Designing Large-Scale Retrieval Systems at Google – Jeff Dean from 2009

Starting to tackle the topic of Big Data. And the place I’m starting is two videos from a few years back, where Google’s Jeff Dean discusses the architecture of large-scale retrieval systems at Google. Here’s the first video, from March 2009:

Vodpod videos no longer available.

And here’s the second video from August 2008:

For more on the topic of Big Data, please see the following articles:

• Jeff Jonas: Big Data is the Next Big Thing – TechCrunch TV, October 2010
• Making sense of big data – PWC Technology forecast, Issue 3 2010
• A conversation with IBM’s Mr. Big Data – InfoWorld, February 2011

glenn

Marketing in the Age of Google – Vanessa Fox on Search Marketing

Vanessa Fox wrote a very nice book that was published in May 2010 titled Marketing in the Age of Google. The book talks about the importance of Search Marketing in the age of Google, focusing specifically on organic search (as opposed to paid search). You can listen to Vanessa talk about her latest book in the interview below:

The following book reviews are also worth checking out:

• Marketing in the Age of Google: Vanessa Fox Interview – Online Marketing Blog, January 2010
• Vanessa Fox Spills the Google Beans in Marketing in the Age of Google – September 2010

In the following interview at the O’Reilly Where 2.0 2010 conference, Fox speaks to the many ways people search for Local Businesses on the Web.

With the emergence/growth of Google Places, Facebook Places, Facebook Marketplace, Foursquare, Groupon, Social Commerce, and local mobile technology generally, understanding the various ways that your local business can be found on the web (and mobile/social web) will critical for SMEs.

I highly recommend Marketing in the Age of Google for anyone involved in Marketing strategy.

glenn

Google Local Search Relevance & Ranking – video overview

A nice 3-1/2 minute overview of how Google ranks local information – the 3 main relevance/ranking factors: (i) relevance, (ii) prominence, and (iii) distance. Here’s the video:

The video also provides a brief overview of 3 Google local ad products: Hotpot, Tags, and Boost. For an introduction to Google’s Hotpot local recommendation engine, see the video below:

glenn

The Open Social Web – OpenSocial and other emerging standards

There were some nice presentations on the open, social web delivered at Google I/O 2010 in May. My favorite was Chris Messina’s presentation titled The Open and Social Web, which can be viewed below:

After viewing the above video, I came across the following video from Google I/O 2008 titled OpenSocial: A Standard for the Social Web:

It presents a nice overview of what OpenSocial is all about (or was all about at its birth in 2008), and the motivation behind its development.

As Chris Messina discusses in his Google I/O 2010 presentation, Google’s work on open social standards extends beyond just OpenSocial standards – including OpenID, OAuth, WebFinger and Salmon, but the principle of the thing – open social web standards – is the same.

glenn

Hyperlocal – Core Dimensions (Part 2)

This is the third in a series of posts on key dimensions of Hyperlocal. Other posts in this series are:

• HyperLocal – a Framework
• Hyperlocal – Core Dimensions (Part 1)
• Hyperlocal – Key Technologies

In the previous post, we explored the dimensions of Hyperlocal News and Commerce. In this post, we will explore Local Advertising and Hyperlocal Community.

Local Advertising

Local Advertising is definitely a key part of Local Business/Commerce, which I explored in the previous post. But local advertising can also be embedded within Local News and Local Community portals. Thus I’ve chose to deal with it as a separate topic.

Insights into Local/Hyperlocal Advertising

First off, I have a few favorite resources for keeping informed in the Local/Hyperlocal advertising space. These are:

• Borrell Associates blog
• BIA/Kelsey blog
• Screenwerk – Greg Sterling’s blog

Borrell Associates – headed up by CEO Gordon Borrell – also sponsors the Local Online Advertising Conference, which was held in New York city early this month.

Jeff Jarvis also frequently has compelling insights into Advertising strategies for Local News Media. For example, see his recent blog posts from February 2010: Stop selling scarcity and NewBizNews: What ad sales people hear.

