tech-ed collisions

Google's view on ISP filtering

Maybe I should rename my blog to 'Google Watch' or something like that because I often find myself commenting on them. Anyway, here's their view on the proposed ISP filtering. My first reaction was it's great to see a measured response on what is a very heated subject for many. We seem to hear lots of views expressed about the Government's heavy handedness approach in this area and how its easy to play the child safety line (after all, who can possibly argue against that). Looking at Google's views though, without all the emotion that you see in other posts, it does seem that the government is going beyond that of other Western democracies. I just hope this isn't the thin end of the wedge. Education, as often stated, is the answer, not the type of regime that could find its way in if this approach is expanded.

Filed under  //   Google   Internet  

Google's real time search

Well it was only a matter of time really. Here's a nice video of Google'e real time search: In the past I have talked about searching the past and the present, drawing a distinction between traditional search engines,which basically crawl 'historical' content (even though it may have been created quite recently, and searches on services like Twitter, which capture what people are thinking or experiencing 'now' (or pretty dammed closed to it anyway). These services have highlighted a bit of a challenge to the old search engines but obviously one that the engineers etc over at Google were up for. Cheers

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Filed under  //   Google   search  

The Google Chrome OS Bombshell - the fallout extends beyond Microsoft and Apple

Sometimes big things happen on the other side of the world while we peacefully sleep through our night. Of course at that time it is daytime in the busiest and most influential parts of the world so it is with interest that we open up our newsreaders bleary eyed first thing in the morning while reaching for a coffee or tea to start the day. So when I powered up my computer this morning and it slowly booted and I eventually managed to connect to my network then start up a browser, a steady feed of posts about the Google Chrome OS started to fill up my screen. Intrigued, I just thought I'd go straight to the Google blog and see what they had to say. Sure enough, there it was - must be a big week at Google after all Gmail came out of Beta after five years just the day before! Anyway, back to the announcement - is this really going to be a big thing? After all I was less than impressed with Chrome as it wouldn't run on my Mac when it first came out and I had to find a PC to test it (still waiting for that email from Google about a Mac version eight months on). Well perhaps it is if you look at some of the commentary. The obvious target for speculation is Microsoft and Windows 7. The ZDNet blog has an interesting analysis on how Google is going after Windows with the launch of this Web OS. They note the push from Google on the promotion of cloud computing:

Google, which has long been singing the praises of cloud-based applications, is stepping up its game to bring the cloud to the mainstream.
Some interesting views over at TechCrunch. From MG Seigler:
..But let’s be clear on what this really is. This is Google dropping the mother of bombs on its chief rival, Microsoft. It even says as much in the first paragraph of its post, “However, the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web.” Yeah, who do you think they mean by that? And it’s a genius play. So many people are buying netbooks right now, but are running WIndows XP on them. Windows XP is 8 years old. It was built to run on Pentium IIIs and Pentium 4s. Google Chrome OS is built to run on both x86 architecture chips and ARM chips, like the ones increasingly found in netbooks. It is also working with multiple OEMs to get the new OS up and running next year. Obviously, this Chrome OS will be lightweight and fast just like the browser itself. But also just like the browser, it will be open-sourced....
For a different view by John Biggs at CrunchGear:
ChromeOS is a specialized version of Linux designed for netbooks. It is more like Android than anything else and, as Fake Steve notes, no one will use it. Oh, manufacturers will pay lip service to it and maybe someone will install it on a few million machines but it will be a drop in the bucket compared to the powerful web OSes called Windows 7 and OS X. ChromeOS, like Android, is a bargaining chip. OEMs can wave ChromeOS in Microsoft’s face and reduce they price they have to pay per PC for installing Windows. It won’t work, but they’ll try. Die-hard Linux users will stick with Linux and the average consumer, when presented with Chrome, will ask where the Start menu went.
And then MG Siegler also has a look on the impact for Apple. It seems that Apple operates in slightly different markets and is less likely to feel the impact. So, given these thoughts from prominent blog(ger)s, I thought it more appropriate for me to speculate in a narrower area, that of education. Netbooks seem to be grabbing the attention of education departments at the moment. They are great entry level devices and pricewise probably represent the best alternatives for getting ICT into the classroom and to each student. Most probably run XP (I am guessing but that seems to make sense), an operating system that was designed for a different time if you read some of the blogs that I have linked to above. Many are locked down and Internet access is very tightly controlled and filtered. In this way departments aim to exercise their duty of care and at the same time educate their students in an ICT enabled environment. What does this mean for the Web OS? Everything is in the cloud - applications, services, content, collaborators, friends and anything else worthwhile you can think of are pulled from the cloud. Does the Web OS have a place in education and if so what will that environment look like? Will departments need to reconsider the way they deploy their SOEs and if so what will they look like? Is the Web Os compatible with long established thinking on deploying ICT into the classroom. We have been talking about cloud services for a while now but what does this next step in the evolution of computing mean for education? I don't have the answers but it would have been nice to just power on my computer this morning and not wait an interminably long time for it to boot and then gradually start the programs that I needed to commence working. That promise of instant access sounds good, at least for a couple of minutes as I wait for my trusty Mac to get going - but then, when would I have chance to go and get my coffee?

