Entries Tagged 'Google' ↓
April 17th, 2008 — Google, Vanderbilt
Vanderbilt designers converged today from all corners of campus for a first-ever meeting and lunch. I wouldn’t have made the cut, but fortunately the graphic artist at the Cancer Center, the same wonderful person who designed the gray-haired lady featured on this blog’s banner, urged me to come. I’m so glad I did, even if it did give me a slight Alice-in-Wonderland feeling.
I’m used to geeks, and while there was a healthy sprinkling of them too, the predominant theme was art. At one point they started talking favorite Pantones. I was proud to even know they were talking about color. And many of them can draw! One used to be a courtroom artist. Wow.
Even more amazing, over a one hour lunch they decided to set up both a listserv and blog, and by quitting time today, both were in place. Zoom….
If you are a Vanderbilt employee, you can get to the blog here: Vanderbilt Designers Blog. One challenge it creates: I follow blogs via Google Reader, but it doesn’t support password-protected ones. I’m not sure how it will unfold, but I certainly do admire the pluck of these artists willing to dive right into Web 2.0.
April 3rd, 2008 — Google, Nashville
Oh my stars has this been a week for little ole’ Nashville. A week ago Google announced that we are now included in their Street View, and today The Tennessean said that Trader Joe’s is coming.
To celebrate this august confluence of events, here are a few street views near-and-dear to my heart.
March 21st, 2008 — Google
This one is for Daisy, who wants a local newsfeed without all the sports. What happened is she added the RSS feed of a local paper she likes to her Google Reader, was inundated with articles that didn’t interest her, and got disgusted.
Step 1. Go to Google News.
Step 2. Scroll down a little and on the right you should see a box something like this:
Step 3. Enter the city, state or zip code of you preferred geographic location
Step 4. The local news will now appear in this section of the main Google News page. Click on its header, which should be a link along the lines of “Nashville, TN, USA.” At this point you could just click on the RSS link in the left margin and subscribe, but take a minute to fine tune.
Step 5. Scan the stories to see types you aren’t interested in. Me? I’m not too interested in NASCAR.
Step 6. At the top of the page, just to the right of the main search box, is small text reading, “Advanced news search.” Click on that.
Step 7. Note that the result retains your city, state or zip. Go to the “without the words” field and enter the terms you’re not interested in: NASCAR, murder, basketball, whatever…. Press enter, and voila, news without the bits you want to avoid.
Step 8. Now click on the RSS link in the left margin and subscribe to the results in Google Reader. You now have a NASCAR-free news feed.
March 4th, 2008 — Google
[Continuing on with Part 3 in brief series on Google Sites, this post veers in a more technical direction.]
In the bevy of early articles that came out last week, a point that was made repeatedly is that Google Sites has similarities to Microsoft’s Sharepoint. As Michael Arrington noted in TechCruch, “Google’s Management Director of Enterprise Matthew Glotzbach called the combined products under Google Apps a ‘Microsoft Sharepoint killer.’”
I’m bothered by this language. It’s true that both are web tools for collaboration, and the Apps suite is more directly in MS’s path than Google usually is. However, having worked quite a bit with Sharepoint in the past, I have to say the two seem worlds apart to me. Sharepoint is based in the old model, where IT is the center of the digital information universe. Sites is based in the new model, where end users are the center of their own digital information universe. Sharepoint typically costs thousands of dollars to deploy. Sites is free. Sharepoint takes a lot to learn. Sites is a breeze. And so on.
So to me it feels not so much like a direct blow as an Aikido move, using the momentum of the opponent to one’s own advantage. Sharepoint can get up and lumber on in its own proprietary, IT-centric mode, while the smaller, more agile and crowd-pleasing Google Sites takes a bow.
March 3rd, 2008 — Church, Google
[Continuing my brief series on Google Sites.]
The best thing about Google Sites is that you don’t have to be a webmaster or IT person to set it up and use it — plus it’s free. Not only that, a web-based collaboration tool hasn’t been readily available to most people before now. I can’t wait to recommend it to some groups I’ve helped build websites for. However, there are other Web users whom I’ll advise to steer clear. It’s not for everyone.
Who Can Make Great Use of Google Sites?
Small Non-Profits. It’s easy to imagine organizations like Gilda’s Club and RASAC building very useful intranets for themselves with Google Sites.
