Searching for context, more than keyword dumpster diving

It’s frustrating to hear people say “I researched that” when they simply mean “I looked it up on Google.”

I believe we have diluted the word ‘research’ by equating it to a one-click action. I’m not trying to say that every topic under the sun needs a deep dive. I’m not suggesting that we turn fact-finding into some geeky task. I’m suggesting that we ought to train our brains to think that knowing something is contextual. There is no pat answer.

Google must know this. It stepped up to the late with the release of what it calls the ‘knowledge graph.’ (I am not a big fan of the term. It has a hint of Zuckerberg;s ‘social graph,’ doesn’t it?) Nevertheless, if you haven’t noticed the contextual info showing up on Google, take a look.

If you’re into the deep dive thing, Google does have a few tricks it tends to hide from the general public.  But there are more. Try these:

Google Scholar - http://scholar.google.com
It provides pages from books, PDFs, scholarly literature, peer-reviewed journals, material found via Google books, and even court opinions. Duke University encourages students to use it!

Patent Search - http://www.google.com/patents?hl=en

Lexis Nexis - http://www.lexisnexis.com
This is not a free service, but it combines information from legal, academic, and corporate knowledge databases.

 

Imagine John Lennon in 140 characters

Interesting statement from Yoko, on John Lennon’s anniversary:

“He would have been writing statements and sending them out to the world as a blogger and a tweeter.”

Of course working with word limitation forces the mind to pack meaning into powerful images. Consider how Lennon’s Imagine curtailed to 140 characters would have been just short of hitting the spot:

“Imagine there’s no heaven It’s easy if you try No hell below us Above us only sky Imagine all the people Living for today Imagine there’s no”

The famous refrain, however just takes 109 characters: “You may say I’m a dreamer But I’m not the only one I hope someday you’ll join us And the world will be as one”

On a related note, this tribute was nicely done by Google:

 

Are you a Hootsuite or Tweetdeck person?

There are two kinds of people in the world: Those who divide the world into two sets of people, and those who see us as one big blob of humanity…

OK, more seriously, while presenting Hootsuite and Tweetdeck, at the webinar on Thursday night (it was Friday in Sri Lanka)  it struck me that these two interfaces, while similar in terms of dashboards, appeal to two types. After all, Hootsuite is a web-based application – no downloads necessary. There are some who are not very comfortable with apps that don’t reside on their computer.  Tweetdeck on the other hand, is a slick application that resides on your desktop (now also for the iPad and iPhone. Both are great search engines in their own right.

In my experience Tweetdeck gives you a lot more search results.

Tweetdeck Advantage: Try this: Look for “Floods in Pakistan” on Tweetdeck. The Search within Tweetdeck gives you a real-time feed of tweets. BUT you could get a broader, deeper set of results by going to Tweetdeck.com, and searching there. The same phrase gives you this. It is a lists of Lists, that also give you a snapshot of the number of followers of that list and the number of tweets a day by people on that list.

Hootsuite gives you a lot more filtration.

Hootsuite Advantage: To conduct the same search on Hootsuite you could either do a quick search using he magnifying glass icon and it brings up a floating column with results, or you could create a permanent feed. But what I like about Hootsuite is that you can then sort through those results using the pull down tab and selecting ‘filter.’ This is very useful when searching for a keyword, organization name or hashtag within the results.

So what’s your dashboard preference? Does it say something about your work style? How does it simplify your search?

 

Replace dirty filters! Stop content clogging up your pipes!

On last Friday’s webinar I asked Dave Barnhart to co-present with me on the final in this 6-part series on Passport To Digital Citizenship. Dave is a social media coach who runs a successful business practice around blogging strategy, micro-blogging and web content. Steve England was also on hand with his mobile marketing insight on how all this plays out as we take our tools and our content into a wireless world.

In this session I focused on filters and deep drilling!

We had previously taught attendees how  to create content, leverage the channels, connect and interact with audiences. So in this final seminar, I asked them to consider what it might be to be on the other side of the equation -as recipients. Too Much Information (TMI) is clogging up the arteries, and customers, readers, listeners and viewers may be filtering us out. What do social media filters look like? How do they provide us with deeper insight?

We’re talked about  Tweetdeck, Hootsuite, Bloglines and much more! It was a great rounding off of what we do a both communicators and recipients!

 

Google’s Caffeine rocks, but don’t shut your eyes to offline information

I’ve been waiting for Caffeine for a long time, since I heard it being mentioned at SMAZ last year. So this week we get a taste of what a caffeinated search looks like.

It’s Caffeine, and it’s finally a way to see real-time information (not archived results).

If you’re concerned about page ranking, keywords, meta-tags and most importantly rich content, it’s worth trying to understand how the complex Google search algorithm works. Not that even the so-called experts know, because there is the secret-sauce factor that Google will not disclose.

However, this video from Google is as far as they will go. serving as a refresher course in search:

But is it that all?

Now while I find Caffeine a terrific improvement, I don’t only rely on (or recommend) Google to deep dive for all information. It’s easy assume that ‘everything’ is out there online, having been spidered and indexed online, when the fact is there are stacks of information you may never see or know exists.

Unless you make a trip to a library!  Or visit bookstores, read journal abstracts –the ones that have not gone digital yet — or scale the walled gardens of subscription-only sites.

