Use your head to control YouTube http://bizt.ag/g2L9Nw

Hugo Boss has developed an intriguing YouTube film, which is controlled by your head movements (as detected via a webcam). Tilt your head left or right and the film changes. The film itself is somewhat obscure but the technology is inventive and original.

10 ways to get more insight into your tweets http://bizt.ag/e3Q7Ff

A handy round-up of 10 (mostly free) tools for learning more about what is and isn’t working on Twitter for you.

Google+ statistics http://bizt.ag/n5H6Rj

A new statistics service for the new social network, AKA another way you can fret about how your online numbers compare with those of Mark Zuckerberg. Me? I’m still recovering from finding out that his dog is 100,000 times more popular than me.

The Cult of Done Manifesto http://bizt.ag/Ha7j4G 

Two years on, still reads well though I’m not sure its authors would appreciate me taking two years to get round to mentioning it…

Get your own customised Barbra Streisand song http://bizt.ag/x7D2Ny

Your life is now complete.

Google’s hit rate with its new projects is fairly low. It knows that if it tries out enough new ideas, the occasional one will be the sort of success that more than makes up for the efforts which went into the flops. Even in social networks, there have been plenty of flops already – remember Google Sidewiki, Google Buzz or Google Wave to name but three?

However, Google+ has three things going for it that make it look, at this early stage, more like a Chrome or an Android – something that is set to become a major success.

First, Google has invested very significantly in the project, as Wired’s excellent feature on Google+’s development explains.

Second, it introduces a significant new focus for organising your social networking, albeit one that others will be able to imitate if it’s a success. Google+ uses the idea of “circles” to organise your friends or contacts, so you can have different groups of (possibly overlapping) people have access to different content. Work colleagues can see some content, for example, whilst personal friends (who may or not include some work colleagues) other content and family possibly some of each. Compare that with Facebook, whose privacy settings simply let you allow wider groups of people to see less, and you can see how Google+’s approach more naturally fits with the way people actually live their lives.

Third, if circles is one of Google+’s hearts the other is Google’s search algorithm expertise, used to find and present content the algorithm think you will find useful from all that being shared online (called “Sparks”) – using your network of contacts to refine what you’re shown but pulling content from across the internet. By contrast, Facebook with its newfeed relies on what your friends have already decided to share on Facebook – a far smaller pool of information, and one necessitated by Facebook not having a global search engine technology at its heart.

If all this turns out to be accurate (and checking back, my initial reaction to Buzz was appropriately sceptical, phew!), what dose it mean for people working in PR?

By bringing together search and social media in the Sparks results, Google+ will heighten the need to run integrated communications operations. Getting media coverage from mainstream news outlets these days often results in very search-friendly content going online – such as if a daily newspaper puts a story up on its website – but that will be only half the job to get it appearing prominently in people’s Sparks. The other half will be having it shared by networks of interested readers, which means both choosing shareable topics and encouraging the formation of those networks.

Google will be even more closely entwining the results of customer service, marketing and public relations – making the costs of having siloed approaches to all three that much higher.

Cross-posted from the MHP Communications blog.

Researchers at the Bank of England have discovered that internet searches for specific related terms are a powerful predictive tool for seeing where unemployment and house prices will go in the future.

Taking search terms such as “estate agent”, “mortgage”, “unemployed” and “jobseekers allowance” and comparing their frequency over a period of years with actual subsequent movements in house values and the claimant count produced results that “have the potential to be useful for economic policy making” and in some cases beat existing guides such as surveys of public opinion.

The idea isn’t new – see Bill Tancer’s Click – and it reinforces what I was told when chatting to someone in a financial firm recently, namely that the dealers they know now often use Twitter to try to catch trends ahead of official information, e.g. a wave of farmers complaining about the weather’s impact on their crops.

Here’s what Google itself says:

Our advice for publishers continues to be to focus on delivering the best possible user experience on your websites and not to focus too much on what they think are Google’s current ranking algorithms or signals. Some publishers have fixated on our prior Panda algorithm change, but Panda was just one of roughly 500 search improvements we expect to roll out to search this year. In fact, since we launched Panda, we’ve rolled out over a dozen additional tweaks to our ranking algorithms, and some sites have incorrectly assumed that changes in their rankings were related to Panda. Search is a complicated and evolving art and science, so rather than focusing on specific algorithmic tweaks, we encourage you to focus on delivering the best possible experience for users.

The full post is well worth a read, especially for the list of questions it provides which people should bear in mind when trying to provide high quality sites.

Chances are you’ve noticed that as you start typing a search term into Google’s search box, it tries to guess what you are typing, suggesting several ways to complete what you are typing in. Those guesses are derived from Google’s huge data set of what people having been searching for online, so seeing what Google suggests also reveals what the most popular searches made by other people have been. The popularity of previous searches is not the only factor that goes into working out what Google will suggest to you, but it is by far the most important.

