Earlier today, Google unveiled the next evolution of its search engine. Considering that Google searches account for about 85% of the worlds search engine traffic, even small tweaks are headline news.  But Google is calling this latest development “… a quantum leap for search.” So the buzz surrounding this is going to be massive. But some of the doomsday SEO people are getting a little bit nuts.

What is Google Instant?

With the ‘old’ Google, you typed a search query and then clicked the ‘search’ button to begin returning results. Refining your search meant performing a series of individual queries to narrow the results. Google did prompt users with hints, but each query still resulted in its own unique results.

With Instant, Google tries to predict what you are searching for before you even finish typing. The search page is refreshed with dynamic results in real time based on the characters you’ve typed so far. So instead of browsing pages of results, you know in a fraction of a second if your search is on-target. (Google claims to save its users 11 hours every second with the new service.) The effect is almost instant feedback that seemingly reads your mind.

How does it work?

Google has apparently reworked their entire search mechanism to facilitate this feature. A combination of indexed pages and cached searches allows Google to predict what you’re searching for and selectively narrow and prioritize results. Then these results are updated in real time using AJAX.

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We’d like to say we left our hearts in San Francisco, but the truth is we were too busy producing web content for the ABA to see much of this city by the bay.

Team Manning was hunkered down for a week in and near the Moscone Center, the site of the American Bar Association’s Annual Meeting.  Mitch, Mike and Doug spent long days and nights shooting, editing and posting video clips to the group’s primary communications site www.ABANow.org.

Photo by Phil Coblentz

Our team was kept busy with quick turnarounds of video content such as Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, new ABA president Stephen Zack and David Boies, the attorney who successfully challenged California’s ban on same-sex marriages. It was a fascinating time to be in San Francisco considering this ban was overturned while the meeting was occurring. Not that we had a great sense of what was going on outside of our edit room. Our late night work schedule limited our opportunities to get to see the city. So while there were few cable car rides, we were able to have some amazing Chinese take out. Continue Reading →

Illustration by Matt Hamm

Recently, Social Times cited a study showing that 50% of companies entering social media have no plan.  It’s sort of like going on a road trip without a GPS. It could be an interesting ride, but it may not get you where you need to go.

Social media are simply tools that facilitate conversations between individuals. What social media you deploy and how you deploy it should really be driven by the goals and needs of your business.

Rather than saying, “We need to be on Facebook,” what you need to be saying is, “Who am I trying to engage and why? What are their needs and interests? What are they saying online and how can I contribute to the conversation?”

There’s a huge misconception that companies need to be on every popular form of social media. You’re told you need a blog, Twitter profile, Facebook page, LinkedIn group, Digg profile, YouTube channel, Flickr account and don’t forget Foursquare! But are your customers there? And do you have the resources to engage and respond to your customers regularly on all of these platforms? If not, you’re better off doing nothing, than doing any of these options poorly. Continue Reading →

Registration Screen from the Times

Not to continue beating a dead horse, or to steal Patrick’s thunder by continuing to rift on the fading glory that is the Newspaper, but there’s been a pretty interesting experiment that’s being going on across the pond that has the potential to change the way we access news online. I’m talking about The Times’ (of London) institution of a pay-for-content scheme, or paywall.

As of July 2, 2010 only The Times’ homepage is available to the public. Attempting to click through to any full story results in an automatic redirect to the registration screen shown above. Current costs are £1 for a daily pass or for a trial month’s worth of access, and could potentially go up over time. Continue Reading →

We have launched many websites in our time, but few were as eventful as the one we participated in for GlenviewMarines.com. Doug and I headed up to the old Glenview Naval Base for the official launch of the site dedicated to helping the servicemen and women who make up the Glenview Marines. Having donated our services, we wanted to introduce them to the ins and outs of their new site.