Churches. The observant might have noticed the picture in my first post was of an intranet for my church. To start with, I’m setting up a separate site for each committee that wants one and then tying them together in a central site. I’m particularly excited about rolling it out to our Stewardship Committee, which is knee deep in pie-charts, calendars, newsletter articles and so on. It will be very helpful to have most of this stuff in one easy-to-access place.
Small Businesses. Google has a helpful example of what this might look like.
Who Should Think Twice?
Individuals. This is a tool for collaboration and internal communication. It’s not really meant for an individual’s personal website.
Healthcare. While the sites do use a secure https connection, I couldn’t find any assurance that Google Sites are HIPAA-compliant.
Large business and organizations. I can imagine it working well for larger organizations in time — but not yet. There’s not enough substance or malleability to make it a good choice yet. The potential is enormous, however. I’m looking forward to watching Sites grow.
March 2nd, 2008 — Google
Last week there were dozens of reviews of Google Sites, a brand new addition to their Applications suite. Yet, as I went through article after article, I couldn’t find the answers I wanted. My big questions….
What is it? And who can best use it for what? Other related questions I couldn’t find answers to included is it yet another Content Management System, will it work for non-techies and is it any good? Eventually it became obvious that I’d just have to try it out. And that’s what I’ve been doing this weekend.
30 hours into this, I can see why others have trouble defining it. While the name is “Sites,” it’s not an all-purpose website authoring tool. It’s more of a website niche tool — albeit it a big niche. The niche is using the web for collaboration, particularly for projects and work groups. Google says it’s for easy creation of team websites. For example, it could be a terrific tool for co-authors, an illustrator and editors to use in managing the production of a book. Or a small business could use it as an intranet — making announcements, keeping a general calendar, and gathering boilerplate or template files in one place.
In its current early form it’s set up to do eight things.
1. Share internally. While you can open your site up to the world, it’s designed particularly for people with the same email address to use together. Typically this means a small business email address — not a large organization like vanderbilt.edu and certainly not generic email accounts like comcast.net and gmail.com.
2. Add simple web pages. You don’t have to know HTML to do this. It’s much like adding pages to a blog.
3. Gather related files into a page (called a “file cabinet”). This strikes me as one of Site’s most useful features. It’s easy to imagine ways to gather documents, spreadsheets, PowerPoints, graphics, and other file formats in one place defined by the project at hand.
4. Integrate announcements into the site. You can have a page of announcements and then display summaries with links on the home page.
5. Add Google Gadgets. The plethora of Google Gadgets available for iGoogle is available to a Google Site too. This opens up lots of possibilities for designing Google Gadgets to use collaboratively.
6. Create lists to track projects.
7. Integrate with other Google Apps. The other “apps” typically include documents, calendar, and chat.
8. Search the site the way only Google can do.
Technically, the software used to write this was a Wiki. But thank heavens they don’t intimidate people by saying that anywhere in Google documentation. Even better, it doesn’t use any of those peculiar Wiki markups. So in my opinion it’s not a Wiki, even if it once was.
You might have noticed I haven’t answered all of my own questions yet. I will do that in upcoming posts, as I continue to pick apart the who, what, how and why of Google Sites.
February 14th, 2008 — Google
I’ve been using Comcast for my primary email account for about eight years, but a month ago I finally decided to switch to Gmail. The last straw was when poetry written by dear friend was blocked. Of course that wasn’t the only reason. They’d been mounting
My reasons were:
- Better spam filtering. Gmail puts what it guesses is junk in a folder you can easily review.
- IMAP is an option. This is particularly helpful if you have an iPhone or similar device. A POP account that you look at on both your computer and your iPhone is a big pain, since you have to touch everything twice.
- No need to backup. I suppose if you have super-important email you might want to back up even Gmail. It is fallible, but it’s nothing compared to the fallibility of email archives on an aging hard drive.
- Great search engine. Combining Google search know-how and email is to die for.
- Multiple email accounts. I still get my Comcast email. It’s just coming into Gmail. You can set Gmail up to fetch up to five POP email accounts. In fact you can set it so it replies from the same email address.
All in all, this is the easiest email migration I’ve ever done. And I’m getting my friend’s poetry again.
January 30th, 2008 — Google
Google is astonishing. The latest wonder I happened across is their experimental timeline search.
They give some great examples on their intro page. The Civil Rights Movement particularly appealed to this Unitarian Universalist, though I can’t help but wonder if a UU wasn’t behind this set, since the first is Thomas Jefferson.
To do one of your own, all that’s required is adding “view:timeline” to a regular Google entry. Here are some of the timeline searches I tried.
Such fun. I certainly hope timeline is a keeper.
