Posts Tagged “Google”

Ever seen the bumper sticker that proclaims, “God is my copilot” or maybe the one that says, “Dog is my copilot“? I don’t think you see as many bumper stickers as you used to, but these days I think if a car has one, it’s as likely to have ten. And I definitely see a lot more evidence that dogs are peoples copilots - if not their actual primary drivers - than that their deities are. On the other hand, it might be pretty cool to have Kali as your copilot, with her head out the passenger window, tongue flapping in the breeze as your car blazes a path of destruction across nine lanes of commuter hell.

OK, enough of my road-rage-fueled commuting fantasies. And my apologies to anyone who feels offended on behalf of Kali. In the interest of full disclosure, my car is protected by a traffic safety talisman I purchased at the Golden Temple in Kyoto. At least that’s what they told me it was.

My point, such as it is, is that I had several appointments in different places today, and in most cases enough time in between that I needed to find a place to kill some time, or if possible, get some work done. GPS and web applications both played big roles. In the morning, a trip to the dentist, just a block away, then hot cider (I was scolded - and scaled - for my coffee intake by the hygienist) with C at 1369, just another block along. Then it got tricky with lunch in Framingham, meeting in West Concord, and dinner in Watertown. As it turned out, two Starbucks with wifi were waypoints and workpoints in between.

I no longer bother to ask anybody for directions when setting up a meeting as long as I get an address. I then depend on my car-mounted GPS or Google Maps on a nearby computer or on my Windows Mobile “smart”phone. Maybe my toys or my skills are a bit out of date, but I find that no single one of these devices or methods quite does the trick on its own, and I use a weird combination of all of them to get around.

The GPS can’t be beat for actually getting there.  Suction cup mount, voice directions and live location information.  But the maps in your average GPS are never as up to date as the ones online, and their POIs (that’s GPS lingo for “Points Of Interest”) are even less so.  My smart phone’s google maps implementaiton is fantastic, but it can’t actually tell me where I am.  And none of these devices seems to have a more complicated itinerary in mind than simple “I need to get from here to there.”

What I need is something that can solve this problem:  I need to get from point A to point B in N hours, but it takes much less time to get there, so I also need to find a location  near point B where I can goof off or work productively (usually defined as a cafe or bookstore with free wifi) until closer to when I need to be there.  And I sometimes need to do this several times in a single trip.  And don’t forget to account for parking time and all.  There’s nothing worse than being late when you’ve had lots of extra time to get there.

Oh, and while I’m at it, I want to get there making the fewest left turns possible.

Google Maps’ Street View feature - wherein they send car-mounted cameras tooling around the streets of an area and use whiz-bang technology to stitch the photos together into an eye-level view of everything along the streets - has come to Boston. So, naturally I poked around, looking at my home, my friends’ homes, places of personal note, and so forth. The images are obviously not live, but I still got a strange feeling when I was able to spot my own car parked across the street from my home.

I can see by the shadows that the picture was taken mid-day and by the foliage that it was in a more temperate season. The fact that I’m parked near my home not at work suggests a weekend or holiday.  The whole thing summons up creepy echoes of Rear Window or Blow Up or some other paranoid story in which a crime is revealed through some form of semi-illicit surveillance - or is it?

Not that I should be at all surprised, but Google has found and delivered the citrusy canard I planted. If Google alerts me about this, maybe I can create an endless loop by blogging that, too.

I’m going back to work tomorrow after a two-week vacation, during which - uncharacteristically - I read work email just twice, once at the beginning, just briefly, and again today, much more thoroughly to prepare for re-entry tomorrow.

Here’s a redacted summary of one message I received. For the purpose of illustration, please assume that “Citrusy Canard” is the name of a company that competes with mine.

Subj: FW: Google Alert for Citrusy Canard

Citrusy is all over the news. Everything they do shows up in my Google alerts. They joined [industry organization] and are getting written up for it, but we were a founding member.
Google Alert for Citrusy Canard
[link to Canard's press release on joining industry organization]

Can you spot the sloppy thinking here? And for extra credit, can you spot the disturbing reality exposed for all marketing and PR professionals?

My colleague is worried because Citrusy Canard is all over the news and we’re not. No, that’s not quite it. He’s worried because CC is all over his news and we’re not. And that’s because he has instructed Google to bring him all the news about CC but not about his own company. Note that he has asked for alerts on the name of the company, not on keywords around what they do - this filter will show all kinds of “news” relevant or not about the company, but will miss news about the industry that doesn’t include that company.

As a PR guy, I said he was barking up the wrong tree. I said that this press release matters only if it gets picked up and read by actual customers, and the Google alert merely says that it got put up on the company’s site, and you’re only getting it because you set up an alert on the company name. I thought it was like when you start thinking about getting a new car and suddenly you notice your intended model all over town - it’s just an illusion based on what you’re attuned to, not the actual prevalence or importance of the thing you’re seeking.

But then I felt it. That funny feeling you get when somebody innocent or foolish, like a child or a sales guy, says something that actually cuts to the heart of the matter in a way that you - the alleged elder or professional - had missed. It wasn’t the uncomfortable digestive readjustment to American food, it was the gassy gurgle of truth.

Fewer and fewer people are reading any regular media, and by that I sweepingly include pretty much all news sites, blogs and company sites. What they are doing is using aggregators, bots, and feeds to create their own personalized metamedia and consuming that. You don’t open the New York Times (paper or web) to learn what’s going on, you get fed selected headlines by the robots you’ve tasked to collect your news. So getting a press release picked up by a news media outlet is nice, but it matters less and less as long as your PR is getting picked up by the newsbots. Makes you think…

So I’m doing an experiment - I’m setting up a Google alert for the uncommon phrase, “Citrusy Canard,” which I will sprinkle throughout this post, to see if I get an alert about it when I publish. For what it’s worth, even such nonsense as Citrusy Canard pulls 461 results on Google, soon to be 462, I hope.

If you put a press release on your website and nobody reads it, does it make a difference? Yes, because Google reads it. Nobody reads anything anymore, but everybody reads Google, and Google reads everything, capisce?

Stand by for the update - will I receive a Google Alert on Citrusy Canard when I publish? How long will it take?