Filed under  //   Google  
Posted July 9, 2009

Google vs Bing - which will you use?

My Twitter feed is starting to get a heap of activity about bing, Microsoft's new search engine, so I thought I better check it out. There's an interesting conversation going on over at Robert Scoble's friendfeed - must be great to have so many connections - but even with all the opinion going on, it's still good to kick the tyres yourself. On launching bing in my browser I was presented with a great image of Santorini and now I just want to go on holidays there. I tried a couple of searches and the first thing I noticed was the speed - its 'google-like'! It's also great to have a nice, clean, simple search interface, unlike some of the horrendous offerings on some of the portals that are seen as competitors to Google. I have only tried a few searches so its hard to comment with authority on the quality of the search results but they seem generally ok in the same way that Google's are generally ok. Context is still an issue for these search engines. Try doing a search on 'bing' and you will see what I mean. At the time I tested Google seemed to have better search results for me than Bing did when I used 'bing' as the search term. Next thing I noticed was the lack of ads down the right side which was a big plus for me. However, that was when I searched for 'eportfolio', a keen interest of mine. When I then searched for 'bing' there was a sponsored link at the top of the search results, and it was for something totally irrelevant to me (sorry Bing Lee whoever you are and whatever you are trying to sell on eBay). Ads can be annoying but when they are totally irrelevant and in a prominent position they can be really irritating. Some work to do there I think - at least its all Beta so it has a ready made excuse. There is an attempt at providing some context through related search suggestions (down the left side) but no joy there at all for the afore mentioned 'bing' search if you are interested in Microsoft Bing. Google also has some really cool ways of displaying results now (discussed previously here) that Bing doesn't match. So what else does it offer? There are a number of links to other Microsoft related services such as Windows Live and ninemsn. The latter one is a bit of a turn-off for me as I really don't like using a search engine provided by a major (in this part of the world) traditional media outlet. This is one of the main reasons I don't use the local Yahoo! offering unless I am getting no joy on other search engines. When I compare the various menu options available from Google and Bing I probably get to the real reason why it will be difficult for me to switch search engines from Google to Bing. I am a user of a number of Google's other services and it is just too convenient for me to have Google as not just my default search engine, but my default home page in my browser. This is going to be a real challenge to Microsoft - how do you convince people to switch search engines to you when it's not just search that people are invested in? I guess if you are a Windows Live user then this decision would look quite different. Unfortunately for me at the moment there doesn't seem to be a really compelling reason to switch search engines but I am really hoping that someone, maybe Microsoft with Bing, can offer some serious competition in the search marketplace.

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Filed under  //   Google   search  
Posted June 1, 2009

'Wave' goodbye to email - Google Wave is on its way.

So this morning when I started up my computer and loaded its email client there was a small wave of emails about this thing called Google Wave. Something's happening over there at Google's developer's conference. It seems that in the keynote they have announced a new product/service called Google Wave. From the Google blog, we get the developer's story on Wave has evolved from an idea to where it is today. There is kind of an explanation on what it is - some kind of collaborative email (think like a cross between wiki, instant messaging and email and then throw in some rich text editing, multimedia embedding etc). SMH has a very brief article on it too that highlights the local (Australian) role in it - the developers. The O'Reilly blog has a much better description. On the O'Reilly blog there are some screenshots which help explain it a bit further. It looks like an interesting way of developing an idea collaboratively and potentially, very quickly which as O'Reilly points out, is a key feature of Google's services:

A key point here is that Google's relentless focus on reducing the latency of online actions is bringing the online experience closer and closer to our real world experience of face-to-face communication. When you're talking with someone, you know what someone is saying before they finish their sentence. You can respond, or even finish their sentence for them. So too with Wave. The real-time connectedness of Wave is truly impressive. Drop photos onto a wave and see the thumbnails appear on the other person's machine before the photos are even finished uploading.
Will it catch on? Not all Google's products instantly turn to gold (think Google Lively as a recent example) but they're out there trying and obviously have the resources to innovate in a way very few companies can match. One aspect of Wave that may help is that its all going to be open - open source, open protocols etc so any developers can grab it and start innovating, developing new services on top of it, competing with it (good luck) etc. On the area of real time editing and collaborating in email, I wonder what opportunities this creates for the spammers - imagine spam popping up while you are editing your wave! I am sure that won't really be an issue but since its a Google service and revenue is derived from advertising, I can't say that I would be surprised if contextual advertising popped up in real time while you are collaborating on the wave (there has to be a business model somewhere). It would be interesting to put Wave into a classroom to see how teaching and learning can apply it. It has many of the features that students are already very familiar with and I believe they would very rapidly adapt to it and put it to some very interesting uses very quickly. Google will be putting up a video on http://wave.google.com very shortly - at the time of posting it is not yet available but maybe by the time I change tabs and hit the refresh button, it will already be there!

