The guys over at FlowingData.com Demo Slam put it together and I would just like to say well done. I wonder if this will spawn a trend of animations made with Google Docs in the future? Kind of reminds me when you use to draw a series of pictures in a notebook and then flick through it.

The long tail describes a wider range of products that are more specific getting sold less often, rather than the ‘head’ being more common/generic products being sold more often. A great image create by leftclick can be seen below:

Effectively the dinosaur represents a curve on the graph, where there more generic or common a product, the increase of the results. On the other end the more specific the term, the less results occur. Following the example by leftclick, how would you leverage the long tail in web 2.0?

If you were in the hotel business and you had a resort you could describe yourself as a ‘hotel’ or perhaps even the location your hotel was. This would be a very generic term, and really ‘the head’. If you were more specific, you could use key works such as ‘accommodation’, ‘Queenstown’, ‘backpacker’, ‘wheelchair access’, ‘pets allowed’ and the results would be fairly narrow. Putting this keywords into Google may give you the results of a few million (the head), to a few hundred or less (the tail).

The more specific your key words, the more specific your audience – leveraging the long tail can yield lower costs in advertising while also increasing your conversion rate.

By doing the following you can target advertisements on the long tail in the example above. This also means you will have lower costs (because there is less competition) and have higher conversion rates (because the target audience is looking for services similar to what you offer).

Another great tip is from leftclick is focused pages, targeted at these specialised search terms. What this basically means is, don’t rely on your advertisements bringing in visitors, create pages or content so the search engines results will list the page (in in turn bring them to your site). In the above example creating an online guest book, or encouraging user reviews (even better if they blog about it and link to your site) are a few good ways to create content.

So what if your a site like Amazon? Similar approach works but there is a few more tips which you can use. If you have a large product range, once the visitor is on your site you might want to direct them towards more generic items you have for sale. The products are more popular and as a first time vistior you might be more interested.

Perhaps you’ve become a member of a site like Amazon and bought a few items. Soon you wont to direct your members towards a little more ‘specific’ material. This will have the opposite effect in that existing members who have seen the common/generic stuff can get pushed towards the more specific terms. By doing this you are encouraging existing users to branch out more.

Perpetual – perpetually – In a perpetual manner; Seeming to never end; endlessly; constantly
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/perpetually

Beta – A software release is the distribution (whether public or private) of an initial or upgraded version of a computer software product. The software engineers and company doing the work decide on how to distribute the program or system, or changes to that pre downloads and compact discs.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_(software_development)

Perpetual Beta – Perpetual beta is a term used to describe software or a system which remains at the beta development stage for an extended or even indefinite period of time. It is often used by developers in order to allow them to constantly release new features that might not be fully tested.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_beta

Perpetual Beta in Web 2.0 is used to describe an online service which remains under constant development. At great example of this was Gmail.

Google’s Gmail service launched on the 1st of April, 2004 as an invite only service. I remained as an invite only service for nearly 3 years before becoming open to the public (7th of February, 2007). It was still labeled a Beta for another 2 years until the lifted the Beta labelled along with the rest of the Google Apps Suite on the 7th of July, 2009.

During its time in Beta Google constantly introduced new features and changed its services. Introducing new languages, enabled IMAP support, increasing the mailbox size, integration with Google Docs, custom themes, Google labs and many more. Click here for a history of Gmail.

So why label something a Beta? Generally if something is in Beta you can expect some things not to work, and problems arise. This is all part of harnessing the collective intelligence to develop the product, find bugs and provided feedback to make a better product. Without having a web 2.0 application or service you will be stuck in the traditional software life cycle which can cost more, take longer and not be as effective.

So why take the Beta label off after so many years? From an Infrastructure perspective you don’t deploy products that are in Beta. You deploy products that a ready that have no expected bugs or problems. Google understood this concept so after around 5 years the finally took the Beta label of. This changes how a business can look at a product and it will allow business to evaluate Gmail and related apps as a potential solution. Previously this would have been ruled out straight away because it wasn’t ready, it was in ‘beta’ and a business can’t afford to have systems that are un-reliable.

