Google has recently launched a new service called Google Public Data Explorer under Google Labs which offers a visual way to look at and analyze large public data sets on a variety of popular search topics. According to Google, the purpose of the new tool is to make “large datasets easy to explore, visualize and communicate”. Google, with its access to an immense assortment of information, is in the perfect position to help us with ways to display this information.

Users can play with the data endlessly, filtering it through various metrics and displaying it in different types of charts and graphs. Google claims that it has been using anonymous information from its users’ searches to best determine what sorts of public data are most requested, and then used that to create a list of the most popular data and statistics search topics. Those results will likely continue to inform Google’s process as it integrates more public data into its offerings.

The Data Explorer tool includes data from the original three sources Google announced last year — the US Census Bureau, US Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the World Bank — as well as five new data providers including: Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD), California Department of Education, Eurostat, US Center for Disease Control & US Bureau of Economic Analysis.

Currently there are four different choices for visualization styles – bar graph, line graph, map or bubble, and each has its advantage. After choosing a visual style, you can select what data points you would like to see and set variables such as time period.

?The Google Public Data Explorer makes large datasets easy to explore, visualize and communicate. As the charts and maps animate over time, the changes in the world become easier to understand. You don’t have to be a data expert to navigate between different views, make your own comparisons, and share your findings pretty easily. Take a look at the example I created below. The animation shows internet users (per 100 people) since 1991 in relation to Mobile cellular subscriptions (per 100 people) of Malaysia & Singapore.

There is also a video by Google from last year which introduces the idea in detail:

Great News for Google Analytics users in Malaysia & Singapore! Google is holding their 2nd Annual Google Analytics Master Class in Malaysia on Thursday, 11th March 2010 at Hilton Hotel, Kuala Lumpur. The same event will also run in Singapore on the 9th of March 2010.

I’m very happy to see that Google is finally branching out their events of Southeast Asia in Malaysia. Malaysia’s web community is pretty massive & most of the businesses here that even has the tiniest bit of web presence uses products like Google Analytics.

But sadly even though many webmasters have analytics program installed on their site, they never make the effort to learn to use the data that the system gathers for them. Analytics isn’t all about numbers, it takes you a big step further and tells you more than just how many visitors you got on your site at a given time. Google Analytics can give you valuable insight on your sales, conversion, visitor segments, visitor loyalty, stickiness of your content, achieved goals, Traffic sources, traffic generating keywords/ search phrases, landing page performance and more. In fact the use of Google analytics can be so wide that you can literally use the data to do many unconventional things (if you are creative).

How to Join the Google Anlaytics Master Class, Malaysia & Singapore

If you wish to join the Google Analytics Master Class in Malaysia / Singapore, you can head over to their website and RSVP. Google doesn’t have an office in Malaysia, thus they are using some kind of an event management company that will handle your reservations. I have heard on the twitter-verse that many have signed up already but they are yet to get any confirmation from Google (or the company acting on behalf of Google). So I made a call to the number they specified and they confirmed that they will be sending out the confirmation by end of this week. But looks like they still haven’t hit the limit yet. So you can still sign-up by registering on the respective pages:

Malaysia: https://sites.google.com/site/analyticsmasterclass/malaysia

Singapore: https://sites.google.com/site/analyticsmasterclass/singapore

Agenda & Speakers of Google Analytics Master Class

1:30 – 2:00pm Arrival & Registration

2:00 – 2:20pm Keynote Address
Beth Liebert, Product Manager, Google Analytics

2:20 – 2:40pm The Power of Segmentation
Barbara Pezzi, Director Webmarketing & Ecommerce, Swissotel
Learn how Swissotel leverages Google Analytics advanced segments to truly understand its visitors

2:40 – 2:55pm Google Analytics: Powerful. Flexible. Intelligent.
Stephanie Hsu, Google Analytics Specialist, Google
Google Analytics has come a long way in the last 12 months. Learn what new features now make Google Analytics a truly Powerful, Flexible, and Intelligent measurement tool.

