Showing posts with label google. Show all posts
Showing posts with label google. Show all posts

The Googlization of Everything: (And Why We Should Worry) Review

The Googlization of Everything: (And Why We Should Worry)
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The Googlization of Everything: (And Why We Should Worry) ReviewThe Googlization of Everything offers a crisp vision for what kind of information society we should be building. That one might not agree with it is a feature -- this is a book that doesn't state the obvious. Rather, it pushes us to rethink what we take for granted, noticing the medium in which we swim, instead of just moving right along.
The book is an impressive synthesis of the current thinking on and around Google -- much of it applicable to any contemporary dot-com with runaway success. One of Siva's objections to the "googlization" of the online knowledge space is that while institutions like libraries and universities typically plan to be around in a hundred years, companies like Google do not necessarily have, or plan for, such staying power. This is a nicely contestable sentiment -- that, as a corporate entity, Google is inherently shorter lived then, say, the University of Virginia, or at least its values are less consistent over time. It sets up a deeper question of what mix of institutions ought to contribute to the world and serve as gateways to our accumulated knowledge, and with what ethos (ethoi?).
In the last section, Siva proposes a Human Knowledge Project. The name is derived from the Human Genome Project. It is intended to be a "global information ecosystem," essentially a Google by and for the public sphere: "The Human Knowledge Project should [be] open, public, global, multilingual, and focused. It should be sensitive to the particular needs of communities of potential knowledge users around the world, yet it should be committed to building a global system that can erase the gaps in knowledge that current exist between a child growing up in a poor village in South Africa and another growing up in a wealthy city in Canada." The Human Knowledge Project also builds on the criticism that Google's rise to such extreme prominence is due in part to the failure of the public sector; thus Siva's proposal is a straight argument for a transfer of power back from private to public hands.
A major difference between this idealized project and the internet (or Google) as it exists now is its central focus on existing libraries as knowledge hubs. One of Siva's central concerns about Google, which emerges in the sections on Google Books and Google Scholar, is its pre-emption of librarians as organizers of knowledge. In his other work -- see The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash Between Freedom and Control Is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System -- Siva has sought to articulate a central role for librarians that some in the information studies community have yet to grasp. The Googlization of Everything is in some ways a sequel: a welcome contribution to our debates over the future of access to knowledge, one blending intimate knowledge of what librarians (and their digital corporate counterparts) actually do with a strong sense of what differences between them matter -- why the library remains of crucial importance as a mediating institution in a society awash in information.The Googlization of Everything: (And Why We Should Worry) Overview

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The Google Resume: How to Prepare for a Career and Land a Job at Apple, Microsoft, Google, or any Top Tech Company Review

The Google Resume: How to Prepare for a Career and Land a Job at Apple, Microsoft, Google, or any Top Tech Company
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The Google Resume: How to Prepare for a Career and Land a Job at Apple, Microsoft, Google, or any Top Tech Company ReviewThe Google Resume is a comprehensive guide to landing a job at any major high-tech company.
This book could not have been written by a more passionate and qualified person. In fact, the author Gayle Laakmann McDowell not only worked at Google and other tech giants, she was responsible for interviewing 100+ candidates while she was there!
The Google Resume opened up my eyes to how rigorous and intimidating a tech interview can be and I feel very lucky to have found such a well written book on this topic, while only a junior in college. Gayle provides all the tools and knowledge so that you can start preparing for the challenging job/internship hiring process now! This puts you at an advantage over the other candidates, who will probably be blindsided when asked to write a non-trivial algorithm on the spot during an interview (See the Programming Interview chapter).
Here are some of the highlights of the book:
Chapter 2: Advanced Preparation. i.e., if you're still a student, what should you be doing right now to build a skill set that would compel a recruiter and manager to interview and hire you.
Chapter 3: Getting in the Door. This chapter has a section that talks about the "Black Hole" of online job submissions. If you don't know what the black hole is, it's when you spend 30 or more minutes submitting your resume online, only to never hear back. She provides many important tips in this chapter to avoid the pitfalls of online resume submissions.
Chapters 4-6: These chapters are all about the fundamental qualities that a tech resume and cover letter should have. I see conflicting resume advice scattered all over the web, Gayle on the other hand, provides very clear and meaningful tips throughout these chapters. I thought I had the perfect resume before reading this, boy was I wrong.
Chapter 9: The programming Interview. This chapter is all about what you can expect from the technical portion of a programming interview, including how you can prepare and what sort of coding questions you can expect. One of the most valuable sections in this chapter is the "Must Know" topics for programing interviews. She provides a list of all the data structures, algorithms and computer science concepts that one would be expected to know at a bare minimum. If you're still a student, this allows you to know in advance what topics will carry over into industry, and should therefore be taken even more seriously.
Chapter 10: Getting into Gaming. I have always wondered what it's really like to work in the video game industry. She provides very insightful commentary on the ins and outs of gaming related jobs. 12 hour days working in gaming, ouch!
In addition to all this, Gayle has a companion website called CareerCup, that gives you company specific interview tips that have been graciously submitted from users that have gone through interviews at companies like Qualcomm, Microsoft and of course Google:)
Perhaps the best thing about this book is that it has zero fluff and can easily be read in a few days.
I've read other advice books related to other topics and I've put them down after a couple chapters, thinking the author was no more knowledgeable on the subject than me. I think it's rare to find a book written by someone with such genuine knowledge on a topic, and who's willing to share it!
if(you want a clear path to a high paying job in tech)
purchase and devour this book;
else
proceed blindly into the technological abyss;The Google Resume: How to Prepare for a Career and Land a Job at Apple, Microsoft, Google, or any Top Tech Company Overview