So while the main service of Gmail isn’t in Beta anymore there are still more features on going. Google introduced Google Labs which is an opt-in only service that lest to add features and functionality that are in a ‘Beta’ phase. I actually use some of these myself such as multiple inboxes, offline synchronisation, youtube preview in e-mails just to name a few. Once these have been tested enough they might make it to the core functionality of Gmail. So this is an example of a Web 2.0 service that is on a constant Perpetual Beta.

For a user to receive data from through the internet there is a least software running on the servers and and software running on the clients end to get this to work, however I don’t this this is the point Tim is trying to make. I like to think of the concept as software allowing you to do more with the device, than if the software was isolated.

Take for example the Foxtel’s IQ cable box. It allows you to view channels, record shows, bring up an EPG all on the device. This functionality is extended through an iPhone App or their website which allows you to program your IQ box through the internet. It has extended your experience from using the software on the device itself, to using web software/ application to view the EPG, schedule in shows to record without using the IQ box directly.

This has extended to other areas inside your home, take a look at the gaming industry. Sony has create an online community, integrated with its products called the Playstation Network (PSN), Microsoft has done the same with X-Box Live and Nintendo with their online community (although very limiting).

I’ve been trying to stay from examples such as Google Maps, E-Mail, Search, Images, Docs, etc simply because it there is so much to talk about and how their software through API’s, Common Protocols, Applications, etc allows their own software to be used on a wide range of devices, but really if you look at any of them you could drill down and see how they are examples of software above the level of a single device. In fact, Minterest.com published an article recently called ‘Over 60 Google Products & Services You Probably Don’t Know‘ that gives you a break down on what Google offers. There is actually a fair few I didn’t know about and haven’t used.

Another similar example of been trying to escape is how the iPhone connects into iTunes on your computer. This then allows you to configure the device, sync selected data such as photos, music, playlists, applications, bookmarks, etc. While iTunes is allowing you to download music, update software on the phone, subscribe to podcasts, add lyrics to songs, download album artwork, etc all without using the iPhone itself. This can all then can synchronised back to the phone. Apple have then added in another software component called mobile.me which could deserve a post in itself (Take a look at Anthony Nicolaides’s post on ‘MobileMe above the level of a single iDevice‘ to find out more).

Looking back on how far we have come in nearly three years. There is still a lot more companies can achieve by providing ‘software above the level of a single device’ as there a still plenty of gaps above. With cloud computing increasing in popularity and continued progression of technology it really is becoming an easier world to live in. All we need now is for companies to not lock themselves into a ‘walled garden’ and the ease of synchronising myself to the digital world will become second nature (Wow! I feel like a holiday, looking at how much I use technology in my daily life.. perhaps I’ll Google holiday resorts on my iPhone).

Google is one example of a service that has transformed dramatically over the last decade. It primarily began as a unique way for consumers to search through the Internet using special text-matching techniques. However, over the years it has grown to encompass other technologies and services, such as e-mailing, online mapping, social networking and video sharing. These new services have only been made possible by taking advantage of Google’s enormous range of data collected and stored over the years.

Above is an image I produced using TouchGraph.com doing a search for ‘google’, which visually displays the major links associated with Google.com. You can try it out yourself!

The Google information database is extremely valuable, with each new web application heavily reliant on this information. Effective database management has become an absolute necessity for the company and the data it holds has become extremely valuable. With out this data, Google’s services wouldn’t exist. This is also a major challenge for any new comer to the market as they will be starting off with an ‘empty’ database as such.

As Web 2.0 sites grow and develop, their data will become increasingly important. Websites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Wikipedia place less emphasis on providing content themselves, and a move to user-generated content. There is a far greater focus on the conservations between users, as opposed to providing a place for advertisers to promote brands. Between 700,000 and 1.3 million blogs are made daily and according to Google, a new blog post is being created every second of every day (James, 2009).

There have been many ethical and legal questions raised regarding the website’s privacy settings. Facebook has been featured on many news programs both locally and internationally, with people questioning whether its privacy settings are indeed safe and confidential for each user. Clearly, being in control of this large range of data is a huge and challenging responsibility.