2:55 – 3:10pm Taming the HiPPO
Adrian Tan, Director, Online Marketing Services, clickTRUE
Jeff Shi, Assistant Manager, Campaign Operations, clickTRUE
clickTRUE share their secrets on overcoming the demands of the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion (HiPPO) to drive real value for business

3:10 – 3:20pm Shaping the Funnel
Vinoaj Vijeyakumaar, Customer Solutions Engineer, Google Southeast Asia
Learn how Amari Hotels used Google Analytics goal funnel reports to optimise their online sales flow to generate more reservations

3:20 – 3:30pm Optimising AdWords with Google Analytics Data
Iris Cheng, Google Analytics Specialist, Google Asia Pacific
Find out how Google’s own Google Analytics Specialists optimise AdWords campaigns for increased returns on investment (ROI)

3:30 – 3:40pm Mobile Analytics for Plasa.com
Justin Lee, PointStar
PointStar share their experiences working with mobile analytics and insights for Plasa.com, Telkomsel Indonesia’s community portal

3:40 – 3:55pm Tea Break

3:55 – 4:05pm Optimising Raffles Hotels and Resorts
Vinoaj Vijeyakumaar, Customer Solutions Engineer, Google Southeast Asia
Find out how eMarketingEye have helped Raffles Hotel understand and optimise their AdWords traffic with the help of Google Analytics reports

4:05 – 4:20pm Better Landing Pages with Google Website Optimiser
Jon Stona, Regional Product Marketing Manager, Google Asia Pacific
Test different landing page designs with Google Website Optimiser and get more visitors converting on your site

4:20 – 4:30pm Price Testing with GWO – The Holy Grail of Marketing
Rachit Dayal, CEO, Happy Marketer
Happy Marketer share their experiences price testing for Genopal.com with Google Website Optimiser

4:30 – 4:45pm Boomz! Other Data Sources To Help Your Business Succeed
Madona Michael, Account Strategist, Google Southeast Asia
Learn how to augment your Google Analytics insights with Insights for Search, Google Ad Planner, and YouTube Insights

4:45 – 4:55pm Google Analytics Resources
Dinesh Jain, Google Analytics Specialist, Google India
Inspired to start making full use of Google Analytics? Learn more about the available educational resources

4:55 – 5:05pm 10 Things to do Today
Vinoaj Vijeyakumaar, Customer Solutions Engineer, Google Southeast Asia
Stephanie Hsu, Google Analytics Specialist, Google
By now your mind is racing with the possibilities Google Analytics holds for your business. We’ve distilled everything down to 10 actionable items for when you leave our Master Class

5:05 – 5:25pm Panel Discussion and Q&A
Panelists: Beth Liebert, TBD

5:25 – 6:30pm Networking Session

Event Date & Location

Thursday, 11th March 2010
Hilton Hotel Kuala Lumpur
Ballroom A
3 Jalan Stesen Sentral,
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia 50470

So who is joining me?

Update: An hour after I wrote this post, I received the confirmation email. And I believe most of the people who registered has also received it. They are still encouraging people to sign up. So don’t wait until the last minute, sign up right away.

Mike Jones, co-president of the less-talked about social networking site MySpace today announced that, updates of all MySpace users will now appear in the Google’s real time search results.

Right now, Google pulls most of its real time search results from Twitter, Google Buzz & Friendfeed. But now that MySpace has also joined the party, its pretty obvious that Google will eventually try to get everyone to open up their data stream for Google’s real time search efforts.

ReadWriteWeb points out that MySpace users don’t usually share as many links as any typical Twitter user. So in my opinion including MySpace into Google’s real time search will not bring any extra value to the searchers. Searchers are usually looking for answers and not ‘conversations’. Twitter is great for Google’s Real-time search as tweets contains valuable links that can help the searcher to find what they are looking for. MySpace users tend to be more into entertainment & music and often looked at as a social network for younger population.

MySpace Status Updates in Google Real-Time Search Results

For certain terms, Google real-time search stream appears automatically. But to see real-time search results for any particular query, you can go to google.com, click on Show Options & select updates from the left hand menu. This will basically show you all real-time updates from various sources for the given query.