So I have two questions to the search experts:

1. Do real-time search results change how archived content shows up? All those white papers, videos, sample book chapters, podcasts etc. Do they get buried and pushed down away from the main results page?
2. Is Caffeine –the real-time engine — trying to be Bing –the relevance engine? Or is it the other way around?

I took a screen shot of similar searches for the keywords “Gulf of Mexico” on Google and Bing today. Big differences!

Take this one from the Associated Press. A story about a reporter who dived into the oily waters in the Gulf. It’s up there on Bing, but not on Google.

The story is probably a good metaphor of how murky it is when you dive into search as well. “I open my eyes and realize my mask is already smeared,” the unnamed reporter says.

 

Quotes for the week ending 22 May, 2010

“If we get to that point, the business of e-commerce and m-commerce may get a huge jolt”

Ian Schafer in Advertising Age about the dawn of Facebook currency

“Writing in the voice of another.”

Mike Klein, responding to Steve Crescenzo‘s post at IABC Exchange, on the three kinds of writing communicators need to know.

“Front-load your subject lines.”

Doron Kritetz, on the four subject lines that grab readers

“We know some people are suffering because of this blockade, but we have to obey the court order in letter and spirit”

Najibullah Malik, secretary of Pakistan’s ministry of information technology, on why Facebook was banned this week in the country.

“I never started a Facebook page. I apologize to people of Muslim faith and ask that this ‘day’ be called off.”

Seattle cartoonist Molly Norris, who called for the ‘day’ to draw a cartoon of the prophet.

“If an economic boycott is truly what you desire, I will be happy to encourage Arizona utilities to renegotiate your power agreements so Los Angeles no longer receives any power from Arizona-based generation”.

Gary Pierce, Arizona’s Corporation Commissioner in an empty threat to Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. The spat was over several states and counties calling for a boycott of Arizona over its new immigration law. The law has promoted many cartoons and punch lines.

 

Quotes for the week ending 17 April, 2010

“I write essentially 7,000 words every week for the blog and for the paper and all that stuff.”

AdAge on the New York Times Reporter, writing fro DealBook, who resigned for ‘accidental plagiarism’

“If you get the chance, grab a video camera (or a smartphone) and head to your nearest Tea Party. Who knows, your footage could dispel some false accusations; citizen-journalists are turning in the most reliable kinds.”

Lachlan Markay,  of Dialog New Media, on the Tea Party infiltrators.

“To all the Twitter lovers out there: this is NOT the first sign of the apocalypse….People will not desert Twitter for this. It’s inevitable — technology services need revenue.”

Josh Bernoff, on Twitter’s business model that might involve advertising

“Her brand is Teflon, ubiquitous and so strong that a book like this is not even going to dent it….The media is not going to give this story a second life.”

Michael Kelley, in Advertising Age, on Kitty Kelly’s latest unauthorized biography on Oprah

“Wait, Who Says My Tweets Belong to Google or the Library of Congress?”

Slate’s Heidi Moore, on the news that Twitter content from as far back as 2006 is being archived in the Library of Congress

“Weave in your personality. Sure it’s business, but you don’t want to be a social media sleeping pill. Avoid dry and boring messages, posts and links.”

Susan Young, at Ragan.com on the ‘Seven Habits of Highly Successful Social Media Communicators’

 

Quotes for the week ending 14 March 2010

“China isn’t budging so perhaps Google will just bolt.”

The story this week about China’s attempt to censor Google.

 

Quotes for the week ending 27 Feb, 2010

“A severe breach of rules by staff”.

Message by British telecom company, Vodafone, apologizing for an offensive message posted to its Twitter account

“The BBC is the arm of MI-6 … We will settle accounts with them when the time comes.”

Gen. Ismail Ahmadi Moghaddam, Iran’s chief of police

“the security tracking software has been completely disabled”

Christopher McGinley, Superintendent of the Lower Merion School District in Phiadelphia. One high school was accused of secretly turning on the web-cams of laptops loaned to students to take home.

“Twitter Toppled Toyota!”

Devang Murthy, in Topnews.in

“Folks were tweeting 5,000 times a day in 2007 … Today, we are seeing 50 million tweets per day—that’s an average of 600 tweets per second”

Twitter blog, charting the popularity of micro-blogging that created a 1,400% growth spurt last year.

“That Wacky Mahathir!”

Headline of a post by the Hugh Downs School of Communications at ASU, on the statement by Mahathir Mohamed, former PM of Mayalsia (who said earlier this year of the US that “If they can make Avatar, they can make anything.”)

 

What an inukshuk teaches content creators

Beyond the visual effect of Bing –especially if you’ve been a Google user out of habit–there’s a lot we could learn from how the search engine treats relevance.

Take for instance its hot-linking parts of this iconic symbol of the Inuits– the inukshuk. It is on one level a way of creating a dynamic home page for searchers surrounded by Olympic-related information.

Embedding links is just a start. But like the inukshuk itself, that I quickly learned is more than a marker, it could sometimes create a ‘window’ to guide someone, and reveal something about the terrain –to suggest a good hunting or fishing area.

So the next time you are tasked with create content, think of it more than a pile of sentences. Stories are more than pyramids, inverted or not. They are windows to deeper knowledge. Like a good search engine, they surround a seeker with context, history and information that could be acted on.