Search Engine Marketing/SEO for SMEs

Obviously, SEM strategies are critical for any local online business on the web. My top go-to resources for local SEM/SEO insights are:

• Small Business Search Marketing by Matt McGee
• SEO by the Sea – Bill Slawski’s blog
• Understanding Google Maps and Local Search – Mike Blumenthal’s blog
• Chris Silver Smith
• The Noisy Channel – Daniel Tunkelang’s blog
• David Mihm
• Local SEO Guide – Andrew Shotland’s blog
• Search Engine Land
• John Battelle’s Searchblog

Big Ad Networks

On the solution provider front, you have the big ad networks around Search Engine marketing, some of which include:

• Google AdWords and Mobile
• Yahoo!
• Microsoft
• AOL

Local Advertising Media/Platforms

A number of application/media providers – many with a mobile focus – are positioned to be significant players, including:

• Twitter
• Foursquare

Niche/Regional-based Ad Networks and Services

Increasingly, however, you also have your niche/regional-based ad networks and service providers. Here’s some examples:

• Adify
• Clickable
• GrowthSpur
• ReachLocal
• Yodle
• WebVisible
• Spot Runner
• Sacremento Press
• Village Voice Media

Bargains and Deals

Numerous vendors provide applications to notify consumers of bargains and deals in the local vicinity, including:

• Forkfly
• Foursquare
• Spreezio
• Google
• 8coupons
• RetailMeNot
• Coupons.com
• Groupon

Additional Local Advertising Solution Providers

One more advertising solution provider I’ll mention:

• PaperG

So there you have it, a sampling of Local Advertising solution providers. Local Advertising should be a very interesting space to watch in 2010, particularly when it comes to mobile, location-based tools and technologies.

Local Community

The Local Community view of HyperLocal is about information and events of interest to the Community. Information and Events around the Local Community may be contributed by businesses, community organizations, or municipal governmental sources, or it may be user-generated content contributed by the Community.

When you talk Community, by definition you are talking about Social Networks. Therefore, you have to consider the various social networking platforms, and particularly those that host large social graphs. I’m thinking here most specifically of:

• Facebook, and
• Twitter

Many of the HyperLocal News platforms are also positioning themselves as Local Community platforms. For example:

• Patch
• Outside.in

You also have open city initiatives/discussions such as those initiated by:

• Vancouver
• Toronto
• NYC Data Mine
• DataSF
• Next Amercian City

For additional information on open city initiatives, see here.

Then there are do-it-yourself City initiatives and tools, for example:

• DIY City
• SeeClickFix
• CitySourced

You have Local Event platforms, such as:

• Zvents
• when.com
• Trumba

And finally, organizational and community tools around local causes. See:

• The Extraordinaries, also see here
• Localgiving

This is really just a very small sampling of possible ways/platforms for organizing people within a geographic community. I look for a lot of innovation in this space over the next several years.

HyperLocal Business Models

This viewpoint explores various ways to make a HyperLocal business commercially viable. There’s some great pioneering work being done by Jeff Jarvis and the folks at CUNY here – see the New Business Models for News Project at CUNY, and Jarvis’ overview of the work on HyperLocal business models here.

More on this to come.

Hyperlocal – Core Dimensions (Part 1)

This is the second in a series of posts on key dimensions of Hyperlocal. Other posts in this series are:

• HyperLocal – a Framework
• Hyperlocal – Core Dimensions (Part 2)
• Hyperlocal – Key Technologies

In the initial post in this series, I introduced the following core dimensions of Hyperlocal/Local:

1. Local News/Journalism
2. Local Business/Commerce
3. Local Advertising
4. Local Community
5. HyperLocal Business Models

This post will briefly explore the first 2 dimensions – Local News and Local Business/Commerce.

Local/Hyperlocal News

An important service to the Local community is News about the Community, or Community perspectives and reactions to the News. A nice definition of HyperLocal News is provided by Christopher Wink here: Hyperlocal news: a definition.