Since many Web 2.0 services thrive on the participation between users, data storage services become more valuable. Consumers depend on these sites for a safe, fun and interactive environment to connect with other people and information. If the Web 2.0 site fails to provide this service, then the demand will reduce. It is becoming more apparent nowadays that the data found on a site is just as important as the actual software. Google has recently shown this to be the case with their investment to DigitalGlobes imagery and geodata. As technology progresses, we demand more than what the Intel Inside chip has to offer. People now have an interactive environment, where communication is fast, simple and reliable.

James, L April 2009, ‘Should you advertise on social networking websites?’, World Advertising Research Centre, viewed 10 July 2009

So now that you have an overview of what Google Wave is (if you didn’t know already). Just send a reply back in this post and I’ll go about sending you an invite as soon as I can.

Note: At this stage the only way to get access to Google Wave is through an invite, so please only reply back if you are interested as there are many people who are still trying to get in.

• http://www.jason-v.com/2009/08/01/have-you-googled-your-name
• http://www.jason-v.com/2009/08/10/web-presence-update

To give a bit of re-cap the site was started and the first post went up on July 30th, 2009. At the stage a search for my name on google didn’t turn out to well, and that is to be expected. So how have things gone in this short period?

In the graph below you can see how I’ve gone on a month by month basis. It might be a little early to tell but you can see a steady trend in the amount of visitors to site each month. If you double the current month (roughly halfway through it) this trend continues.

The amount of bandwidth being used though hasn’t been steady as I’ve seen this go up and down. Recently I started uploading more images and photos which has seen the amount of bandwidth being used jump up a fair bit (realistically though it is such a small amount for a website). It might be worth mentioning that I now have caching working on the site as well as a few other optimisations done with some help from Shane (Hosting Guy).

Monthly websites statistics measuring the amount of hits, visitors each month and bandwidth used each month. - 16th October, 2009

So how searchable is my name? Has it improved? Below is a list of searches on two different variations of my name. Jason Van Dyk & “Jason Van Dyk”. I’ve also compared to the results taken on the 10th August 2009.

• Search on www.google.com for – Jason Van Dyk = 6th & 7th vs. 18th & 19th (Improved by 12 spots)
• Search on www.google.com for – “Jason Van Dyk” = 3rd & 4th vs. 25th & 26th (Improved by 22 spots)
• Search on www.yahoo.com for – Jason Van Dyk = 1st, 2nd & 4th vs. 1st, 2nd & 7th (Maintained 1st & 2nd, Improved by 3 spots)
• Search on www.yahoo.com for – “Jason Van Dyk” = 1st, 2nd & 5th vs. 1st, 2nd & 6th (Maintained 1st & 2nd, Improved by 1 spot)
• Search on www.bing.com for – Jason Van Dyk = 2nd & 4th vs. 3rd (Improved by 1 spot and added an extra hit)
• Search on www.bing.com for – “Jason Van Dyk” = 1st vs. 1st, 5th & 10th (Maintained 1st, lost 2 hits)

In summary doing a search for my name will either bring up my site, a profile on a social networking site or some other form a hit which is directly related to me. The results have improved dramatically to have top 10 hit amongst all search engines. This is great and has meant that achieving my goal is working.

How have you gone? What are some of the steps you’ve taken to increase your web presence?

I’ve committed to my goal and have reached it within the time frame. You can now google my name, and results appear. So what is going to happen now? Well I will be posting less about Enterprise 2.0 related topics and instead will broaden the topics to cover more of my interests.

This got me thinking about the importance of creating a strong brand name. A brand, an image, something which stands out and makes consumers want it! There are some very good examples of how companies brand themselves well such as: Coca-Cola, MacDonalds, Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Apple are another great example, but not only do they manage their company brand well they create a very strong product brand for each of the product lines they sell. One way they do that is by engage an emotional response. They associate a great experience, easy to use and a product that makes your life more enjoyable with it. So how quickly did it take for you to look at the picture of a person’s silhouette, bright background, with white head phones before you realised it was for Apple, and then related to iPod / iTunes? I bet that you would of picked up on it before I asked the question (maybe I should of removed the iPod wording).

So besides creating a company brand or a product brand, how can you create your own personal brand?

