Google Audio Indexing (Gaudi) is a new technology that allows users to better search and watch videos from various YouTube channels. It uses speech technology to find spoken words inside videos and lets the user jump to the right portion of the video where these words are spoken. Google Audio Indexing thus makes it easier for people to find and consume spoken content from videos on the Web.

The official announcement suggested we would be seeing continuing innovation. For more detailed information on GAUDI, check out the FAQ for this technology.

Google for some time has had Google Elections Video Search gadget which is wholly US centric information. It was very instrumental in pulling together information on the views, actions and platforms of the two presidential candidates. Google Audio and the Google Elections Video Search gadget use the exact same underlying technology.

Google Audio Indexing uses speech technology to transform spoken words into text and leverages the Google indexing technology to return the best results to the user. The returned videos are ranked based — among other things — on the spoken content, the metadata, the freshness. The gadget periodically crawls the YouTube political channels for new content. As soon as a new video is uploaded to YouTube, it is processed by the system and made available in the GAUDI index for people to search.

Google Audio Indexing searches only those videos uploaded on the YouTube political channels at the present time. That is a very limited scope currently, but it will surely not be long before Google extends the use over the whole YouTube Gamut.

Post from: StayGoLinks

Dipping into videos with Google’s GAUDI

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The El Camino Hospital in Silicon Valley has opened a new facility making it possibly the most wired hospital you can find.

The $480 million, state-of-the-art facility takes full advantage of new technologies, ranging from a wall-to-wall wireless network, to patient beds with built-in translators for 22 languages, to robots that move around the hospital carrying medical supplies and patient meals. Robotic devices help doctors perform surgeries and electronic lifts help get patients into beds safely.

There is also a Genomics Center as part of the facility. The state-of-the-art, seismically sound acute care center has health care business intelligence capabilities based on the Amalga technology from Microsoft. By aggregating ambulatory and inpatient data in a common data store, the Amalga Unified Intelligence System (UIS) delivers a cross-care continuum view of the patient without requiring clinicians to learn multiple systems or requiring IT to maintain multiple systems.

Now that is one smart hospital.

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Smart Hospitals Speak Your Language

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Darren Rowse poses an interesting question in asking What are Your Favorite 10 Blogging Tools? It clearly also is a topic that will generate a great deal of comment and discussion given the popularity of his Problogger blog.

It’s time for a little discussion – lets talk blogging tools. Over in the ProBlogger.com forum there’s been a lot of talk about different tools, applications, platforms and plugins that helps to improve blogs. I’m loving the different opinions and experiences and thought it’d be a good question to open up to the wider community – what are your favourite 10 blogging tools? I suspect most of us will probably include our blogging platform (Blogspot, WordPress, TypePad etc) in the list somewhere but other than that anything goes. Perhaps it’s a comments tool, perhaps a desktop editor, perhaps a plugin or widget – anything goes!

I am sure the resulting blog post with all its comments will be very search engine visible and many others will link to it.

However I am not sure that these lists of 10 that are so search-engine friendly are necessarily the most useful to readers. In this case, I can suggest a more user-friendly topic, which will undoubtedly be much less search-engine visible. I hope many will choose to comment since this could collect a host of revelations and new finds for our readers. The question we are asking is:

What is your favorite blogging tool that you believe few others may have found?

I could have nominated Dragon NaturallySpeaking, which is software to create text by dictation, and which is a real productivity help:

Dragon NaturallySpeaking gives small business and advanced PC users the power to create documents, reports and emails three times faster than most people type — with up to 99% accuracy. Most people speak over 120 words per minute, but type less than 40 words a minute. That means you can create documents and emails about three times faster with Dragon NaturallySpeaking. Dragon never makes a spelling mistake, and it actually gets smarter the more you use it!

DNS does of course cost money, so my nomination for the best, least known blogging tool is to use Mind Maps to organize your thoughts before you expand on your ideas. A great free tool to use, which I highly recommend is FreeMind, which is free mind mapping software.

FreeMind is a premier free mind-mapping software written in Java. The recent development has hopefully turned it into high productivity tool. We are proud that the operation and navigation of FreeMind is faster than that of MindManager because of one-click “fold / unfold” and “follow link” operations.