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Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America Review

Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America
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Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America ReviewIf Variety had a threesome with Wired Magazine and a ColdFusion manual, it would look a lot like this book. It captures a great story of an unlikely internet company (from LA no less) overachieving and does what I think is a great job of walking through the nuances that separate myspace from friendster and a lot of other companies nobody remembers.
I think this would make a fantastic movie as it highlights some over-sized personalities/egos, covers the torn friendships that often happen when startups and $$ are involved and shows how a company can capitalize on a shift in technology (digital pictures/mp3.s + broadband) before most people understand what has happened.Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America Overview

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The Consuming Instinct: What Juicy Burgers, Ferraris, Pornography, and Gift Giving Reveal About Human Nature Review

The Consuming Instinct: What Juicy Burgers, Ferraris, Pornography, and Gift Giving Reveal About Human Nature
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The Consuming Instinct: What Juicy Burgers, Ferraris, Pornography, and Gift Giving Reveal About Human Nature ReviewDr. Saad has been a pioneer in bringing evolutionary ideas to the field of business. An overwhelming body of literature has now demonstrated that human decision-making is influenced by adaptively motivated biases we inherited from our ancestors. It follows that those motivated biases will influence how we allocate our scarce economic resources. This has profound implications for consumer behavior, as Geoffrey Miller and others (Jill Sundie at UT, Vlad Griskevicius at Minnesota, and Josh Ackerman at MIT) have been arguing. These researchers have also been providing ample empirical demonstrations of the power of that viewpoint. Gad Saad has been been advancing an evolutionary approach to business for years, sometimes encountering opposition from colleagues in his field (who labor under a set of false Blank Slate assumptions that Saad reviews in the first chapter, along with brief rebuttals).
The consumer goods in Saad's clever title are not chosen randomly, but are matched to what he views as four overriding Darwinian pursuits:
1. Survival: We are here because our ancestors were inclined to eat fatty cooked meats and other calorie-dense foods scorned by all California vegans today. Transported into the present, our ancestors would have lined up at McDonald's for those juicy burgers in his title. In the modern world, Saad notes that the top ten restaurants are McDonald's, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Burger King, Starbuck's, Subway, Pizza Hut, Wendy's, Taco Bell, Domino's Pizza, and Dunkin' Donuts. That diet does not help us live to 90, but the inclinations that drive those choices probably helped our ancestors survive until reproductive age.
2. Reproduction: As Saad notes, men are overwhelmingly the consumers of pornography, and this sex difference is just the tip of the iceberg. Indeed, flashy overpowered sports cars are also overwhelmingly a male purchase, and, Saad argues, mainly used as a sexual signal (and indeed the media from Fox News to the Belfast Telegraph is abuzz this week with a series of studies by Jill Sundie and colleagues that demonstrates the links between Porsches and mating displays). In Saad's own research, he finds that simply driving an expensive sports car triggers a boost in men's testosterone levels.
3. Kin Selection: Saad notes that many of our purchases are made for direct kin. This month, I've shelled out money for Legos, art supplies, summer recreational programs, as well as a number of special foods aimed to please my seven-year-old son. I just got back from lunch with him, his older brother, and my two grandchildren, and to test your knowledge of marketing behavior and inclusive fitness, guess who paid?
4. Reciprocity: We not only buy gifts and lunches for our kin, we buy gifts for friends, pick up the tab at the restaurant when we're with close friends, and so on. We do so not because we're economically "irrational," but because it feels good to make our close associates feel good. Indeed, gift-giving is linked not only to friends and kin, it is used to woo mates and to maintain relationships with them (think Valentine's day and anniversary presents). I enjoy Saad's abundant use of statistics to bolster the points. He informs us that fully 10 percent of retail purchases in North America are for gifts, which boils down to $1,215 per person, which starts to add up after a while (to a whopping $253 billion per year in the economy, in fact).
One could quibble with Saad's list of motivational forces, but I will instead simply agree with something that David Buss says in the foreward to the Consuming Instinct: This is a book that should be required reading at business schools. Besides a broad-ranging overview of research on marketing, psychology, economics, anthropology, and biology, Saad peppers the book with lots of take-home messages for consumers, policy-makers, and business people (this is an appealing feature of books aimed at the business crowd -- a la Heath and Heath's Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die and Goldstein, Martin, and Cialdini's Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive- practical bottom-line suggestions of how the science can be used).
If you are either a professional businessperson or simply a consumer, I would challenge you read this book and Geoffrey Miller's Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior -- and not come away thinking very differently about people's motives for buying the many, many, things they buy.
Doug Kenrick is author of Sex, Murder, and the Meaning of Life: A Psychologist Investigates How Evolution, Cognition, and Complexity are Revolutionizing our View of Human NatureThe Consuming Instinct: What Juicy Burgers, Ferraris, Pornography, and Gift Giving Reveal About Human Nature Overview