As part of the celebration, we were treated to the presentation of the flags by a full Color Guard and a spontaneous singing of the Marine Corps Hymn (Did you ever hear the last verse? Hilarious!). We were also joined by representatives from the Semper Fi Fund, the Wounded Warrior Regiment and Andrew Tibby, a local Iraqi vet who had received grants from the Semper Fi Fund. Continue Reading →

For anyone following the 2010 FIFA World Cup, the vuvuzela is an impossible-to-ignore aspect of the tournament’s location. A traditional South African musical instrument, soccer fans have turned the now-plastic noise makers into the Jar-Jar Binks of the sporting world – loved by few, hated by most, ridiculed by all. The buzzing noise has gotten so bad that FIFA briefly considered a ban in response to players, commentators and broadcasters complaining about it’s impact on the game. Now, if they’d just stayed in the soccer stadiums where they belong, I’d have nothing to blog about. But the vuvuzela has become an internet sensation as well; that’s right: its trademark buzz has gone viral.
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Everyone knows that print journalism is in a death rattle, and it’s tempting to wax nostalgic as paper after paper bites the dust. But when you hear comments like those of Tribune Chairman Sam Zell, it’s tough to have a lot of sympathy.

During an interview with CNBC, Zell was asked about the future of the newspaper business. What is his visionary prediction? PDFs. That’s right–the staggering problem of remaining profitable in the newspaper industry could be solved if only we could figure out a way to deliver PDF versions of publications.

“going forward, it’s going to require all kinds of different approaches, including probably most significant, the elimination of home delivery and the replacement of it by PDFs.”

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There's a reason you don't see packaging like this.

If you’ve ever been backcountry camping, you know that it’s always a bad idea to draw your drinking water from a static source. Sure, that pond may have water in it. But when you’re parched from a day of hiking, would you rather quench your thirst from the algae-covered (and probably bacteria-filled) stagnant pond, or from a swift-moving mountain stream? The choice should be obvious.

In the past, most websites were like the pond – static pools of water. They may have looked pretty at first, but they tended to stagnate quickly. As the content grew more and more outdated, the site became about as appealing as a drink from that algae-covered water. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that when it comes to browsing the web, people’s preferences are no different—they want their content fresh.

Some of the web’s leading thinkers see the evolution of content ‘streams’ as the future of media consumption. Gone by the wayside, they predict, will be the notion of viewers making the online journey to visit a static site. Instead, our news thirst will be quenched by a series of content streams that the user may draw from at his or her leisure.

If you think this sounds like foolish dreaming about some future web utopia, you’d be wrong. This transformation has been going on right under your nose, and we’ve already begun to see this evolution in services Twitter, Facebook and Google Finance. And one of our own clients, the American Bar Association, has already been publishing stream-based content for almost a year on their ABANow site.

Have you observed a change in the way you consume web content?

I spent this past weekend attending a Canon HDSLR workshop in Chicago.  The three day event was put together by Createasphere and Canon to showcase and teach the many uses for this remarkable camera.  Our instructors Nancy Schreiber ASC, and Jared Abrams (HDSLR Expert) trained us on the aesthetics of movie making, and provided the technical expertise on camera operation.  Additionally, Mike Sippel, the Director of Engineering at Fletcher Camera Chicago, was instrumental in educating the group on complex menu systems and the “guts” of the camera.  If you’ve ever read a manual and wondered what the heck you were looking at, this is the guy that can explain it.

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There is a huge surge in the number of adults watching online video and studies show that there is a big explosion in mobile video.  Mobile video has the highest growth rate of any mobile application category.  A new Cisco study reports that nearly two-thirds of the entire mobile data traffic will be video in just 3 years.

CNN's iPhone App gives users access to mobile video.

Overall video is now one-third of all consumer Internet traffic, and will approach 40% by the end of this year. Cisco predicts that video will account for more than 90% of all Internet traffic in just 4 years.  A Pew Research report backs up those numbers. Pew’s survey shows 69% of all adult Internet users watch video online.  While there is a big jump in comedy clips, the number of people watching educational videos nearly doubled since 2007.  We are seeing online video move beyond skateboarding tricks and cats playing the piano to thoroughly embrace serious communications.