If you have some blogging tool that you are using that you think is not well enough known, why not add a mention in the comments. I’m sure others will appreciate your effort.

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Post from: StayGoLinks

Best Least Known Blogging Tool

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High performance delivered is a slogan that Accenture has made famous. It is a powerful reminder of how businesses can achieve success. The thinking can be applied to any business function: that includes websites.

When you hear the words high performance, your mind may immediately switch to images of glossy automobiles with highly tuned engines. In some ways a website can be similar to that glossy automobile. In both cases high-performance means doing what is necessary to ensure the vehicle will perform as well as it can. With both that only has meaning when there is a clear objective to be achieved. In the case of the automobile it may be high speed. In the case of the website it probably has something to do with how visitors appreciate and interact with the website.

Efficiency in meeting website objectives

High-performance is a question of efficiency. Only when you have scales to measure performance can you begin to tune it for even better performance results. For a time it was customary to do website reviews. As we pointed out in the previous post, with greater knowledge, people are now requesting website audits. As with any audit, this gives concrete results that measure what has been achieved and suggest what improvement can be targeted.

A website is much more than just what people see in the first ten minutes exposure to it. Many factors are involved in delivering the best customer experience to website visitors. A big part in getting visitors to the site may be the search engine visibility the website has created. Once on the website the first impression is very important. Thereafter the visitor must find it easy to navigate around the website in order to get the information they are seeking. The content of the site must be such that visitors develop a sense of trust in the website owner. This in turn increases the probability that they will react positively to any call to action. For example some may choose to buy the product they were looking at.

How to choose a website designer

If a website must now be strong in all these different dimensions, this raises the question of how best to choose a website designer. Any website designer who is aware of all these different dimensions will no doubt illustrate their team’s multitalented abilities through their own websites.

If one is seeking an all-around website designer, what might their website showcase. A prime example of this is PrimeView who offer Arizona web design.

Their website features a number of skill sets which they feel are important.. The main ones are web design affecting the immediate impression of the website, Internet marketing, e-commerce where online purchases are involved and Arizona SEO.

This is not the case of being good at everything but master of none as you can check by visiting their cool before and after gallery.

As more people become frustrated by a nonperforming website and become aware of those who are operating high-performance websites, the shift will be on. Websites can achieve very strong results if they are only built with high performance in mind right from the start.

Post from: StayGoLinks

Designing High Performance Websites

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In the past I have expressed some skepticism about the free website reviews that are available.

Another aspect of this topic came to mind when I took part in a website audit online chat hosted by David Harry via his Huomah SEO Blog.  I suddenly realized that there is a world of difference between the words review and audit.

What is a review?

Most often the word review is used about art objects, like a play or a book.  It is usually one person’s opinion and clearly it is always subjective.

If you want a review of your website, it could be triggered by a simple question like, What do you think of my website?  The word review almost emphasizes that this should deal with how the website looks to the reviewer.

If you regard your website as a work of art, then such a review may be all that you are looking for.

Grading Websites

Many website owners need more.  They build their websites to achieve certain goals.  A review that indicates that the reviewer found the website attractive is not very helpful in measuring performance against goals.  Some people have therefore attempted to put some precision in this process by offering grades for websites.

For example Website Grader does attempt to measure how well a given site will appear in the search engine listings.  This particular blog seems to be rated quite highly by such a tool.

However the method of computing the score can be somewhat arbitrary and certainly Michael Gray has some major reservations about this process.  In addition it is not clear that such a grading tool will give the right list of actionable items to help improve the website.

What is an audit?

The word audit would seem to be a much better choice for a tool that can help point to ways of improving the website.  An audit is a disciplined monitoring process to identify how well a website is performing on the important factors involved in achieving the website’s objectives.

A good audit will cover all the important parameters of the website and provide measurements of the website’s position.  This allows a detailed list to be prepared of what actions are needed for full performance improvement.  The hard-nosed audit process is much more likely to be useful than the somewhat soft and fuzzy review.

