Late? Never again!

In what has become a yearly April Fool's tradition, GMail announces it's newest feature: GMail Custom Time. It provides users the ability to "back-date" an email that they forgot to send on time. Wouldn't that be cool?

Last year's new GMail feature was GMail Paper.

Google Image Labeler

Google has an ingenious little game on their site now called the Google Image Labeler. Here's how it works:

You are paired up with another site visitor who is also willing to play. You are then each shown the same image and asked to come up with keywords that describe the contents of the image. Woman, brunette, sunset, beach, etc. The idea is to come up with matches - words that both you and your partner thought of.

Google is using this game as a way to tag images and use those tags to improve image search results. Because the more often an image receives the same descriptive keyword, the more likely that word is a good description of the image. It's a brilliant way to harness the power of the masses and make the mundane and immense task of image tagging fun.

NORAD Santa

Here's a great story from the official Google blog about NORAD Santa. Well done, Colonel Shoup!

My kids will be watching.

Digital footprints

Have you done it yet? Have you Googled yourself?

If you have, you're probably not alone. Potential employers. Your dates. Business competitors. They are all using Google and other search tools to research you.

Message board posts, blogs, photos, old jobs, MySpace pages, LinkedIn profiles - all kinds of information, some not even posted by you, can come up in searches and provide specific information (or misinformation) about you.

Employers are "Googling" potential employees for a possible checkered past. Executive job and networking firm ExecuNet found that 35 percent of executive recruiters have chosen not to hire applicants because of information found online, up from 26 percent in 2005.

College recruiters are even taking a peek in Facebook to see what they can find.

Any time you meet someone new, depending on the uniqueness of their name, you can often Google them and find out where they work or where they went to school, organizations they may belong to or even photographs of them on vacation.

So think twice before posting those racy photos or that controversial opinion. The Internet is not an anonymous playground. We all need to be cognizant of the digital tracks we leave behind and protect our online reputations.

Friday fun: The way it never was

Google in 1960:

Yahoo Search

I would still consider myself more of a "Google Guy" than a "Yahoo User" but I must admit the recent upgrade to Yahoo's search feature is pretty cool.

Yahoo now suggests ways to phrase a search request as a user types into the query box, providing a list of related concepts and produces links to related photos, videos and music on the main results page.

I might actually use Yahoo now. You know, if the Google site is down or something.

The incredible, embeddable map

Google recently added a much-needed feature to their mapping service. Users can now easily embed an interactive map on their blog or website. Like this one.


View Larger Map

I can see this being of great use for restaurants and other businesses. No longer should we see be forced to endure the static, useless screenshot from Mapquest when one like this allows users to interact with it and get directions.

I'll be on vacation next week so this blog may be quiet. Where will I be? Check the map.

The Age of Ideas

Where do good ideas come from?

I'm a firm believer that we all have good ideas inside us. The trick is figuring out how to get at those creative thoughts and apply them to our businesses. Some people keep a notepad by the bed and write down those middle-of-the-night revelations. Others find inspiration in the shower. Or the gym.

But the most important question is: Do you give yourself time to think? It's hard to dream of something "outside the box" if you don't set aside time to dream.

I remember one time a few years ago the radio in my car broke. As I drove in silence, I couldn't believe how active and productive my mind was. Turn off your distractions and let your mind "play." Think about your website and what would make it a better site. Or a better experience for your users.

Some organizations are very good at playing with new ideas and fostering an innovative spirit. Google has its Google Labs. Yahoo has its research area. Plenty of sites go into beta and refine their ideas with the help of users.

Ideas are the lifeblood of the information age. Being able to generate, support and grow good ideas is a modern key to success.

The future of search

Insightful summary of a presentation from Marissa Mayer of Google on where search is headed. Especially interesting was this note:

"According to Mayer, someday in the future Google could automatically search content in all languages and present all the translated results to the user on the same page, regardless of language!"

Wow.

iGoogle

I might have gone with YouGoogle instead. Or YourGoogle.

Two reasons: They already own YouTube, so there could have been some consistency and maybe they start a franchise of product offerings focused on "You." Secondly, doesn't the "iProductname" format make you think of Apple?

How Google is like the dictionary

I remember an episode of M*A*S*H from my youth in which Hawkeye Pierce (Alan Alda) is being interviewed by a war documentarian. One of the questions is "what's your favorite book?" Hawkeye, in his smart-alecky way, answered that he would choose the dictionary because "you know, it has all the other books in it."

In the same way I think if I were asked what my favorite website is, my answer would have to be what George Bush dubbed "The Google." Not for how it looks, but for what it does and what it provides me. In a fraction of a second. For free.

Now I realize there are other, arguably better search engines, and not everything is findable through Google. But our ability to find and access information - facts, statistics, opinions, images - is greater now than at any other point in history. And to me, no other site exemplifies that achievement of mankind more than Google.

With hundreds of millions of searches per day, I don't think I'm alone in this sentiment.