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Filed under  //   Google  
Posted May 29, 2009

Nice new search options from Google

Just the other day I was trying to find some reviews on a particular software product but was really only interested in quite recent ones. As the product in question has been around for some years there were plenty of reviews about it but I had a really difficult time finding recent ones with Google. When I got to work this morning and checked my Twitter feed I found an interesting tweet leading me in the direction of Google and their 'Searchology' event held this week. At the event they announced some new features including 'Search Options' and 'Rich Snippets'. Search options looks really interesting and provides some great ways of examing your search results and helps you get answers easily to questions like my above mentioned problem. The following video from Google provides a nice overview of all that this new feature does: As well as looking at recent results you can look at videos, forums and reviews. Results can be displayed in different ways such as visually or on a timeline (for me its interesting to look at the timeline search and compare it to how we have implemented a similar feature for one of our customers). Rich Snippets looks interesting in that they:

extract and show more useful information from web pages than the preview text that you are used to seeing. For example, if you are thinking of trying out a new restaurant and are searching for reviews, rich snippets could include things like the average review score, the number of reviews, and the restaurant's price range"
Rich snippets rely on other webpages using microformats and RDF to provide information to Google. Nice to see them looking at open and existing specifications here. For our own benefit, I think we will need to have a look at how this feature can enhance the services we provide for ourselves and our customers.

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Filed under  //   Google   search  
Posted May 15, 2009

Is Google my ePortfolio? (revisited)

Quite some time ago (way back in June 2007) I posed this question in a post and while the intent was never really to answer the question with a yes, but to highlight some of the features that are important to eportfolios and their owners, it's interesting to see that in some sort of manner, Google is now offering functionality that eportfolio owners would find useful. It has been possible to create a Google site for quite some time and call it your eportfolio (and many people do so very successfully). Just recently however, Google has released Google Profiles allowing you to create your own profile on Google and have it appear in Google search results. More information on the service can be found at the Google blog. I guess what's interesting or useful about this is that it does give you some control over what is displayed about you in a Google search results page when someone searches your name so you at least get one search result linking to something that you have created and hopefully it has a pretty good page rank. I haven't seen this yet - still working on my profile. So... one of the first things I went to do was to test out where I appear if I do a search. It seems to get a public profile you need to supply Google with quite a bit of information. A name, location and company is not enough. I got a message telling me that to have a public profile I need to supply more information. So I added a bit to the 'short bio' area and created a link to my work blog. For the moment this was all I wanted to be public in my profile. Still, this wasn't enough to satisfy Google. According to the blurb about Google profiles, it:

allows you to control how you appear on Google and tell others a bit more about who you are
and
You have control over what others see
What's not obvious is just how much information I have to add so that I can 'control' it. At the very least it would be nice to know what are the 'mandatory' bits of information I have to hand over or even what percentage complete I am (eg 70% would at least let me know that I am getting close to the threshold that they want). One interesting aspect of creating my profile is that Google had selected an image of me from somewhere and gave me the option of changing it. The interesting part of this is that while the image was me, it was not one (as far as I can tell, and I am pretty confident in that) that I use on my Google account. It seems to have sourced it from somewhere else and I would really like to know where. I know of three social networks where I use this image and none of them have anything to do with Google. This begs the question of permissions and rights and what exactly I have signed up to in all those networks. Those terms and conditions are far to voluminous and complex for most users to really understand but that's a whole other issue.

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Filed under  //   Google   eportfolio  

a great post from the Google Blog

If any of the following quotes interest you at all, you should really take the time to read this reasonably lengthy, but very compelling post from Jonathan Rosenberg, SVP, Product Management on the Google Blog:

