Google's New Knol Not a Wikepedia Killer

In a variation of the old, "if it bleeds, it leads" axiom of sensational journalism, today's technology news is rife with reports of Google's new challenge to Wikipedia. The WSJ headline says: Google Targets Wikipedia... C/NET talks of a Wikipedia "Rival." Well, that's one angle I suppose, but it is not the right one.

Google's new "Knol" platform is not a Wikipedia competitor, it is substantially different from the Wiki platform and it seeks to accomplish different goals. Read the Official Google Blog post here. Then, read Scott Gilbertson's post on the Wired blog. Scott gets it right. Once built, Knol will be a great compliment to Wikipedia and I personally welcome the development. And I confess, I'm interested in what readers think of my writing, so a rating system makes sense to me.

I've noted before that I use Wikipedia several times a day, and this blog contains almost 150 links to that wonderful and comprehensive source. In fact, I am a Wikimedia Foundation donor and have urged my readers to consider modest financial contributions as well. But I will certainly contribute content to the Google platform, and I imagine that I will soon be a regular user. Hey, the web is maturing and there's plenty of room for continued innovation, and new approaches. Bottom line, I trust both of these organizations and based on my own experience, both produce fine products with my best interests in mind.

Google Announces Energy Initiative

Google today announced a new energy initiative designed to produce clean energy for less than the cost of coal power generation. A project of Google's foundation, Google.org, and Google Corporate, initial goals call for producing a full Gigawatt of power - enough to provide for the energy needs of a city the size of San Francisco. Read about it at Tim O'Reilly's site, O'Reilly's Radar. If you are wondering why an Internet giant is playing in the Energy space, just imagine how much power it must take to run a GooglePlex. O'Reilly likes the idea, and so do I.

Also today, reports surfaced about the Gdrive online storage and backup service that Google is due to announce in short order (the company declined comment today). It looks like this service formalizes and featurizes the functionality the company already offers users of several other products including Google Docs, Google Video and Picasaweb online photo archive. Again, a welcome move from the author's point of view. Readers of Pop Impulse know that I gave it up to Google long ago, and am totally delighted with the results. There's a reason the company's shares are around $700. Google gets it. And, of course, they're not Microsoft.

Google kicks some Microsoft Ass

Google continues to surprise me. They so get it. I totally understand why the company's stock just passed the $700/share mark.

Microsoft's expensive investment in Facebook got a lot of press last week. So the prospect, raised in a commentary by John C. Dvorak in PC World, that Steve Balmer and crew were "duped" into making the high bid for Facebook is especially delicious. Early reports cited the ruffians from Redmond as having "won" the bidding war. Not. In a stroke of dissmisive brilliance, Google followed up the announcement by releasing their OpenSocial platform and API, signing up almost the whole A-list of serious web 2.0 players to their team including MySpace, and then; a day later, highlighting 3rd-party apps that were already coming in to support the environment. Slam-dunk. And so well done, it takes my breath away. Gives a lot of credence to Dvorak's point-on hunch. Now I admit I've got a dog in this fight. I watched quite helplessly during the late 80's as Microsoft crushed and consumed a number of my clients. Just ate em right up, with prejudice.

The high-tech industry would be far better off had Microsoft failed in attempts to stave off anti-trust constraints. But they were too big and too vocal an opponent for the Feds - who declined to break up the company when it made sense to do so. Now, the marketplace is taking care of that piece of business. And let me go on the record right now: Google has already won, and Microsoft has lost - regardless of their recently reported profit from forcing Vista down the throats of their closest partners. And the GooglePhone, which promises to change the model for wireless voice communication forever, hasn't even hit yet. The anticipation for that launch is palpable and growing.

The world is moving, as well it should, to open systems and web-based software, storage and communications services. It's a good thing. Google gets that, and is facilitating the migration - making itself invaluable in every area of web 2.0 (and beyond) in the process. It's has the air of inevitability about it at this point. Microsoft's continuing relevance to this process is not clear, and certainly not inevitable as in the past.

I've posted about Google Apps before, here. I use many of Google's useful services, including: iGoogle, Google Apps, AdWords, Blogger, Picasaweb, Google Earth, Google Maping, Google Check-out, Google Page Creator and Google Alerts. What's really cool is that by combining the free and efficient services in creative configurations I can actually architect and build my own personal system, dashboard and communications platform from a single point. I love this stuff. And if you've still got confidentially worries, there's always the Open Office Suite running on the latest Ubuntu rev. as a viable Microsoft alternative. As the various flavors of Linux mature, developers respond with more applications and Open Systems gain market share. The ultimate effect of this trend seems pretty obvious to me. And I'm sure the scenario is creating indigestion on the fabled Microsoft campus. An image I confess to enjoying.

