organizer, John Caddell. My goal was to get a feel from this group of fellow early adopters about what they like/dislike about Wave so far, and about what they see as the future implications of the technology.
Here are my takeaways on the question, Will Google Wave affect the way business is done?
Google Wave will change project management. It’s clear that Wave is superbly suited for small project teams who need to collaborate on projects, often in real-time.
Google Wave will change how we think about documents. Right now the paradigm within business is that a document is a document is a document. An after-action review, a set of product specs, an informal memo, and a legal contract are created, versioned, and stored in similar ways. The current way of thinking about, creating, and storing documents makes sense for things like contracts and records that are meant to become static. But that way of thinking is inadequate for documents about things like best practices, bios and CVs, and marketing research. Wave will prompt business to differentiate between “static documents” and “living documents.”
Google wave is the wiki for the rest of us. Enterprises currently attempt to create “living documents” (and a management/storage system for them) by setting up internal wikis. The problem is, getting a wiki up and running—and more importantly, getting people to actually use it—is difficult at best. Compared to a wiki, Google Wave is fun. Even if Wave is not completely intuitive and simple, it’s more intuitive and simple than a wiki. The impact of Google Wave on knowledge management should not be underestimated.
Google Wave reinvents the message board. Message boards, forums, and BBs have been falling out of favor throughout the past decade. They’re most alive in the tech community, but adoption within other sectors has fallen off. The similarity of a wave to a message board thread is close enough that Google Wave may make a good modern-day replacement for phpBB and other forum software.
Google Wave makes messages more social. Including someone new in a wave is easy and doesn’t require introductions, unlike adding someone to a conversation taking place between multiple people via e-mail. Wave also allows newcomers to the conversation to catch up by watching how the wave evolved over time, using the (really cool) “playback” feature. What’s more, if you find yourself in a wave with a participant you weren’t connected with before, adding them to your contacts (and thus, to your personal network) is a breeze.
What do you think? Are these predictions pie in the sky? Are there other ways you see Wave impacting business processes in the near future?
Here’s a screencast of the presentation I gave at the November 2009 meeting of the Lancaster SEO Meetup Group. I share a list of 17 ways to use standard sites and services like Delicious, Yahoo Answers, blogs, and Twitter in nonstandard and unusual ways. If you want to do more than broadcast and blend in, or if your love affair with Twitter or Facebook needs a new spark, I share creative marketing tactics for you to consider. Delicious for workflow? Reviews for social capital? Facebook events for social climbing? Google Alerts for random words? It’s in here.
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