In classic Google fashion, there is a friendly video overview of Google Goggles over at the Google Mobile Blog. For those who haven’t viewed it yet, Goggles brings picture search to Android phones in a big, big way. Here’s how it works:

• Using your Android phone, you snap a picture of a logo, a book cover, or even a storefront.
• Google Goggles identifies the object and then kicks back relevant information, whether its search results, user reviews, price comparisons or store hours.
• You can save your visual search history just like you save your regular search history via a web browser.

The examples on the website are pretty impressive. A snapshot of a certain iconic bridge in San Francisco makes Goggles instantly spit back “Golden Gate Bridge” and offer a Wikipedia entry for perusal, while a picture of a business card automatically parses out the name, phone number and email address.

Google Goggles

But what’s more exciting, and scary, are the capabilities that Google Goggles will wield once it emerges from its infancy. The exciting aspects of visual search are easy to fathom. There’s many a time words fail us when we try to come up with an effective search query. Questions like: “What species of tree did this leaf come from?”, or “What kind of pill is this?”, or “Is this rash contagious?” will be far more answerable (much in the same way Midomi revolutionized the “name that tune” conundrum).

Read the rest of this article at ReveNews.

Photo by lietus

“At this time, please pretend to pay attention as we go over the safety features of this plane. In case you haven’t been in an automobile since 1964, the seat belt is fastened by inserting the flat end into the buckle until it latches. If cabin pressure is lost, a yellow oxygen mask will drop from the ceiling. Affix the mask over your face and breathe normally (yeah right…you’ve seen Fight Club haven’t you?). In the case that this flight becomes a cruise, we will provide fashionable yellow life jackets. Pull the tabs to inflate automatically. For overachievers, inflate the life jacket by blowing into the tubes located on either side of the jacket.”

The FAA requires flight attendants to go through this spiel. They know that we know the routine, and we know that they know, so most of us tune it out. Most airlines have their attendants go through the motions as quickly and generically as possible, dutifully fulfilling their obligations to their captive audience. But Southwest at least takes this opportunity to entertain their passengers and lighten the mood, which is much appreciated, especially after a long delay like mine.

A quick YouTube search of “funny Southwest attendants” reveals that my experience with Southwest is not unique. Undoubtedly, this novel approach to the mundane drag of regulatory compliance was part of the staff’s training. The practice turns out to be very astute for two reasons: it gets people to listen and it makes a memorable impression.

Like flight attendants, Web writers are representatives of a company and whether drafting a sales letter, providing copy for a website, or addressing customers through a newsletter, we  speak  with the voice of the company. While the safe route is to adopt mind-numbingly innocuous corporate language – “Moving forward, our company’s vision is to add value to the paradigm that we have pioneered through our excellent service and award-winning innovation” -  in many cases, it can be more successful to connect with readers in your target audience by adopting a more relaxed tone. After all, on the Web something more interesting is always a click away, and if the medium doesn’t hook the message will never be delivered.

Read the rest of this post at ReveNews,

Image by PinkMoose.

While the art of the resume is far from dead, what exists in the virtual cloud may ultimately have more sway on your career path than what’s on paper. These days, it’s not so much about what you say about yourself as it is about what employers and potential clients can find out about you. Take these basic steps in order to ensure that what they do find is to your advantage.

Step One: Hide Your Shame

The first and obvious step to reclaiming your web presence is to nix all the bad news on you. Unless you’re a celebrity or political figure, most of the disparaging material is going to be self-inflicted. In my case, it was my younger self that was responsible for besmirching my good name. As a kid, I was kind of a humongous dork and churned out a voluminous amount of embarrassingly crappy websites and “Dear Diary, I’m a sad sack teenager” vanity blogs. More recently, there’s stuff like Facebook and MySpace to worry about.

Here’s what you gotta do:

Nuke Old Blogs. Google all your old nicknames and handles. This will quickly bring up stuff that may not be apparent when Googling your given name but may turn up with some digging. Once you find the Xanga or LiveJournal of DarkWarrior69 or something, try to log in and put your account on private or simply delete it.

Mask Your Facebook. Log in to your account and go to Settings / Privacy / Profile. Make all of the dropdown menus “Only friends.” (Especially “Photos tagged of you.”) Don’t risk allowing “Friends of Friends” access – that’s a wider network than you may realize (I’m sure Kevin Bacon’s in there somewhere).

Protect your MySpace. Log in and click My Account / Privacy. Make everything viewable by “My Friends Only.” Or better yet, just delete your MySpace account – you’ve likely outgrown it.

Purge Search Engine Caches. Many search engines save copies of websites in a cache, which means some material can linger even after deletion. In theory, search engine spiders should remove links to old content during its next update when it finds out the page has changed (or disappeared). If that’s not quick enough for you, you’ll need to use Google Webmaster Tools or Yahoo Site Explorer (though you’ll often need admin access to the site do so). You also may want to put in a removal request with the Internet Archive. For the future, use a robots.txt file. Read more on all this here.

There. That should remove the bulk of your misguided racist manifestos and and all the drunken, half-nude photos of you. With a relatively clean slate, let’s move on.

Step Two: Disambiguation

One confounding feature of the Internet is that instead of finding what you are looking for, you find what someone else is looking for. Having a white bread name like mine compounds the problem, especially if your doppelganger has a significantly bigger wig than yours (in my case, I’m contending with venture capitalists, a pool cleaner and a fairly prominent brewing company).

In order to dethrone the pretenders, you’re going to have to make it easier for your audience to find you.

Here’s how:

Read the rest of this article at Primer Magazine.

Some excerpts from MediaBistro:

·    Will the New York Times’ “Paper Cuts” or the Los Angeles Times’ “Jacket Copy” or “Shelf Life” at Entertainment Weekly, to pick three examples, be bound by the same FTC guidelines as “The Elegant Variation” or “Smart Bitches, Trashy Books” ? If not, why not?

·    Just out of curiosity, will the FTC be requiring authors who blurb other authors’ books to disclose the “material connections” they have to those authors and the publishers of those books? If so, will those requirements apply to blurbs printed on book jackets as well as print advertising? (And if such disclosures are not made, against whom should a complaint be made? the publisher or the author who wrote the blurb?) If not, why not?

On the other hand, Associated Press writers Deborah Yao and Emily Fredrix respond to at least the first bullet by stating the following:

“Bloggers have long praised or panned products and services online. But what some consumers might not know is that many companies pay reviewers for their write-ups or give them free products such as toys or computers or trips to Disneyland. In contrast, at traditional journalism outlets, products borrowed for reviews generally have to be returned.”

Reading these reactions, I detect a fair amount of exaggeration and “slippery slope” fear-mongering. I do think that it’s interesting that both the print media and blogger factions choose to bring up books as the innocuous side of the endorsement coin. And I think discussing it in these terms sorely misses the point.

Read the rest of the article at ReveNews.

Image by dbking.