SMM offers Website Mini-Audits

A full website audit can be extremely detailed and take a significant amount of time to complete.  However in some cases a more summary mini-audit may quickly identify important major factors that need correction.  It is for this reason that SMM offers a range of mini-audits to check out major problems when only limited budgets are available.

• Bonus Website Mini-Audit
• Basic Website Mini-Audit
• Rapid Website Mini-Audit

If you are concerned about your website and whether it is performing as well as it might, why not get in touch with us for which ever mini-audit will work for you.

Post from: StayGoLinks

Website Audits Replace Website Reviews

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Guy Kawasaki feels the need to apologize for his practice of repeating tweets since this goes against the spirit of the early days of Twitter. He has some interesting charts showing the effectiveness of repeating tweets. Given this, he is in no way repentant. We would do well to follow his example.

As he points out, Twitter now is a very different online space from what it was in the early days. Then one would send the word to a few friends on what was happening in your neck of the woods.

Now the Twitter-scape is a rushing torrent of tweets and it is very much a matter of hit-or-miss whether you will see the tweets of your friends when so much else is going on. Twitter continues to see exponential growth so this problem will get worse as time goes on.

Given this, we should all find Guy Kawasaki’s approach one that we can adopt without qualms. The tweets should of course be worth repeating and the repetition should not be too often nor for too long. However in a world that has got used to the multiple appearances of television ads, sometimes within minutes, repeated tweets should not be viewed askance. Indeed it will still be true that most people will not see any of them or possible one or two occurrences. That can hardly be described as overkill.

Post from: StayGoLinks

Guy Kawasaki Repeats Tweets: So Do It

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Canadians pay among the highest cellphone rates in the western world, according to a new international report by the OECD that has reignited calls for greater competition and regulation in Canada’s wireless sector.

Any way you slice it, technology consultant Jesse Hirsh said Canadians aren’t getting a good deal from the country’s three large carriers because the trio — Telus, Rogers and Bell — make up an oligopoly that “are all ex-monopolies and they think and act like monopolies. They’re less interested in innovation and more interested in the least amount of effort that they can make to charge the highest price.”

That is why the iPhone was so long delayed here in Canada and you should not expect that the exciting innovation represented by Google Voice will be available in Canada anytime soon.

The Mobile Web is a major sector for technological investment and innovation. It is heart-breaking that Canadian involvement is severely weakened by the dog-in-the-manger attitude of the Canadian cellphone oligopoly. Their short-sighted focus on maximising short term revenues from existing customers does both them and the Canadian economy a major disservice. One can only hope that the Canadian Government puts a high priority on changing this situation. In terms of reward on effort, it would be one of the most important dossiers they have.

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Canadian Cell Phone Rates Throttle Mobile Web Innovation

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If you thought MLM stood for Multi-Level Marketing, then you are a little behind the times.  It is the next big thing and according to the Kelsey Blog, Mike Boland and Michelle Moore, director of search engine strategies at Metric Voodoo, were together on a panel at SES San Jose this week and no doubt got into how to get Mobile Local Marketing right.

If you are into this hot subject of MLM, then you should follow the Kelsey Blog.  Other recent articles that caught my eye were the following:

Yellix Dials in to Mobile Social Networking 

Yellix is a mobile app that identifies incoming calls with Facebook information of the caller (if they happen to be a Facebook friend).  The idea is that Facebook status updates add contextual “conversation starter” to phone conversations, possibly driving some sort of location based activity.  This will in fact be tied to local business information that is searchable and served when contextually relevant to the content of incoming callers’ status updates.

Pay per Call Moving Into YP Mainstream

There is much chatter in the Yellow Pages business about pay-per-call advertising programs, in print as well as online, moving beyond selective use and into the mainstream. Bill Dinan, president of the call measurement firm Telmetrics, asserts that “Pay for Performance Advertising Shows Dramatic Growth as Local Search Marketers Deal with Economy’s Reduced Budgets.”

YouTube’s ‘News Near You’ Working to Expand Local Media Partners

YouTube’s “News Near You” service has signed deals with 200 local media outlets to post their videos, according to reporting in The New York Times. The Google-owned company will share ad revenue with these outlets, whose numbers are likely to increase. More than 25,000 news sources have been invited to participate.

