Gray Dudek

This seriously satisfies the inner geek as it is a view from Google of their Container Data Centre which is just amazing. You get the feeling that the server farm is going to have to be pretty big but the intricacies that have had to go into designing the way the centre works, is cooled, is powered, etc is simply mind blowing.

So next you put a search into Google and it takes longer than 0.2secs you’ll have an appreciation of why the ‘internet’ might be a bit slow today…

Google CEO Eric Schmidt envisions a radically changed internet five years from now: dominated by Chinese-language and social media content, delivered over super-fast bandwidth in real time. Figuring out how to rank real-time social content is “the great challenge of the age,” Schmidt said in an interview in front of thousands of CIOs and IT Directors at last week’s Gartner Symposium/ITxpo Orlando 2009.

Gartner is the largest and most respected analyst firm in the world and much of what Schmidt said in his 45 minute interview was directed specifically at business leaders, but we’ve excerpted 6 minutes that we believe is of interest to anyone who’s touched by the web.

Highlighted comments include:

• Five years from now the internet will be dominated by Chinese-language content.
• Today’s teenagers are the model of how the web will work in five years – they jump from app to app to app seamlessly.
• Five years is a factor of ten in Moore’s Law, meaning that computers will be capable of far more by that time than they are today.
• Within five years there will be broadband well above 100MB in performance – and distribution distinctions between TV, radio and the web will go away.
• “We’re starting to make significant money off of Youtube”, content will move towards more video.
• “Real time information is just as valuable as all the other information, we want it included in our search results.”
• There are many companies beyond Twitter and Facebook doing real time.
• “We can index real-time info now – but how do we rank it?”
• It’s because of this fundamental shift towards user-generated information that people will listen more to other people than to traditional sources. Learning how to rank that “is the great challenge of the age.” Schmidt believes Google can solve that problem.

There’s lots more in the full 45 minutes of Schmidt’s interview, including a statement that a Google OS Netbook will be here in 2010, with HTML5 local caching for offline use.

That’s the roadmap, though, that’s guiding much of what Google is doing today. From Chrome OS to Google Social Search.

Shamefully distributed social networking, structured data, recommendations, presence data and other factors that could complicate Google’s plans were not discussed but the vision sounds very compelling!

[source - ReadWriteWeb]

So on Monday I received my Google Wave invite! Yeh I know I shouldn’t feel special as hundreds of thousands of people did but I can’t seem to find anyone else I know who received on direct. So for the moment I am gonna feel a little special.

That said, I logged in and straight away realised that the essence behind Google Wave is to Wave ‘with people’ so I went straight to the invite section and got some of my guys on board too.

And being a true social media prisoner I also Tweeted saying I would give out some invites to my followers if they DM’d me their email address – seemed only right.

I will write a full review in the coming weeks as will many others but I am going to come at from an advertising agency perspective as the the essence of any good ad’ agency is collaboration. In this way great ideas come to life so with this in mind surely Google Wave should be a godsend to all of us in the agencies?

Let’s see…

In the meantime if you know about Google Wave and just want to see a cool short vid’ about it have a look below. If on the other hand you have no idea what the hell I am talking about and wonder why you have even read this far down the article have a watch too.

As the video states, it’s only captured maybe 3.5% of what Google Wave can do but it’s one of THE most pertinent parts of it that will change the way we communicate today.

Google has quietly gotten rid of PageRank in Webmaster Tools. Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Round-table points to a thread featuring an explanation from Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Susan Moskwa.

“We’ve been telling people for a long time that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it’s the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true,” says Moskwa. “We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it.”

Search marketers are wondering why Google tells people not to focus on PageRank and removes it from Webmaster Tools, but still keeps it in the Google Toolbar. “Back in 2007, Google wanted feedback on removing PageRank from the Toolbar,” says Schwartz. “I felt it was a good idea but the idea died out. Google cannot remove PageRank from the Toolbar, it is too much of their branding. No matter how much Matt Cutts and the Google search quality and webmaster trends team want it removed, I cannot see Google’s executives allowing it.”

Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim says the role of PageRank has been reduced to nothing more than a “comfort blanket for SEO Noobs.” He adds, “I say this, with a high degree of confidence that most experienced SEOs pour over the data in Google Webmaster Tools, whereas those new to the industry likely let the toolbar be their only guiding light.”

He also notes, however, that PageRank data can still be useful. For example, it can be a good indicator of a site’s behavior in Google’s index. “Any green means ‘go.’ No green, means there’s something to investigate,” says Beal.

Despite this usefulness though, Moskwa pretty much closes the case on Google’s position on it. In fact, she even points to a FAQ page about crawling, indexing, and ranking, which says that webmasters shouldn’t even bother thinking about it. It also says that PageRank is just one of over 200 signals that can affect how your site is crawled, indexed, and ranked.