How Google's Wonder Wheel Sparked an Edinburgh Technology PR video idea

Google's wonder wheel is not well known, yet it's useful for generating ideas.

Using the wonder wheel option returns search results on Google arranged in a wheel that resembles a mind-map. The spokes represent search terms. The natural results for your search are displayed to the right of the wheel.

The wheel format allows you to quickly see the search results. Click a spoke and another wheel pops up with more results, allowing you to drill down and chase threads of ideas. Then it's easy to refine your results by choosing to show results for "images" or "videos" - which are displayed like the results of a regular Google search.

Using this wheel/refined search combo, you may find information gaps, as I did in this example.

Technology PR agency search spots a gap:

Key a search term into Google as per normal

When the results appear, look above them - just below the Google search box - to see a blue shaded bar containing the words "show options" - click on that.

A list with 4 groups drops down to the right of your search results. The group called "standard view" contains the "wonder wheel" option . Click and your results show a neat wonder wheel.

Click a spoke of your wheel to see another wheel popping up based on a further 10 results relating to the spoke you just clicked.

Follow your thoughts and click away to spark off ideas for articles or blogs - and throw up opportunities.

Using a search on "PR"(UK pages), I clicked on a"technology PR agencies"spoke because technology PR is one of PHPR's strengths. I refined the list to see "videos" - there were no results. Excellent. That means there's a gap in the market and I'm now off to make a technology PR agency video!

Edinburgh on Google Logo

Good to see Edinburgh Castle on Google for St Andrew's day

Google's Data Liberation Front

Storing your info in the cloud is great in that you don't have to carry it with you. You can log-in and access your data just about anywhere: calendars, photos, documents & presentations etc.

But it's apparently not always easy to swap data around and manage it. Especially if you want to change to another application or platform.

If you're like me. a lot of your data is on Google. This blog is powered by Google's Blogger and customised to be hosted on my website by shopfitter.com. A pro network I'm in stores data for Google-Groups as Google Docs. Many of my pix are in Picasa web albums. I used a temp Gmail account when my ISP screwed up.

How do you get all that somewhere else when you want to move to a different platform?

Well those guys at Google have been thinking about that too, and an engineering team have come up with the Data Liberation Front (DLF). The DLF reckon you can get data out of any of the Google products, but some give up that data more easily than others. To date they are about two thirds of the way through liberating data i.e. making it very easy to get data out. They've been on a liberating mission since 2007.

They point out that "Customers own the data they put into Google Apps, so we fundamentally believe it should be easy for companies to switch away from Google Apps to other messaging and collaboration solutions."

It may be counter intuitive, but I think it's a smart move.

By making it easy to get stuff out, we feel comfortable and don't want to leave.
Make it hard to get out and it niggles away at us. We feel trapped and some start to view it as a challenge.

And announcing it now is even smarter. As InformationWeek says: it's "a move that comes as the company is being assailed by competitors, interest groups, and the government for its online ad dominance and its digital book ambitions."

In PR and the news game: timing is all.

But I did find out something useful: although it's easy to escape from Blogger, the same easy escape route - an export from Blogger - is also a handy way to export a copy to your hard-drive as a back-up precaution. They may not be earth shattering, but you may find other similar insights at the DLF's site & blog:

http://www.dataliberation.org/
http://dataliberation.blogspot.com/

I currently wouldn't want to escape from Blogger because I hear that Google's own blogs get indexed on Google faster. But if you do want to escape, the Data Liberation team "hosts the Google Blog Converters open source project. This project also powers a hosted conversion service with support for migrating from WordPress, MovableType, and Livejournal."

Another smart move: as you check the DLF out: they may well tempt you into other Google offerings - it's a fair-sized list down the left-hand side!

Google on Caffeine Tastes Even Better

Google's new search engine is called Caffeine and it's not quite ready yet. But an early version is available to web developer to provide feedback. Google claim it will deliver faster, better results, and index content faster. As usual with Google, most of the work is under the bonnet so we will notice little obvious change.

But what will it do to our carefully optimised websites? That's why they are asking for feedback from developers.

But to get an idea of how it is shaping up as far as your site and your key search engine terms, a web developer has set up a neat side-by-side comparison site at www.comparegoogle.com - no, not compare the meerkats...

I ran the search terms we've been getting onto page 1 of Google's natural search results for clients using well-written content on monitored press release sites. All of them performed slightly better on the caffeinated version, so I'm looking forward to Google with a dash of caffeine.

Google's forthcoming Wave

Google's forthcoming Wave looks like email meets instant messaging, only better (imo). I think it will be rather handy for working on collaborative projects - and in PR, what project isn't collaborative these days? Good for fine-tuning press releases, articles, online PR materials, web copy and other marcoms text.

Wave is due to be launched later this year.

As MicroSoft tries to move into Google territory with Bing and Google is attempting to venture into MicroSoft territory with Wave, the first video below provides an overview of both Bing and Wave. It also demonstrates the added value that good media analysis brings to a subject, if you compare it to the second video below, but that was a preview for developers, and it does contain a useful demo of Wave.









(you can skip the long preamble - the actual Wave demo starts c6 mins 30 secs into the video).


I've already blogged on Bing. With Wave I like the almost instant transmission of characters as people type in replies, so you can be formulating your response and not staring at a "X is typing" message. I don't think speaking through a keyboard can ever be truly like a conversation, as Google claims, but I think it does look more conversational than instant messaging.

There's a very neat trick where you can take some bits of the online conversation to selected recipients and the ones missed out don't know. And easily add others in later - there's a neat playback facility the newcomers can use to replay the wave construction sequence to make sense of it unfolding.

Nice one Google.