Try searching on the names of prominent politicians and one common pattern emerges – Google keeps on suggesting their name followed by Twitter as the search term you want to use.

That’s the case not only for the leaders of the three main parties, David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband, but also for Caroline Lucas (the Green MP), Alex Salmond (Scotland’s first minister) and Nigel Farage of UKIP. It was only on searches for Plaid’s leader Ieuan Wyn Jones that Google did not prompt to suggest looking for Twitter in the tests I carried out.

The lesson of this? Trying to find political leaders on Twitter is one of the most common pieces of research about them that the public carry out. And if so many people are looking for you on Twitter, that is a good reason for being there and using it well.

Welcome to the latest monthly collection of 5 weblinks that you shouldn’t miss, put together by the Digital Leadership Group at Engine. Thanks to everyone who contributed suggestions this month.

Rapportive: integrating social media with email http://bit.ly/h7n3RJ

Integrating information from different social networks both with each other and with your email is one of the hot topics at the moment –and this free Gmail add-on is one of the hottest start-ups of the moment. Now when you are reading an email from someone, you can see their latest social network activity, whether you are connected with them on different networks, and more. It’s like services such as Xobni, only better.

CurrencyFair: cutting out foreign exchange dealers http://bit.ly/fk94st

Another attempt to use the internet to cut-out the middle man, this time by matching up people who want to buy and sell foreign currency. No middleman. (Err, … except for the website.)

Google eyes the UK movie streaming market http://bit.ly/gEGwlP

Rumours abound that Google is looking to pilot a movie streaming service on YouTube in the UK before rolling it out in the United States.

(Note: if the mention of seeing a film makes you sing, “Butterkist, Butterkist, ra ra ra” you are old. Official. And if you also know that the jingle was written by Tony Hawks in his pre-fridge days you are scary.)

The Internet Wishlist http://bit.ly/fW7Fr2

A suggestion box for the future of technology, sitting there waiting for you to pick the collective wisdom.

Evernote http://bit.ly/eBRmiE

It used to be the case that a computer promising to remember everything was an ominous warning, now it’s an online promise of goodness. This note taking service lets you collate text, video, pictures, web clippings and more into one digital scrapbook.

An error on Google Maps has caused an international conflict in Central America.

A Nicaraguan military commander, relying on Google Maps, moved troops into an area near San Juan Lake along the border between his country and Costa Rica.* The troops are accused of setting up camp there, taking down a Costa Rican flag and raising the Nicaraguan flag, doing work to clean up a nearby river, and dumping the sediment in Costa Rican territory.

La Nacion — the largest newspaper in Costa Rica — says the Nicaraguan commander, Eden Pastora, used Google Maps to “justify” the incursion even though the official maps used by both countries indicate the territory belongs to Costa Rica.

The area is correctly mapped by Microsoft.

* Other reports are that Google was consulted only after the troops got to the location, being then used to establish which side of the boundary the troops were actually on.

Hat-tip: Campaign Reboot

Here’s the 2004 list:

US technology outfits
Adobe
Adobe Acrobat 10
Apple Computers
Apple – QuickTime
Blogger Google
Google Search
Hewlett-Packard Development Company
Intel Corporation
Macromedia
PHPBB Forum
Real Media

US bodies
Energy.gov
National Science Foundation

Other
World Wide Web Consortium

The fourteen sites on the list are dominated by technology and America. Now look at the current list of Pagerank 10 sites:

Technology
Adobe – Adobe Flash Player
Adobe – Adobe Reader Download
Google Search

Social networking
Facebook
Social Bookmarking Sharing Button Widget

News
CNN

US bodies
The White House
United States Department of Health and Human Services
US Government website

Other countries
Group of Eight (coalition of Australian universities)
Miibeian (Chinese government site)
National Portal of India

Other
World Wide Web Consortium

Of these thirteen sites, five are technology or social networking. Three other countries now feature and there is a broad spread of services: software, social networking, news and more.

Both lists courtesy of Search Engine Genie.

* Google’s Pagerank formula is what made it as a search engine company. Although Pagerank is now a less important part of how its search results are determined than in the early days, it is still the case that the more links and the higher the quality of them, the higher your Pagerank score. For more on how Pagerank works see this explanation over on Search Engine Land.

Cross-posted from the Mandate blog

Google boss Eric Schmidt increasingly reminds me of Rumsfeld. Also smart. Also controversial. And he says things such as:

He predicts, apparently seriously, that every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends’ social media sites. (Wall Street Journal)

Er… except that plenty of people will know your old and new name, and you’ll look the same in photos, and… Oh I could go on, but just consider this little thought experiment. If Google changed its name tomorrow, would that suddenly separate it off from the firm’s previous behaviour? No.