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Marketing in the Age of Google: Your Online Strategy IS Your Business Strategy Review

Marketing in the Age of Google: Your Online Strategy IS Your Business Strategy
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Marketing in the Age of Google: Your Online Strategy IS Your Business Strategy ReviewAlthough overall a book with a lot of tips, the author does not explain things as well as she could. For instant, she starts talking about Google Trends and doesn't tell us where to find it online (I guess there's Google for that ;). That said, there are a lot of good gems she shares. Here are some:
-Searchers click on organic results 85% of the time
-Companies connect with searches in two ways: Paid and Organic
-Longer search queries = fewer paid results appearing to the searcher
-Videos and images draw users away from the paid search column
-50% of searchers will see the 7th search result
-100% of searchers look at the first organic result; 50% look at the first paid result
-Increased organic results = increased brand awareness
-organic results last over time, whereas paid results stop the second you stop paying for them
-Searchers click on a brand 92% of the time when a brand is in both paid and organic results
-A search is on avg. three words long; nearly 25% are only one word
-Women are more deliberate in reading search results
-A #1 ranking is less important than people think. If you rank in the top 3 to 4 results and have a more compelling title and description, you may own the click
-Searchers don't even look at the entire title. They look at the left half of it
-Remember that every page of your site is a potential entry for visitors
-The days of normal search results that everyone sees the same are now over
-YouTube is the second largest search engine
-Results that contain both video and images, searches start with that first, then go above, and then below in their scanMarketing in the Age of Google: Your Online Strategy IS Your Business Strategy Overview

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Blogging Heroes: Interviews with 30 of the World's Top Bloggers Review

Blogging Heroes: Interviews with 30 of the World's Top Bloggers
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Blogging Heroes: Interviews with 30 of the World's Top Bloggers ReviewI found "Blogging Heroes" to be a really inspirational book that introduces the reader to many of the pioneers of blogging. As someone who is not a hard-core technical person, it was refreshing to learn the variety of blogs and get a glimpse into their world from the inside. You will probably recognize several of the blogs and enjoy finding out their origins and what motivates the people that breath life into them.
Some of the blogs profiled started as magazines first; others were born online. Some are run professionally by trained journalists; others are run as hobbies during spare time. All of the profiles, though, were interesting. I often found myself at the end of each chapter thinking, "That is so cool. What that person did!"
As you read the book, you'll easily notice patterns in the advice, motivations and other factors that were keys to these bloggers' success. By the end of the book, you'll have a very concise list of what to do if you want to get started blogging (or improve your current blog).
Michael Banks style is great. "Blogging Heroes" is very easy to read with each of the 30 chapters devoted to one interview. I read the book one or two chapters each night before bed. It was perfect for that kind of reading- chapters are under 10 pages long; so, you can always finish one in about 10 minutes.
I recommend this book to anyone that wants to learn more about the world of blogging from a personal level.Blogging Heroes: Interviews with 30 of the World's Top Bloggers Overview

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In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives Review