Google's Blogger Play Rocks

Google's new Blogger Play widget for your Google home page is surprisingly fun and way addictive. If you're not already using Google as your home page, you should be IMNSHO. If you are, you can easily add the Google Play widget. Just go here. The widget auto-loads and displays images that are being uploaded, right now, to blogs all over the planet. In Google's words, "You can watch the blogs go by..." And of course, there are hundreds of millions of blogs at this point. If you see a pic that arouses your curiosity, you can simply click on the image and the parent blog loads in a new window. Way fun, very addictive. I've gotten lost surfing for thirty-minutes at a time.

Global Warming - Street View & New Software

While the most senior White House aide since Reagan (interesting juxtaposition) is declared a felon and sentenced to 30 months in prison, president Bush is in Europe trying to convince a skeptical public and colleagues in the G8 that he is serious about finally recognizing global warming and doing something about it. He's not, of course. Not this president. He's all about image and PR, sticking to his reactionary guns, and never listening to advice that doesn't come to him from his trusted inner circle of yes-men and yes-women. So his conversion is immediately suspect.

We are well advised to critically examine what Bush is actually doing while he's posturing for the press. One recent revelation puts his conversion in some perspective. While he calls for new "studies" (god forbid we should have actual emission targets), his administration is practically eliminating the country's ability to track global warming with its array of weather satellites. Now that's intuitive, don't you think? Give me a break. Check out James Hrynyshyn's great post on the subject here. This president is all about oil, coal, consumerism and he's more than willing to live with the consequences.

The Germans appear to have him figured out. Der Speigel calls attention to "The Emperor's Green Clothes" here. And speaking about Germany, the same source has a fantastic article about what really is possible. A farming village collects its waste products, converts them to methane for power, then transfers the resulting heat to a variety of local settlements for free or very low cost. Read about it here.

Another controversy appears to be unfolding around Google's new Street View app. I know I'm coming late to this, following posts on Boing Boing and a firestorm of opinions, comments and net conversations. I submit, however, that the focus of these conversations is misplaced. Street View is not the issue, the images are in not in real time and the convenience of having 3-D views of areas mapped is profound. Again, Google is very good at balancing access to data with reasonable privacy concerns. They've built-in flagging capabilities and have a very easy procedure for removing offending images. The real issue here is around privacy in the digital age, the utter loss of anonymity and the ability of large commercial concerns to build deep profiles and share intimate personal data about customers. The National Academy of Science explores the issue here. So let's leave Google alone and take a look at the Pentagon, large corporate data-mining practices and archives, and the kind of "interception" that may be employed to grab our email correspondence, net-surfing patterns and personal data without our knowledge or permission.

Finally, some real competition for Microsoft Office and the new Google online office apps. Robert Scoble's post first attracted my attention to Zoho and their new suite of surprisingly robust office apps. Check out this hot new desi company and their equally hot software.

Virtual Berlin

Whoa. Berlin has gone virtual. Germany's famed capital can now be viewed in stunning, user navigable 3-D on Google Earth through this link. You can even click your way through the Brandenburg Gate or wander into the Reichstag. Check it out. Now think of the possibilities. Virtual shops where real vendors are located, for example. This is some cool stuff. And the Berliners beat their cross-regional rivals in the City of Hamburg to the punch. I posted about the Hamburg project and their promise, now unfulfilled, to be the first 3-D metropolis on Google Earth almost a month ago. Props to Berlin.

Google Offers Web Apps

Today, Google announced the availability of a web-based, premium suite of office applications targeted to businesses. For a flat, $50 fee per user, per year, the zero-footprint software can be rapidly scaled up or down - depending on business needs and personnel configurations. The trend toward rich Internet applications coupled with the emergence of techniques like Ajax, could threaten the market share and strategic directions of Microsoft - which has just shipped Vista with a new suite of office applications at a much higher pricing point. While Intel continues to rely on founder Gordon Moore's model of ever bigger, ever faster microprocessors; companies like IBM are experimenting with a new breed of CPU that is optimized for speed and efficiency, rather than raw computing power. What kind of environment suits such a chip? Web-based computing and communications that wraps across multiple platforms. Investors bold enough to include tech stocks in their portfolios would be well-served to take a look at which companies they hold that are well-positioned to benefit from this new, Internet-driven direction, and which ones still don't "get it."

Related Anecdote: I once worked with the greatest writer of serial communication drivers on the planet. That's all he did, serial communications. He was so good that a major chip maker, that will remain un-named, contracted with his home-based consultancy for a lot of their really difficult driver work. He told me on one occasion that he received a spec. for some really bloated code that provided the necessary functionality in the clunkiest, most inelegant way possible. Thinking the spec. was in error, he called his contact - only to be reminded rather abruptly that his host was in the business of selling ever-more-powerful processors to folks who really thought they needed them. "Write the driver just as it was specified," concluded the conversation. Surprised? I didn't think so.