Yet there is a decent point in what he says in that quite how we deal with leaving so much of our live documented for others to find is a question that will come back again and again. The example I’ve often used is imagine the scene in a few years: parent lecturing teenager on being out too late one night. Teenager responds: “But I’ve seen your Facebook wall from when you were my age – I know you did just the same!”

Take also Schmidt’s comment, first made a few years ago, that “The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn’t understand”.

The first thing? The first? I know there are some darn smart people in Google, but I don’t think even they would have to think too hard to find other examples of things that years after their invention humans were still not struggling to really understand or foresee the impact of. Such as the printing press. And TV. And in fact pretty much every major technology has taken a long time for people to begin to see just quite what the limits are of what it can do.

So once again, Schmidt makes some sense – yes, the internet is bringing about major and uncertain change – but wrapped in words that are more deserving of chuckles than applause. Very Rumsfeld.

Google dominates the search engine market, both in the UK and internationally. Although there are some countries where a local search service has the lead (e.g. Russia), overall Google is undoubtedly number one.

The world however is full of companies which used to be massive, even dominant, but fell from grace. Remember the days when Novell dominated the server market? Or watch Blade Runner and look at the brand names used back then, firms so big that it was easy to believe the future would include them. Names such as Pan-Am.

So could Google too fall from grace? And if so how?

Google gets a case of commercial madness

No matter how big the company, a domineering chief with a kooky business plan can bring it to its knees. Think RBS. Think Marconi. It may be very much a long shot that Google will commit commercial suicide in this way, but it is not completely unthinkable. (And the highly implausible has a nasty habit of happening now and again. After all, who until a few weeks ago would have thought that one wrong character in one file could break Google’s search engines for a few hours?).

Google gets regulated

The repeated skirmishes between Microsoft and regulators haven’t brought Microsoft to its knees. They have cost the firm in fines, legal costs and reputation, but Microsoft is still one of the commercially most successful companies in the history of the IT industry.

Other firms have though been dismembered by regulatory action; IBM comes to mind most notably.

Could Google ever face such a fate? Its increasing dominance of online advertising markets could leave it open to anti-trust / anti-monopoly action, especially if the economic downturn and resulting advertising squeeze makes its advertising rivals turn up the pressure for intervention.

Google loses the privacy battle

Much of Google technical and commercial success relies on gathering bucket loads of data from us. Lots and lots and lots. And the putting that data to work to improve its services even further and to tie us in to them.

But what if there is a move to give people much more control over what is done with their data? This could cause serious damage to the Google way, and it appears to be the line of attack that Microsoft is taking.

Microsoft has been signing up some of the best privacy talent in the business to work for it. All done in the name of helping to improve its own services of course, but if Microsoft can get public and regulatory opinion on its side, we could see a move towards much greater individual control over data that could seriously damage Google.

Someone does a better search engine than Google

There have been, and are, lots of new search services which try to find an approach that Google doesn’t cover, such as clustering search results around themes or providing visual representations of the results.

This is an area where Google can feel confident, because not only is it their own core area of expertise, but Google has the huge financial resources to buy or replicate any ideas other people have which take off.

Moreover, Google is  now so deeply embedded into people’s habits and systems, that even if a better search engine came along (and several around at the moment argue that they are better), Google has a huge incumbency advantage. To illustrate this, imagine if you invented a superior taste for a cola drink this weekend. What would you actually then start doing on Monday morning to topple Coke or Pepsi? It’s not trivial task to knock an incumbent off their perch, even online.

We stop needing Google

A bigger risk, though, is that people move to using search services built into other services which are beyond Google. This is what was happening with YouTube – until Google purchased it. YouTube has become the second most popular search site on the internet, after Google itself. It may only return video results, but its content is so popular that people are often happy to only be searching that, leaving the rest of the internet alone.

With YouTube, Google’s money snuffled out the threat. But why shouldn’t search migrate in future to another site stuffed full of content? And if that other site, having captured people’s attention with the ability to search its own content, started adding in search results from the wider internet…

Consider social networks, which now get more internet traffic in the UK than search engines.

Or consider Microsoft’s move to turn its extremely widespread Office software suite into a web-based software service. Microsoft’s own search engine has failed to dent Google’s dominance, but imagine a world where Microsoft migrates millions of users around the world to using Office online, making its Office services some of the most heavily used sites on the internet. Drop a search box on to them and it’d be time to start selling Google stock.

There are good reasons to think that each of these futures might not happen. Just as Microsoft has largely successfully seen off wave after wave of competitors, Google might too. But even if the odds of any one method of downfall are low, for Google to continue to dominate, it has to be the case that none of them happens – and that’s a much less likely prospect.