• Get yourself a business card (paper, electronic, etc) – People need to establish who you are and how to get back in contact with you
• Network yourself, before you need to network
• Create yourself a resume! Nearly every job requires one, so give this some attention
• Get yourself a domain (www.mydomain.com) and ditch (subdomain.com). If you don’t want to blog, create a static page at least
• Produce your own content, don’t just consume what you read. Add value to yourself by sharing
• Integrate your social profiles / online profiles (eg: Twitter, Facebook, LinkkedIn)
• You don’t always have to agree
• Remember your brand isn’t just your web presence
• Become an assets for your co-workers, business and clients

I would love to hear your thoughts on how you have created your own brand. Any stories in how branding work in your favour when you least expected it?

Your blogs (66 enrolled)

–        17 enrolled but no blog URL provided (26%)
–        31 blogs look inactive (only 1 or 2 posts) (47%)
–        18 blogs tracking well (27%)

The results above at this stage mean that 73% of students who have enrolled (INB346 – Enterprise 2.0 @ QUT) are in trouble at this stage and there was a bit of discussion on this before the lecture started.

In reply to the discussion I thought I would post some of my opinions and some hurdles I’ve come across. Tips to get your site out that and hopefully get you in the right direction. I’ll keep it fairly generic so this can be applied in other areas, in other situations.

Site platform: What to use for your website? Is it free? Should I get hosting? What about a domain name?

There are a lot of choices out there. Perhaps that can be a bit of a problem. I decided before looking what to use I was going to buy a domain and host the site on the web. To purchase the domain I went to www.godaddy.com entered in a few details and there it was. I already had hosting organised, so it was fairly easy for me to point the domain to the correct name servers and other stuff.

My next choice was to pick what software to use. Open Source, stable and already established. I could quickly short list this to: Joomla, Drupal, WordPress, Blogger, Mambo. As I knew Blogger was owned by Google and didn’t really allow full control I crossed that out. Mambo was a fork of Joomla made a year or so ago and Joomla itself did a fair bit more than blogging so I took that off the list. That left Drupal and WordPress. WordPresshad a great write up and had both hosted solution (of their domain) and a version you could download and host yourself so I gave that a try (and stuck with it).

Once I had purchased the domain and installed WordPress. My main goal was to make my site searchable. Now that it was on the web, getting it on the search engines was the next challenge. This brings me to the second hurdle.

Content: Remove standard content, writing posts, integrating twitter, categories, tags

Removing the standard content such as “hello world”, the standard links and all that for me was a must. I didn’t want Google searching my site and identifying it as a generic installation that is going no where. I didn’t want to “give the wrong impression” and get black listed as such. I quickly changed the about me page, knowing that this can be changed later. I wrote up a first post (and edited it a few times after it was published) and I was on my way.

So how do I pick what to write about? I attend the lecture and listen to Jason Watson talk and if I get some thoughts going on a particular topic I wrote some points down. I look at the workshop activities and take things from there. Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 concepts are everywhere, and we interact with them daily. I know some students voiced that they didn’t want to get shot down in case the said something wrong. Instead I think of it is an opportunity to voice what I know where someone else can agree, disagree or even provide feedback to further my knowledge (best case scenario).

Categories and Tags. To be honest this is something that I might not have done the best at this stage, but one thing I make sure I do with every post is to make sure I put it in a category, and I tag it with key words which summaries the post. This way you can find that article by looking in a specific category or specific tag. Having more ways to find your content, and search for it isn’t going to hurt.

Integrating twitter – well first I had to join which was easy, and the next step was getting my updates to display on the site. This took a bit of searching around but in the end I decided to go with a plugin called ‘WordPress’. It does what it says, and after installation it was very easy to set it up as a widget on the side of my site.

Web Presence: How am I increasing my web presence? How to give yourself feedback?