Keeping Informed about HyperLocal News Media

Here are a few of the sites I regularly visit to keep track of happenings in the Local/Hyperlocal News media space:

• BuzzMachine – Jeff Jarvis’ blog
• News Innovation
• Journalism 2.0 – Mark Briggs’ blog
• Lost Remote
• Media Transparent
• HyperlocalBlogger – Matt McGee

Sites

There are many, many Hyperlocal blogs and websites currently servicing their local communities. Wink provides a nice overview of some of the major ones in his post Hyperlocal news sites worth following.

Platform Providers

This is a core area of innovation at present, and a slew of recent acquisitions by major media companies of hyperlocal news platform providers illustrates this point.

Some of the key innovators:

• Patch
• Everyblock
• Outside.in
• NowPublic
• Breaking News Network
• Spot.us
• Google, and again

Citizen Journalism

Often Hyperlocal news sites leverage Citizen Journalists as contributors to their site. A very interesting example of this approach is Examiner.com, which I blogged about here.

Real-time News Feeds

Finally, with the rise of Twitter, real-time geotagged feeds are also breaking onto the scene. Pat Kitano‘s Hyperlocal Curation of Real Time News post from November 2009 provides some interesting examples. Kitano’s Breaking News Network is a powerful example of location-relevant breaking news.

And of course, Twitter has launched location-based Trending Topics, would should add additional impetus to this trend.

Local Business/Commerce

Here, we’re talking about the commercial aspect of HyperLocal. A profound insight into the potential de-coupling of “core” Local News from Local Business services was recently delivered by Clay Shirky at the Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy in September 2009. A must-listen-to presentation IMHO.

There are many, many players and platforms that service local business needs, with many more soon to come no doubt. Here are a smattering of players in a very competitive space:

Business Listings – General

• Google
• YellowPages.com
• Superpages
• Yellowbook
• Yell.com
• InfoUSA
• Acxiom
• Localeze
• CitySearch
• CitySquares
• Local.com
• Yodle
• City.com
• Business.com
• Insider Pages
• ThinkLocal
• CityVoter

Business Listings – Niche

• Yelp
• Urbanspoon

Services – Niche

• Craigslist
• Oodle
• AutoTrader.com
• Monster.com
• MLSlistings
• Realtor.com
• Zillow
• Trulia
• HelpHive
• My Builder
• ServiceMagic

Shopping

• Google
• ShopLocal
• ShopCity
• Milo
• NearbyNow

As you can see, there are a number of different spaces by which software providers and hosting sites are seeking to provide services for local commerce. In the next post, we’ll look at two additional hyperlocal/local dimensions: Advertising and Community.

glenn

Business Listings Optimization in Google – BizRank?

Chris Silver Smith asks if Google Maps has switched from PageRank to “BizRank” in an interesting post from June 2009.

glenn

PlaceRank – Google’s algorithm for ranking Local Landmarks

A very provocative article from Chris Silver Smith at Search Engine Land on Google’s algorithm for ranking local landmarks, which Google has recently branded as Favorite Places. This algorithm, often referred to as “PlaceRank”, was apparently first highlighted by Bill Slawski in 2007 in a post analyzing the related Google patent.

Silver Smith’s post goes on to explore how the Placerank algorithm gives prefential treatment to Wikipedia pages, as well as highlights a couple articles on optimizing for PageRank:

• Can Your Business Achieve Landmark Status In Google Maps? – Chris Silver Smith, December 2009
• Google PlaceRank in the wild – Ash Nallawalla, December 2009

For additional local search-related commentary, see additional recent Chris Silver Smith’s articles here.

Geolocation is certainly a dominant trend for 2010.

glenn

Google launches Near me Now – positions for Hyperlocal

This past week, Google formally launched its Near me Now Search functionality, which enables one to discover places and things of interest that are nearby ones current location. Here’s a video of the Near me Now capability in action:

And here’s what Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, and Search Engine Land had to say about the announcement.

glenn

Google’s advice to Newspapers – Gina Chen

A nice summary from Gina Chen of Marissa Mayer’s – who is Google’s VP of Search Product and User Experience – testimony to a U.S. Senate Subcomitte on the future of journalism back in May 2009. Here it is: Google’s advice to newspapers.

Nothing earth-shattering here, just another reminder of how profoundly the news media industry must, and will, change in the near future.

glenn