Say hello to Google Wave

Posted by Administrator on Jun 12th, 2009 | View Comments home title

Google Wave is a new tool for communication and collaboration on the web, coming later this year.

Interesting… I mean the timing is interesting… I’m sure any tool launched by Google in the web 2.0 era will be awesome (with this much fanfare > there are 1990 linked Google news articles to the original Reuters article on Wave in Google news as I write this morning) but it’s the fact that its’ launch is almost exactly timed as a response to Bing.

Now Wave isn’t Bing (and Bing Is Not Google!). Both are useful if not game changing – Microsoft finally appearing to have brought some brains in to create a new spin on search which will almost inevitably bring back market share. But as the social media/knowledge sharing, enterprise geek I am, Wave’s integration of all the typical communicatiosn tools we use into one platform looks really good.

One question: why are all the presenters on the clip Prject Managers?!

PS Wow – just seen the demo of multiple users working on the same doc at the same time, with real time doc updates – awesome!!

GoCompare ranking penalty (again!)

Posted by Administrator on Apr 23rd, 2009 | View Comments home title

Isn’t it great when the authorities in your field pick up on something that used to be such a hot topic within a much smaller community. I remember the last time round (must have only been a year and a half ago) when GoCompare incurred their last ranking penalty that it was only really picked up by the SEO community. This time round it was Econsultancy that broke the news which inspired Hitwise to release free data (wow) backing the story up!

The great thing about stories like this in the SEO community is that it defines boundaries. We all know how crappy Google has been at imposing it’s own ethical policies and that SEO is all about testing and pushing limits (not on client sites of course!) but it’s always a good thing to see just how far you can go before you get noticed.

What’s so funny about the story this time round is that GoCompare are going to suffer much worse than their 6 month drop first time round. This time their media spend is going to have to be enormous to counter their lack in visibility on brand terms. Hell I might even have a bid myself! Thanks again to Google’s relaxation in trademark bidding policies every man and his dog can bid on GoCompare’s brand terms and get away with it, making competition all the more expensive.

You’ve got to love them – Google and GoCompare too! Here’s a lovely graph for the wall courtesy of Hitwise.