Viacom Gives Joost a Boost

After exiting YouTube with noisy complaints, media giant Viacom has joined studio-legend Paramount Pictures at Joost, according to a company press release dated the 20th. Hello, big news for media mavens. Joost has some serious horsepower behind it, including the founders of Skype and Kazaa. And some considerable horsepower requirments at the moment. Those without major bandwidth need not apply. And, of course, Joost is still in beta. That didn't stop Viacom, Paramount and others from signing on. So I'm guessing we'll see an iTV from Apple sometime soon, as the battle for the high ground in the new digital media world intensifies on the content, hardware and distribution fronts. For users, this will take internet protocol TV up a notch. It's a win for Joost, and arguably a loss for YouTube parent GOOGLE.

AdWords Adventures

I've posted before about neural marketing and the online buzz machinery. Part of the process of building a "Borat Buzz" around the Bijou property has been a couple of Google AdWords campaigns we're running. For the crew of producers, myself included, this is a new experience.

Of course we'd been reading about the new marketing communications paradigm, and the price of Google's common stock reinforces the expected success of the model. After several months of experience, we heartily concur. AdWords rule. That's all there is to it. End of story.

My friend John Fricker, an IT guy at Musician's Friend and the former technical genius behind Southern Oregon Magazine (online version), originally hooked me up with AdWords. He forwarded me a backgrounder outlining how he had used the service to "purchase" the name of our local congressman during the last election cycle. He then used his key-word purchase to reach about 20 thousand potential voters with his message for under 30 bucks. I was impressed, and wanted to know all the details.

Google makes it easy. After reading John's primer, the tutorials, FAQs and some forum chatter, I designed a campaign around two simple text ads that feature some of the show's strongest image and identity messages, paired with the URL for the project blog. Our initial goal was to just get the project name back out in the market. Our moniker, Matinee at the Bijou, is not unknown - as the show was on PBS for eight years, five consecutively, in the 80s. So we wanted to get that back out in play as aggressively as possible on a tight budget.

That highlights the fact that an AdWords campaign is perhaps as effective a public relations tool as an advertising vehicle. We're certainly using AdWords in that manner, as part of a multi-layered approach. AdWords also play an important, though non-traditional role, in the neural marketing construct that I proposed in an earlier post.

Here's how it works. Once on the net, making connections and actually "using" those connections, then getting them to work independently on their own, is what feeds buzz. AdWords, the impressions they make and the click-throughs they generate, are nodes in the neural system - generating "use" and strengthening connections. That's a very good thing.

The Bijou project is using AdWords campaigns to: (1) build visibility; (2) develop awareness and context; (3) anchor key images and messages; and, (4) call fans to action.

We've learned that Google offers two models for purchasing AdWords: keyword-based campaigns; and, site-based campaigns. Additionally, with key-word campaigns, Google offers both "search engine" placement and "content network" placement. Google's content network consists of all sites that utilize Google companion communication product, AdSense. For example, our Bijou is Back blog site has three "content network" Google ads. Our own ad graces the pages of sites that are thematically related to our message. Works so fine. In fact, if one's own site has the traffic, it is not inconceivable that the AdSense ad revenue generated will partially or completely cover the expenses of an AdWords campaign. Now that would be elegant indeed. Just the possibility seems to be a powerful motivator.

AdWords can also be deployed in a variety of user-defined configurations. One can select specific metropolitan statistical areas, specific pages on which ads are to be displayed, specific sites, the list seems to be quite extensive. What a concept.

The bidding piece seems to be daunting for some. That is, one makes a minimum "bid" to purchase key words. The bid is for a minimum Cost per Click (CPC). Remember, there is PR value for simple viewer "impressions," but only click-throughs cost. For site-specific campaigns, one bids on CPM. The Google system defaults to a suggested minimum bid, and learning the system (and the tricks of the trade) is not complicated. Further, the system alerts customers when key-words become inactive, and offers the opportunity to raise one's bid - or not. Adding or deleting words, activating or pausing the campaigns, checking on status, pricing and monitoring costs is all so easy and intuitive just about anyone can master it. And that's just what the Googlies had in mind. We check our account several times a day and on weekends to fine-tune our campaigns.

Google also understands what constitutes value added services. The Big-G nerd patrol provides a bevy of on-line resources, a useful blog and access to robust analytics. Data. We're talking lots of quality data presented in a number of useful ways. I love the metrics. One can measure everyfreakingthing. My colleagues are very impressed with the numbers, charts, graphs and reporting capabilities of our programs. Makes the program manager look like a star, for sure.

At this writing, we've had 734,000 impressions and 518 click-throughs - gross. With the reporting capabilities of AdWords, the data becomes much more granular. As a result, we're seeing rate and amplitude increases in traffic at our blog, some additional subscribers at our YouTube pages, an increase in comment frequency and we're thinking the buzz is building. I'll have more to report on that later.