If you have not yet considered how to tap into this explosive growth for Mobile Local Marketing, then the Kelsey Blog should be on your RSS News Feed reader to get the latest buzz.

Post from: StayGoLinks

Mobile Local Marketing – or MLM

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THE next frontier in computing has four wheels. Just as microprocessors and wireless Internet connections have turned cameras, phones and televisions into computers (sans mouse, of course), the technology is poised to transform the way we drive by putting the Internet — and all of its wondrous options and distractions — on the dashboard.

It cited a number of examples:

• WEB RADIO Blaupunkt will offer thousands of stations from the Internet.
• Chrysler’s Uconnect is a combination high-speed cellular Internet connection and wireless router that gives any nearby Wi-Fi-enabled device Web access.
• Ford has its Microsoft-based Sync system.The system allows drivers to use voice commands to play music from connected MP3 players and have text messages read back to them, and the new version adds GPS navigation, traffic conditions and information, including weather and news culled from the Internet.
• Sync differs from standard navigation and entertainment systems in that it does not require a built-in LCD display. It relies solely on voice recognition, eliminating the need for human operators on the other end because it sends spoken, Internet-based information back to the car. Turn-by-turn directions, for example, are read aloud.
• Audiovox, which makes car DVD and entertainment systems, is planning to extend live television feeds to the back seat. The company is working with a subsidiary of Qualcomm that already provides live TV programming to Verizon Wireless and AT&T cellular customers.

Nissan has pushed the notion to the ultimate by describing its new Cube automobile as a gas-powered smartphone.

The new Nissan Cube is  a “mobile device” which has “extreme browsing” capability. In other words, a giant gas-powered smart phone for a generation likelier to idolize Steve Jobs than Steve McQueen.  The multimillion-dollar marketing campaign is a unique attempt at addressing what’s become the industry’s digital elephant in the room: that for many North Americans, the open road isn’t nearly as enticing as the information superhighway.

The (somewhat slow loading Flash) Canadian website encourages drivers to “personalize it, share it, connect with it” — with the Cube’s roomy interior described in Facebook parlance as a place to “add friends” — while the launch has incorporated a “Hypercube” social media campaign, Twitter stream, blogging site, community forum, Facebook presence and iPhone game that was downloaded more than 50,000 times in its first three days.

One might wonder how far can all this go.

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Your Mobile Device Has Wheels

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If they do their checking before they leave home using their desktop PC, then they may well use Google Local Search. It may be a problem for you to rank well in such a search as a recent Cre8asite Forums discussion points out. As the topic author pointed out, there are Completely And Utterly Farcical Google Local Verification Procedures. The problem is that Google does not support this local search facility with a customer service function. They rely on computer algorithms to identify the location of particular businesses. If that algorithm handles your website incorrectly, then it may be very difficult for you to get that corrected.

You may not be aware, but if such a customer does a Google search for your business on their mobile device that may give them a very different result. Since your more interesting prospects may be using a Blackberry or an iPhone, this can be an important challenge.

To check out whether you appear in Google Mobile Search for appropriate keywords, the following is a way for you to check this. This is a simulation of how Google mobile search appears on an iPhone using landscape display.

In all likelihood you may be surprised at the results. As usual Google does not reveal details of its Mobile Search algorithm. However it is likely that if your website does not give a good user experience on a mobile device, then it may be downgraded in the listings. Notice also that there is a link to Google Local Search. That of course in this case must be Google Local Mobile search. The results will be different from the regular desktop Local Search.

It is also of interest to note that it is only on mobile devices that you have this direct link to local search. In the regular Google desk top research there is no such link. In that case Google relies on an analysis of the search terms to decide whether to give you local search results. You can try your desktop search using Google Maps but this does not give you an easy route to find local suppliers.

If you wish to make sure that potential customers find you, it is important that you cover all all these different ways customers may try to find you. Contact us if you need help in handling these challenges.

Post from: StayGoLinks

Check Mobile Customers Search And Find Your Website

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