Loosing Site

In this video Matt Cutts reveals that Google does not use keyword for ranking “even the least little bit”. It looks like so much spamming had been going on that keywords were effectively rendered useless for ranking sites and pages.

There are two other use cases that spring to mind. Accessibility and composition.

In the UK, the Royal National Institute for the Blind recommends the use of metadata, including keywords, to aid navigation.

“Page information metadata must include a page TITLE, keywords, author and description. This should be as accurate as possible to ensure that users get all the information they need to navigate a site.”

Keywords can also provide a useful focus when composing text for a page. It’s a way of noting the few precise concepts you want to cover in a manner that will survive edits and revisions you make in the text.

I’ve been using Google Fast Flip for a few days now, and quite like it. It’s close to the feel of browsing through a magazine or newspaper, with the eye briefly skimming each article as it comes through.

Google Fast Flip is a web application that lets users discover and share news articles. It combines qualities of print and the Web, with the ability to “flip” through pages online as quickly as flipping through a magazine. It also enables users to follow friends and topics, discover new content and create their own custom magazines around searches.

Features : Google Fast Flip – Google News Help

This works really well with traditional journalistic writing that has an inverted pyramid structure as I can get the gist from the first few paragraphs.  I like the feeling of serendipity encouraged by flicking through articles from different sources that I ordinarily wouldn’t have found – like this article about a Skype lawsuit from the Christian Science Monitor.

I nice to see such a variety of reading tools developing, with Fast Flip, Issuu and Veri exploring richer interfaces and different discovery processes.

Google has added a map chart type to its free data visualisation solution. Google charts API creates images on the fly to present data encoded in the image url.

The available maps are at continental or world scale, with the exception of the USA where geographical data for each state can be displayed.

Developer’s Guide – Google Chart API – Google Code via kwout

Data for the charts is included as url parameters using ISO Country Codes, RGB color values and simple numeric or string encoding of data values.

Developer’s Guide – Google Chart API – Google Code via kwout

The URL’s are simple enough to construct by (a careful) hand, but are more suited to scripting and code generation.

Google has launched Sites, a product developed from its 2006 JotSpot acquisition.

Designed for team based site building and collaboration, the application can be used to build intranets, projects spaces, on-line classrooms and generic web sites.

Welcome to Google Sites via kwout

Sites are built from combinations of:

• Web pages with WYSIWYG editing and version control.
• Dashboards composed of collections of gadgets.
• Dated announcements that act as internal blogs.
• File Cabinets used for storing and describing binary files.
• Sortable Lists.

Pages can be enhanced with gadgets that integrate with other Google services:

• Calendars
• Documents
• Picassa web slideshows
• Spreadsheets
• Spreadsheet Forms
• Presentations
• YouTube
• Google Video

Specialised gadgets help with navigation

• Table of Contents
• Recent Posts
• Recent Uploaded Files
• Text Blocks

Any standard gadget from the iGoogle directory can be embedded in a page, as can Google Mashups and bespoke gadgets built on top of the Google Gadget API.

Sites has a small collection of themes. Additional options give a more refined control over backgrounds, logos, color schemes and fonts. The visual appearance will be adequate for many applications, but will not be sufficiently distinctive for sites that require strong branding and highly distinctive visuals.

While Sites is best suited to intranet/workgroup use, the easy integration with other feeds and services makes it a platform worth considering for public facing content driven applications, particularly those that integrate data from a variety of sources.

Official Google Blog: Bringing it all together via kwout

Integrating well with Google Apps for Teams, Google Sites is in direct competition with Microsoft Sharepoint. It again uses a bottom up marketing strategy, allowing workgroups to introduce technical solutions linked via company email addresses.

Google has added a new feature to its online spreadheet. Simple polls and surveys to be conducted by email or through web forms with the results saved in a spreadsheet.

Holiday Reading via kwout

The forms are easy to create and easy to complete. There is no authentication, which means that the same respondant can complete the form multiple times. This is not suitable for high stakes applications, or where identity issues are a concern, but it’s fine for simple data gathering, fun polls, suggestions boxes, guestbooks, ad listings etc.

Feel free to complete the sample survey on Holiday Reading.