One of my main goals is getting a web presence and the site on to google.com and very high up there in the rankings when you search for my name. I believe this is achievable so I’m going to achieve it…. and I’m monitoring my progress so I know if I’m getting closer or further away. This is one thing which I set up from the start with my Have you googled your name? post and have followed up on it later with a Web Presence Update post. This is a way of personal feedback and I way to assess how your blog is going. If you get the feeling of movement and progress you might find you get a bit of snowballing effect. I also have stats running on my site “called AwStats” in the back end which monitors who visits the site, time of the day, what pages have been viewed, etc which allows me to judge where I’ve gone right or wrong. This is how I found out that my Negative Web Presence Example – Abbey Sherwell post was suck up by Google and spat out in the search results.

Exposure: How will Google find my site? How will my search engine ranking increase? Comments? Pings? Trackbacks?

Very similar to my last hurdle, but I thought I would break it up.

So how do you get your site on Google? I bet most of you haven’t thought about actually telling Google have you?

1. It does sound crazy, but once you got a few posts on your site tell Google it is there. You can do that by clicking here and adding your URL.
2. Pings – your WordPress site also sends out pings when you publish a post – More info here, but if you’re not using WordPress it might be something you can look out.
3. Add your blog to the Google Blog Search (yes there is a separate site on Google to search blogs) – by clicking here
4. Submit to other sites like Yahoo! (I didn’t do Yahoo! but my site has come up there already), Bing (click here), others?
5. Trackbacks – If your post is related to someone elses, or you link to someone elses post make sure you “send trackbacks”.
6. Links – Link to other peoples posts, site. If you join up to another site (twitter), make sure you’ve put your website in your profile.
7. Comment – If you comment on other peoples site (leave url link in the URL field if possible) and you might get comments back. Network
8. Keep the content going. Search engines need a reason to keep coming back to your site and you need a reason for people to come back also!

Other: Something I’ve missed? Forgotten? What about comments?

Well these were some of the first hurdles I’ve had, and I think this is what other will come across too. One thing mentioned in the lecture was comments. We all like comments and like to here feedback (I know I do) but this shouldn’t be a crucial aspect of your site. Think of it as a bonus if you get any. We also have a fair amount of students in this subject, so once you get the ball rolling have a look on other students site and leave a comment. If you receive a comment, try and return the favour. If I’m going to comment, I try and add extra value to the original post which I would like to recommend my readers in doing.

Outro:

There are plenty of tips, how to’s, screenshots, guides, tutorials, posts and resources on the net to help you get started. I’ve only touched on on a few things here but if you feel like there was something I’ve missed let me know and I can update the post. Also if you are struggling to get started let me know and I might be able to assist (or point you in the right direction).

I thought I would give everyone a bit of an update of what is happening behind the scenes with my site. One of the key objectives was to entertain the idea of creating a web presence. So how will I know how I’m going and if I’m heading the right way?

Monitoring with stats, checking search results and finding out where I stand. As there are fellow QUT Students doing this, and a few have decided to create their own domain I thought it would be interesting in sharing:

• First Post – July 30th, 2009
• Total Number of Unique Visitors since the site creation – 182
• Most Popular Post – http://jason-v.com/2009/08/05/negative-web-presence-example-abbey-sherwell

The last one took me by surprise, not only is it my most popular post it ranks on the front page of www.google.com when you do a search for “Abbey Sherwell”. I’m quietly happy with that, and I’m not going to complain about the 100+ hits it has received (hits are different to Unique Visitors I mentioned above). This also means that the google bot has been trawling my site for some google juice.

So I thought I would share some results (searches on Jason Van Dyk & “Jason Van Dyk”):

• Search on www.google.com for – Jason Van Dyk = 18th & 19th
• Search on www.google.com for – “Jason Van Dyk” = 25th & 26th
• Search on www.yahoo.com for – Jason Van Dyk = 1st, 2nd & 7th
• Search on www.yahoo.com for – “Jason Van Dyk” = 1st, 2nd & 6th
• Search on www.bing.com for – Jason Van Dyk = 3rd
• Search on www.bing.com for – “Jason Van Dyk” = 1st, 5th & 10th

It would be safe to say that I’ve clearly entered the web and my rankings are on the rise (considering there were next to nothing).  I plan on writing a post to highlight some of the things I’ve done and things which you can do as well to increase your exposure but first I wanted to be able to say that “yes” it does work, and it has worked because my site is there.

I would be interested to see how other people have gone, and the steps taken by others to get them name out there.