In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
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In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives ReviewAmong recent great books describing the business and impact of information technology, In the Plex is one of the best. As impactful as Pulse: The New Science of Harnessing Internet Buzz to Track Threats and Opportunities, and with story-telling as engaging as Idea Man: A Memoir by the Cofounder of Microsoft this book will be on the shortlist of 2011 "must reads" in the business of technology.
One of my favorite writers, Steven Levy of Wired, gained what may be unprecedented access to the employees and upper management of Google in order explore the history, the work environment key management decisions of one of the most innovative and culturally-influential companies of all time. Google manages this with 24,000 employees who see Google as the perfect employer for them. Levy describes Google as a place for the "unspeakably brainy", a kind of "geek never-never land" - just the right kind of environment to maximize innovativeness. Among the perks is the requirement for every engineer to spend a share of their time on personal projects. And as daunting as it sounds, Levy says Co-founder Larry Page actually still signs off on every single hire.
The co-founders Sergey Brin and Page literally started Google from a garage. (The name was a misspelling of the mathematical term for 10 to the 100th power - Googol. But the name stuck.) Their big idea: efficient searches and how to make money at it by selling keywords. Levy then leads us through Google's history of fantastic growth and innovation focusing mainly on big decisions in the firm. Among them the mistakes of handling the special case of China where media access is more controlled than Google would prefer and where management style of the China-based executives were more like a stodgy, old IBM than the free-thinking Google. The company with the motto "Don't be Evil", ultimately decided to leave the China market.
The rapid growth of the firm was itself a major challenge. That many smart people with the freedom and resources to chase many ideas could spread themselves thin. Some of the ideas could be technically possible because of the clever solutions Google staff would develop, but some ideas had other obstacles the engineering-oriented firm didn't anticipate. For example, Google's plan to scan in millions of books and offer them online ran into what should have been entirely foreseeable legal obstacles from authors. But as Levy describes in the first pages of the book, "To Google, it was a boon to civilization." It is this story that frames much of the rest of the book: visionary and cash-rich but somewhat naïve technologists struggle with practical realities of the rest of the world.
Some of the employee perks are drying up as economic hard times have even hit Google. The sheer size of the firm has required some amount of long-avoided bureaucracy and rapid acquisitions of firms the engineers thought were cool has slowed down. As Levy says, even the "Don't Be Evil" motto is now used as ironic humor by Google's detractors. But Google, with a $180+ billion dollar market capitalization is an example of a massive creation of wealth from one of a few areas where US exports lead the world: world-changing innovation.
Levy's telling of the Google story is based on access no other author had and, as a result, it is the best story about Google written to date.In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives Overview

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Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live Review

Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live
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Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live ReviewJeff Jarvis has written a provocative book that will force us to have a serious conversation about the trade-offs between enhanced privacy rights and "publicness" -- which he defines as the benefits that come "from being open and making the connections that technology now affords."
Some will bristle at the notion that privacy "rights" should be balanced against any other right or value. If we desire the benefits of a more open and transparent society, however, it is a conversation we need to have. As Jarvis correctly notes, publicness improves interpersonal relationships, empowers communities, strengthens social ties, enables greater collaboration, promotes transparency and truth-seeking, and helps enliven deliberative democracy, among many other things.
Of course, new innovations in information technology -- the printing press, cameras, microphones, and now search engines and social networking -- have always spawned new privacy tensions. Ultimately, though, they also bring tremendous benefits, Jarvis correctly notes. The Internet revolution and all the angst that it entails is just the latest in this reoccurring cycle. We're going through the same growing pains our ancestors did with previous technologies and it's important not to overreact.
Whatever your view on privacy and the law governing it, it's always good to hear the other side of the story. Jarvis delivers it here with gusto and makes a powerful case for re-framing the way we think about these challenging issues going forward. Incidentally, those who find this topic of interest should also check out "The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us To Choose Between Privacy And Freedom?" by David Brin, which also makes the case for increased information sharing and publicness.
[My longer review of "Public Parts" can be found at Forbes.com]
Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live Overview

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Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications Review

Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications
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Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications ReviewThis book, based on new archives, presents a wealth of new information on Western Union and Bell. An invaluable resource. In particular, possibly the most useful book on Western Union yet published. The Bell sections present new information that threatens many of the existing theories of why AT&T came to rule American telecommunications as a private regulated monopoly.Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications Overview

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No Bullshit Social Media: The All-Business, No-Hype Guide to Social Media Marketing Review