  • we are in the midst of what is likely the worst economic situation of our lifetimes
  • Access to information has completed its journey from privileged to ubiquitous
  • All the world's information will be accessible from the palm of every person
  • More than three billion people have mobile phones, with 1.2 billion new phones expected to be sold this year
  • Our ongoing challenge is to create the perfect search engine
  • Why should a user have to ask us a question to get the information she needs?
  • Everyone can publish, and everyone will
  • 120K blogs are created daily — most of them with an audience of one
  • No one argues the value of free speech, but the vast majority of stuff we find on the web is useless
  • The Surui tribe in the Amazon rain forest uses Google Earth to mark the boundaries of their land and work with authorities to stop illegal logging
  • the vast majority of computing will occur in the cloud
  • the consumer market now gets the greatest innovations first
  • The real potential of cloud computing lies not in taking stuff that used to live on PCs and putting it online, but in doing things online that were previously simply impossible
  • Combining open standards with cloud computing will enable businesses to conduct commerce in brand new ways
  • As more people do more things online computer systems will have the opportunity to learn from the collective behavior of billions of humans
The post was originally an internal document for Googlers but was encouraged to be made public - Many, many thanks to those who thought this. Anyway, I encourage anyone who is interested at all in any of the above snippets from the post to go and have a read. Despite being orignally an internal document and drawing inspiration from President Barack Obama/Presidents Day in the USA, it has great relevance (excuse the pun) for many of us with an interest in search and related technologies.

Filed under  //   Google  

100,000 articles on knol - but do you know anyone who uses it?

Bit of a surprise this morning when I read from the Google blog that knol has reached the 100,000 'knols' milestone. It's only been six months since launch and I had forgotten all about it. I am not sure what surprised me most - that it had reached the milestone or that it is still around as it seems to have a low profile. At the time it came out I remember wondering how successful knol might be. Given the numbers that Google works with 100,000 seems like a small number but as this post from mashable points out, it seems to be tracking pretty well in growth (of published articles at least). The mischievous side of me can't help wondering what temptation there is over there to lift 'knols' presence in Google rankings - can't say I remember seeing any in Google searches to date.

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Filed under  //   Google  

My first post using Google Chrome

So this morning when I fired up my browser (Firefox) for the first time, Google's home page had changed again - yesterday the stump jump plough, today a whole new browser is available. I started to read about it yesterday on Google's blog and obviously there is a stack of posts all over the place now. Now, being a bit of a Web tragic, the first thing I had to do was download it and check it out for myself so I clicked on the link and off I went to the download page. Unfortunately for me there it was: "Google Chrome (BETA) for Windows" followed by a big button which said something like 'Sign up now' for news about Mac. Bummer! Not to be deterred, I quickly located a Windows machine and promptly downloaded Chrome and started it up. The user interface, well you just have to see it and judge for yourself. The first time its kind well...I don't know! The first task I thought of doing was to write a blog post and that is what I am doing while I am experimenting with it. The next thing you notice is it is blindingly fast! The performance seems to be fantastic. As I started writing my post (in Wordpress using the simple editor) I came to the point where I wanted to insert my first link and.. wait a second - where have all the editor buttons gone? Some stuff just isn't working yet. Ok, it's a beta version and Google seems to be following its philosophy of 'launch early and iterate' but having to code html tags in my blog posts is not something I am keen on. What did a link tag look like? So there is only one link in this post and that is all there is going to be because it's just a pain to do. I guess this post won't be picked up in too many places. As I write the post I am checking a few things so hit the new tab button and now things are starting to look interesting. On the 'new tab' page my history is starting to build up and I am getting a nice graphical display of my most visited pages and other history. The next thing I do is go to the home page but where is it? I can't find a button for it. This is interesting! Back to the Google Chrome site and I can see that there is information telling me that I have to set a home page before I get a button. Ok - here goes... and a little bit later its done (from the customise and control Google Chrome button select 'options' and away you go). But where's my home button? Back into the options and I can now see that it is a two step process - I have to set a home page and then tick a box to tell Chrome to display it. Now I have a home page button and I am happy. Old habits die hard and for the moment I just need a home page! Alright I have had enough playing with this new browser, what would make me want to use it? I can see why Google would like me to use it and Larry Dignan covers that in his blog on ZDNet (Oh no, now I have to code another link!). Here it is. The thing that immediately came to my mind was all the websites and services that I have trouble accessing because they require Internet Explorer. Recent examples for me include Vivaty and Google's own Lively (and I am not going to link to them). Why do they insist on developing them for IE? If Google could integrate all of its products (including Lively), I might be tempted. As I write this I am conscious that I should be checking what I am writing about so of I go to Lively and I find out that it will work in Firefox (woohoo) but not the platform I am currently on (Chrome). As I continue to navigate around I am still impressed with the speed of this browser however speed is not the only thing that counts - functionality is key too. I probably picked a poor task to do first but writing this post in Wordpress has really highlighted for me that there are some things in a browser that just must work in order for me to use it. I know its only BETA and as such, would be staying away from it in many educational settings but I can see that moving forwards, it has real potential. I look forward to the other half of the 'launch early and iterate' mantra! Cheers, Jerry

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Filed under  //   Google