Open The Dialogue

Via The Disney Blog comes what is the first instance I've seen of an actual back-and-forth (at least as much as is possible) relating to a story that's happening using the new comment feature on Google News.

Last week a study came out from The University of Washington's Institute for Learning and Brain Science relating to language development in toddlers and how it might be impacted by videos such as Disney's Baby Einstein series. This resulted in a number of headlines in the mainstream press as well as the online world. But now the two parties, the study's authors and the Disney company. Disney wants the study retracted since it didn't actually include any looks at the Baby Einstein videos and so it feels its being wrongly labeled as contributing to toddlers who can't make with the usage that is good of the words.

I'm going to make this point again: Why is this something Google had to think of? Why isn't the news media either 1) Getting their facts straight in the first place (I know - but I had to say it) or 2) Doing this kind of thing on their own site? "Here's the story as we've reported it. Click here for participant reaction." Barring that sort of media buy-in, this is very much the sort of thing that could be covered on a corporate blog, where executives could weigh in with a company point of view on a story related to them.

Seeing this comment function in action also makes it seem to me like a very clunky tool. The reactions seem to be tied, in some cases, to a particular version of the story. One of the comments from Disney is labeled as being a response to the Time Magazine story. Good idea, but why so specific? And what does this accomplish that, if the party in question has a blog of their own, wouldn't be achieved by adding some sort of trackback functionality?

As John Frost at The Disney Blog says, this is now another outlet for corporations and their agencies to monitor, but with the no-spiders rule and other problems with automated tracking it's not exactly easy to do.

Posted by Chris Thilk at 11:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Google News has announced it will begin including comments on the stories it links to. These won't be comments from readers or trackbacks in the way we've come to define them in the blog world, but limited to the subjects of the story in question. This allows those people to add their additional perspective on a story that might not have been possible through the couple of quotes selected by the writer.

A major move? Absolutely, but not necessarily for the obvious reasons.

Google in the past has positioned News as something that's just an aggregator. Every time Google has responded to jittery news organizations who say they're stealing content and subsequent ad revenue Google says "No, we're actually pointing more people to your site" by just showing a headline and an abstract. And they've been right.

But this neatly lifts out the news organization from the user experience. This is something that brings the reader right back to Google or prompts them to never leave in the first place.

It seems to me that this wouldn't even be an issue if news sites did a little more innovating - and I don't include adding video as innovation. I mean what if a news site put up a story just like before but then allowed room for participants to add comments right there? Or put up the whole text of an interview online for readers to peruse on their own? Seems like both of those would add to the value of the site and to the engagement (read: time of visit, the all-important ad metric) on that site.

Someone asked what kind of impact this is going to have on us as public relations professionals. I don't actually think it's that much of a new thing for PR folks, at least not in and of itself. If we've worked with our clients to develop a sensible online strategy, including how to respond to blog postings, problematic Wikipedia entries and such than this is just an extension of that. It's something else to keep in the back of your mind. Same best practice guidelines exist, at least to my mind.

LATER UPDATE: Seems Google has disallowed spiders from crawling the comments content, setting off a firestorm of charges of hypocrisy. Those are somewhat warranted, especially since Google News is kind of, you know, built on a foundation of spiders. The fact that Google's first foray into content creation is inaccessible to search engines should not be overlooked by anyone who covers the media space.

Posted by Chris Thilk at 01:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've been using Writely, the online word processing program, for a while now. I love having all - or at least most of the functionality of a word processing program online. Earlier this year Writely was bought by Google and then a couple weeks ago they finally integrated with the Google accounts of its users. But that didn't change much about the look and feel of the system.

Until today. This morning when I went to writely.com it redirected to docs.google.com. All my documents were there, just as they had been, along with the Google Spreadsheets I had in my account. This is just the sort of integrated functionality I've been looking for from Google since I can now access my Calendar, Docs and Picasa photos all from the Gmail page I open as soon as I sit down at the computer.

Great move by Google to make sure their features are as easy to use as possible. As more of us spend out entire days online using Web 2.0-ish apps this a handy way to put everything Google offers in one convenient place.

Posted by Chris Thilk at 08:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Well it's official. After a few days of speculation (which seem like an eternity if measured in number of RSS feed refreshes) Google has paid $1.65 billion for YouTube, the largest acquisition the search-focused company has made to date. YouTube will retain its staff as well as its brand name.

I'll be honest with everyone here and say out loud that this deal never made sense to me from the moment it was first speculated on. Google has a video sharing site already, even if it falls far short in usability and popularity from YouTube. For Google to let the site exist as its own independent brand does little for the Google brand name in terms of added value and, considering that, it seemed like an adversely large responsibility to take on. I know that YouTube has vast and as yet untapped potential for making money but I never really bought that search ads would be enough to really make this purchase worth it. It might pay for itself in four or five year, as Jason Calacanis, but can any of us predict what the media landscape will look like at that point?

I've even been thinking about it for days now and I still don't see the advantages for Google in this deal. The only things they've just bought themselves, to my thinking, are more work for their servers and their copyright attorneys. Google must see the upside in this but it's eluding me. It will be interesting to see how this partnership develops over the next few months. Will AdSense ads pop up on every page? Will Google Video disappear? Will this mean more sponsored "channels" on YouTube? Only time will tell and I'll be anxious to be shown how this plays out.

Posted by Chris Thilk at 04:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Let's talk a little bit about transparency - not necessarily in the sense of "not hiding" something - when it comes to companies using blogs and other Web presences to get the word out about things. Something I've come to appreciate more and more is when people are just honest and forthcoming about things that people think about on their own. In this post from Monday night over at the Google Talk blog, software engineer Jon Perlow owns up to the fact that the way users of the software are notified of users coming on/off of the network, moving from idle to available, and other changes "can be a lot better."

It's not so much that they've even done anything, but in some ways it's more about doing things like keeping your boss apprised of projects you're working on - even those that are behind the eight ball - before s/he hits you up asking what the status is. Perlow didn't need to come out and say this, but he did. And that's just pretty cool IMHO.

Posted by Tom Biro at 09:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Just a few weeks ago, we all learned about Google Base, the search company's entry into the mass indexing market (which basically has one player - them). Just a few days ago, on the Google Base blog, Gavin wrote about yet another amazing feat (and I use feat, not feature, intentionally) that the service brings - the ability to drive traffic to your brick-and-mortar store's door - by combining the existing Froogle shopping search with Base.

Posted by Tom Biro at 09:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)