David Herrold

Gmail labs

Posted by Dave | Filed under Communication, Google, Software

I’m checking out Gmail labs. Has anyone started to play around with the new features?

- Dave

Tags: gmail, gmail labs, Google

Google opens Website Optimizer

Posted by Dave | Filed under Business, Design, Development, Google, Marketing, Usability, Web design

Google released their Website Optimizer platform last week for general use. It has only been available to sites using Google AdWords in the past, but now can be used by anyone to enhance site performance. This is great news for web analytic junkies, usability testers, developers and designers alike.

In a nutshell, Google’s Website Optimizer allows you to test multiple versions of content (ie. marketing messages, logos, icons, copy, etc) in a live environment to determine which combination of content yields the best results.

Based upon what you are testing, this “result” could mean higher click-throughs, increased product sales, increased product downloads, increased ad revenue, higher traffic to internal pages, etc.

This eliminates the guesswork of testing ad placement, site designs, product purchase flows, etc. You can simply release multiple versions of your content and look at the analytics to determine which one is yielding the best results.

There are certainly other tools to do the same job; but not many are free or this simple. We could certainly do the same thing at the Chronicle, however we would have to use several systems to make it happen. This simplicity of using one system appeals to me.

Here are some links to get you started with Google’s Website Optimizer:

Google Website Optimizer
Google Website Optimizer blog
Website Optimizer press release

(via Web Worker Daily)

Tags: analytics, Google, Marketing, Usability, website optimizer

Google Apps Engine vs Amazon S3

Posted by Dave | Filed under Development, Google, Technology

According to a recent TechCrunch post, Google will be venturing into the application cloud business to compete directly with Amazon’s S3 service.

From TechCrunch:

Unlike Amazon Web Services’ loosely coupled architecture, which consists of several essentially independent services that can optionally be tied together by developers, Google’s architecture is more unified but less flexible. For example, it is possible with Amazon to use their storage service S3 independently of any other services, while with Google using their BigTable service will require writing and deploying a Python script to their app servers, one that creates a web-accessible interface to BigTable.

Are there enough differences for both services to exist or will there be a knock-down, drag-out fight in the near future. It’s hard to beat Google’s “hey, kids, our dope is free…for now” model.

It should be interesting to watch this unfold.

- Dave

Tags: amazon, application, Google, hosting, s3

Google goes goth

Posted by Dave | Filed under Google

Is Google going goth or perhaps making an homage to heavy metal concert t-shirts (ROCK-N-ROLL…where’s the stage)?

No, my fellow creatures of the night, they are not. According to Google:

Google users in the United States will notice today that we “turned the lights out” on the Google.com homepage as a gesture to raise awareness of a worldwide energy conservation effort called Earth Hour. As to why we don’t do this permanently - it saves no energy; modern displays use the same amount of power regardless of what they display. However, you can do something to reduce the energy consumption of your home PC by joining the Climate Savers Computing Initiative.

On Saturday, March 29, 2008, Earth Hour invites people around the world to turn off their lights for one hour – from 8:00pm to 9:00pm in their local time zone. On this day, cities around the world, including Copenhagen, Chicago, Melbourne, Dubai, and Tel Aviv, will hold events to acknowledge their commitment to energy conservation.

I thought I hit an odd key combination this morning that inversed my screen colors (command+option+control+8 on a Mac). I stopped for a minute, cocked my head in a a befuddled way and clicked on the Earth Hour link.

Ah, it all makes sense now. It was simply Google giving us a dose of environmental awareness at 72 DPI.

Thanks Google…I need more coffee.

Tags: earth hour, energy, environment, Google

RSS bloat with Google Reader

Posted by Dave | Filed under Google, Technology, Usability

Nearly 4 months ago I trimmed the RSS feeds I read on a regular basis from 192 to 132. That reduction was fairly easy and painless. I looked at my reading trends and the frequency with which many of the feeds update and cut anything I hadn’t read within the last 30 days.

I checked my subscriptions tonight in my Google Reader account and was shocked to find that I have climbed back up to 162 subscriptions.

How did this happen?!

Click here to read more…

Tags: feeds, Google Reader, RSS, subscriptions

Google Knol - Wikipedia killer?

Posted by Dave | Filed under Communication, Google

From the official Google blog:

Earlier this week, we started inviting a selected group of people to try a new, free tool that we are calling “knol”, which stands for a unit of knowledge. Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. The tool is still in development and this is just the first phase of testing. For now, using it is by invitation only. But we wanted to share with everyone the basic premises and goals behind this project.

The key idea behind the knol project is to highlight authors. Books have authors’ names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors — but somehow the web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors names highlighted. We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content. At the heart, a knol is just a web page; we use the word “knol” as the name of the project and as an instance of an article interchangeably. It is well-organized, nicely presented, and has a distinct look and feel, but it is still just a web page. Google will provide easy-to-use tools for writing, editing, and so on, and it will provide free hosting of the content. Writers only need to write; we’ll do the rest.

Sounds like Google’s Knol is a direct competitor to Wikipedia if I’ve ever seen one.

Tags: distribution, Google, information, Wikipedia