Filter Real-Time Updates based on Services

If you wish to just see the real-time updates of one particular service (e.g. myspace.com) you can use the site:domain.com operator next to your keyword.

So to see all the updates regarding “chinese new year” in myspace, go to the Google’s update page and search for – Chinese New Year site:myspace.com

So do you think adding MySpace updates in Google’s Realtime search will bring any ‘real’ value to the searchers?

Google always like to test new features via their Labs. Most of the big Google products like Google Mail, Youtube, Google Search has a Labs section where they usually have a lot of hidden features & gems.

Today I’m really excited to see that one of my favorite Google products – Google Maps has just launched a Labs section on their website where they have already put up about 10 new add-ons.

Like any other Google Labs repository, Google Maps Labs will work as testing ground for experimental features that aren’t quite ready for primetime. Google clearly states that these feature may change, break or disappear at any time, so apply them with caution.

How to Enable Google Maps Labs

If you want to enable and browse the Google maps Labs, just visit the main maps page and click the green flask at the top and you get a chance to enable features like the following:

Some of the cool features that is currently available under Google Maps Labs are as follows:

Drag ‘n’ Zoom
With this feature Zooming in on a specific part of the map will become very fast and easy. With a simple click on Drag ‘n’ Zoom button, you will be able to draw a box on the map, and zoom!

Aerial Imagery
Aerial imagery gives you rotatable, high-resolution overhead imagery presented in a new perspective.

Where in the World Game
This is a really fun feature that lets you test your knowledge of world geography! You will have to guess the name of the country from satellite imagery, and try to beat your top score!

Rotatable Maps
Tired of North always being up? Add rotatable map types and give East, West and South a fair go.

What’s Around Here?
This neat feature adds a second search button that searches for “*”, returning the top results in the current view. A great way to browse the map.

LatLng Tooltip
Displays a tooltip next to the mouse cursor showing the latlng directly underneath it.

LatLng Marker
Adds an option to the context menu that lets you drop a mini marker showing the latlng of the position that the cursor was pointing at when the context menu was evoked

…..and many more! Try out the Google Maps Labs today!

If you go to the Google.com homepage now, you will see a stylish drawing of the opening ceremony of Vancouver 2010 Olympics which is unusually stretched right the way across the screen. I might be wrong, but I actually don’t remember seeing anything like that in Google before.

They have definitely done a lot of doodles for Olympics in the past, but usually all their doodles has a very similar look and feel & size. If you go through them, they all pretty much look like a mash-up of their official logo, but this stretched logo looks like a big design change to me.

If you notice closely, the logo boasts an Olympic flame in place of the letter “l”, and a small print of the Olympic rings.

So what do you think of this logo/design change?

Bing seems to continuously gain market share (a bit by bit) as the rest of the engines (especially Yahoo) sees a decline. Well, we all know how Microsoft’s Bing is gaining all these market share so easily. They are literally still spending millions on advertising to advertise their engine and go mainstream.

In the month of January, Bing’s share increased to 11.3%, up from 10.7% in December. That’s up from 8.5% a year ago.

• Google (GOOG) fell to 65.4%, from 65.7% in December, but up from 63% a year ago.
• Yahoo (YHOO) fell to 17%, from 17.3%. That’s down from 21% a year ago.
• AOL (AOL) fell to 2.5%, from 2.6%.
• Ask.com (IACI) gained market share up to 3.8%, from 3.7%.

It seems like if Bing continues to grow at this current rate, they might be able to go pass Yahoo in another year or so.

(Source: Silicon Alley Insider)

Gowalla is yet another location based product just like foursquare that allows you to record your current  whereabouts and share it with your friends.

On a recent blog post they have announced that from now onwards they will be allowing developers to build applications that uses data from Gowalla in fun and interesting ways. All of the technical details can be found by browsing the API Explorer, reading the Gowalla API documentation, and visiting the gowalla-dev Google Group.

On their official blog, Gowalla Team gave away a couple of cool ideas that uses the Gowalla API:

LunchVote — A social voting system that helps you to decide where/what to eat for lunch.