No Bullshit Social Media: The All-Business, No-Hype Guide to Social Media Marketing
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No Bullshit Social Media: The All-Business, No-Hype Guide to Social Media Marketing ReviewNo B**S Social Media, a Recommended Book (Four Stars)
No B**S Social Media, Review No B**S? Really! No B**S Social Media at least has a catchy title. It certainly got my attention and hope that this would be one of the better books on Social Media Marketing. I teach Social Media Marketing in San Francisco and online (just Google `Jason McDonald' or click on my profile to find me), and so I am always on the look out for new insights into the emerging world of SMM.
Bottom line: four stars
I recommend the book as a good, fresh intro to Social Media Marketing.
The book's strength: a detailed, high level overview to WHY Social Media matters.
The book's weakness: lack of how-to-, step-by-step detail.
No B**S Social Media is 90% a conceptual book, and only 10% a practical how-to guide. The discussions of ROI / Metrics, review marketing, and how to organize your social media team in a larger company are all quite good. If you have an established product, more than ten employees, and are looking for a good airplane read on social media, this is a good book for you. If you are a start up, a single employee company, or are looking for a detailed practical manual on Social Media Marketing, you are better served by Social Media for Dummies.
Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid of Social Media
Not surprisingly, given its brash title, the book's tone is no nonsense. One major theme in the book is: Be afraid, be very afraid! Be afraid, first of all, that the Social Media Revolution is here, and be afraid that you - Mr. or Ms. Marketing - do not understand it. Your company will be doomed as will you - so you had better start paying attention! Do I agree with this statement? Absolutely. Do I agree with the tone: not at all.
Should you be afraid of Social Media? If you are a large company like Nestle or United Airlines, there is certainly reason to fear the viral attack campaign of your Facebook page, or the viral video "United Breaks Guitars." For most businesses, however, the worst that happens is a) the unhappy customer review on Yelp or Google Places, or b) a complete lack of interest by your customers in your products.
Very few of us will experience a viral video assault like "United Breaks Guitars," but many of us will experience the "b" option - difficulty getting our customers to truly be excited about our brand, our products, and our news. Fear is the wrong metaphor, in my view.
Attitude is everything I believe, so despite what No B**S says, I encourage you to be open minded about Social Media rather than fearful. Expect some direct insights from your customers, good or bad, but see this revolution for what it is: an amazing, fun marketing opportunity to get to know your customers regardless of the limits of time or space. Experiment. Be innovative. For many small businesses, Social Media will start and end with Google Places and Yelp. That's OK. It all depends on what YOU make what works for YOUR BUSINESS.
My take, therefore, is 1) don't be afraid you will be left behind, there is still plenty of time to get started in Social Media Marketing. But certainly take the plunge now and start educating yourself and your company, and 2) don't worry too much about the high-visibility attacks such as those against Nestle or United Airlines. Unless you are a major brand, those viral social media messages are very rare indeed, and 3) look for focused opportunities rather than trying to do everything at once. Nigerian proverb: man who goes after two mice, catches none. So, focus, focus, focus on just the best social media opportunities, unique to your business.
Social Media Opportunities - Reviews and Review-based SMM
For many businesses the strongest Social Media Opportunity is in the review space. Fortunately this is the best part of the book - its discussion of reviews and eWOM (electronic word-of mouth). Nowadays, many customers may base their decision to engage with you on reviews posted about your company or products on sites such as ePinions.com, Amazon.com, Yelp.com, and other platforms. Small businesses like roofing companies or attorneys, in particular, are being reviewed heavily on Yelp and Google Places.
Do reviews matter to your business?
If so, what is your strategy to encourage them?
If so, what is your strategy to monitor and respond to them - good, bad, and ugly?
With respect to reviews, the authors make the obvious but necessary point that people often do NOT believe advertising but they WILL believe the reviews of total strangers. Looking for a new Bar-be-que restaurant in Dallas? Turn to Yelp or Google Places, read reviews, go to restaurant. Ready to buy a new book on Amazon? Read the reviews, like the reviewer, buy the book. Review marketing is big, and getting bigger. Reviews matter. Do you lack a review strategy? Then be afraid, be very afraid.
Here, however, is where the book falls down. We are given no easy Web index of sites that have reviews, tools or tips to encourage reviews - so we know that reviews are important, but we aren't really taught how to cultivate them, at either the conceptual or practical level. Like so many books in this sector, the book reads too much like a novel and not enough like a workbook. As someone who teaches Social Media Marketing, I know from my students that what they want are practical, step-by-step directions on issues like how to encourage reviews. In this regard, No B**S Social Media disappoints. It even lacks an appendix of great websites, or power tools for Social Media - items that in this Internet age should certainly be part of any book on the topic.
Conclusion
There's theory and then there's practice. A truly excellent Social Media Marketing book would have booth - a discussion of why reviews matter, and also a step-by-step guide to how to encourage reviews. No B**S Social Media is more theory than practice, but it's still a good book. Buying it, reading it, and most of all - beginning to embrace Social Media - is a start. That's no B**S.No Bullshit Social Media: The All-Business, No-Hype Guide to Social Media Marketing Overview

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