Matt Cutts from Google gave this excellent insight to SEO from Google's point of view at WordCamp 09 in San Francisco, earlier this year. The slide show from the presentation is also available at: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-for-bloggers/
Google already embeds YouTube videos in search results, however now
it has launched a built in music playback on search results.
Just search for an artist, an album, a song or even a few words from the lyrics and you get song previews in the search results.
6% of all searches on Google are for music or music-related information and now
when you get the results you can play a preview of the song and buy it right there with one of
Google's partner music sales sites.
This will leverage enormous impulse buying of music tracks.
Here's info from Google about this new feature:
Time.com has an interesting article discussing the issue of what happens Facebook profiles after you die.
This issue arose recently when a new version
of Facebook added a feature to automatically generates suggestions
of people to reconnect with. Within days there were complaints about
suggestions to connect with friends who had died.
I'm pretty sure Facebook doesn't have some medium connection to the after world !!
Anyway Facebook has now clarified that profiles of people who have died
are sealed and only made available to friends and family and will not
be part of the reconnect with friends function.
It does make you think of the broader issues of real life and virtual lives, ever after lives.
Food for thought....
At the recent Web 2.0 Summit, Microsoft announced that their search engine Bing.com had social media search capability (using Twitter and Facebook) and Google replied with details of its "Social Search" option which has been made available on Google Labs.
When you search on Google a section on the bottom of the search results, shows Social
Search results, from content produced by your friends and contacts in blogs, Twitter, Facebook
and other social media sites listed in your Google Profile.
So if you searched for a new camera, as well as seeing results from the manufacturer,
the retailers, and the review sites, you might also find a blog review of it by one of your friends or contacts,
which is an enormously more powerful recommendation.
Wired.com has an article and video about Obscura Digital, a marketing media lab, which has developing a 360 degrees fully immersive interactive video installation for a party penthouse.
The videos are projected on all walls of the room giving a sensation of being transported to various locations and it picks up on conversation in the room and modifies the video to reflect it.
The system uses 10 computers, 11 projectors, has panoramic scenes and includes videos of dancers.
A research team at the University of Utah has come up with an inexpensive method to see inside a building. Currently some radar units costing over 100k have made this possible but hardly used because of the expense. Now, using inexpensive radio technology its possible to take a different and more accurate approach.
Looks like the fantasy of superman's X-Ray vision may soon be a reality.
This is an excellent and funny video presentation by Rory Sutherland at TED.com on how advertising adds value to a product by changing our perspective.