Gowallahashing — Inspired by XKCD’s Geohashing, a service that algorithmically pick a random spot every day for a given area, to encourage serendipitous challenges and meetups.

Sidebar Badge — A simple way to show off your top ten spots with a sidebar badge for your blog. 

Conference Games — Encourage conference attendees to explore the city and get to know each other by tracking their check-ins and rewarding those who get off the beaten path.

Now that Google Buzz is here which will eventually turn into a more open platform, do you think its worth developing apps/services for Gowalla or Foursquare?

If you have started blogging with a posterous blog for convenience and now thinking of moving to a full-blown blogging platform like Wordpress then they have just the right solution for you.

Wordpress has just launched a Posterous import feature inside all Wordpress.com dashboard. It uses the Posterous API so the import is seamless & easy. Basically all you need to do is, just login to your wordpress.com dashboard and go under Tools -> Import.

There you should see a Posterous importer option. Once you click that a form should appear, type in your Posterous host name, user name, and password in the appropriate fields and hit the Submit button.

Once the importer validates your credentials it will automatically start the import. If everything works out great then you should receive an email from Wordpress saying that your import has been successful!

Why would someone want to move from Posterous?

Even though posterous is a great platform to maintain something like a tumblelog, it may not be suitable for mainstream blogging due to some limitations. For instance, Posterous currently doesn’t support javascript which is required to run Advertising programs like Google Adsense or any analytics or tracking program like Google Analytics and so on.

Earlier today, Google has announced their new social media product called – Google Buzz which can be accessed from the site – buzz.google.com.

What is Google Buzz?

I personally think Google Buzz is Google’s answer to all the social media / micro-blogging sites that are out there, such as twitter, facebook, friendfeed and so on. Buzz is a dedicated page under Gmail which sort of brings status updates, links, videos and other shared features all in one place.

If you have seen/used friedfeed or Facebook’s newsfeed before then this should be a very familiar concept for you. The beauty of the product is that all these will sit right inside your Gmail, thus you don’t have to go to a separate website but just one place where most of us always go to – our email inbox!

Google Buzz and Gmail will sort of share the same contact list. So whoever you send emails to often or friends with via Google chat are to be treated as your friends/contacts in Google Buzz.

Currently Google Buzz can pull data directly from the following services:
– Flickr
– Twitter
– Picase Web
– YouTube
– Blogger
– RSS feeds connected to your Google Profile (e.g. Blogs)

How Does Google Buzz Work?

Google Buzz basically appears as a inbox/page inside your Gmail navigation (you may not see it immediately as it will be slowly rolled out in couple of days). At first Google Buzz will notify you how many people you already be auto-following based on the number of existing Google contacts you have in your Gmail account.

When using Google Buzz you can choose to share Buzz updates publicly or privately on a post-by-post basis. You can easily hand select the posts that you don’t want to be public and only to be shared among groups or individual contacts that you specify.

Here’s how Buzz will look once it’s part of your Gmail account:

Official Google Buzz Introduction Demo

Google Buzz on a Mobile Device

Google has done some interesting thing with Buzz for mobile devices. First of all, any iPhone and Android users can access Buzz by visiting buzz.google.com on their mobile browsers. There are no dedicated apps for the mobile devices yet. Buzz does a lot of things with location on the mobile. A “nearby” view shows public updates in your vicinity — which is very similar to what Foursquare and Gowalla does. Google Buzz is also nicely integrated with Google Maps. Check out the video below to learn more:

How to Activate Google Buzz in your Gmail?

Google buzz will be slowly rolled out to everyone. So no special activation is necessary. Just keep refreshing your gmail page until you see buzz in the navigation! (Just kidding..)

Conversations About Google Buzz on the Web

Google Buzz Is Google’s Approach to Sharing and the Social Space – LifeHacker

Google’s social side hopes to catch some Buzz – CNet

Google Buzz: 5 Things You Need to Know – O Reilly

Google Adds ‘Buzz’ to Gmail – Wall Street Journal

Morning Buzz: Live From Google’s Major Step Into The Social Spotlight – Techcrunch

Google Buzz in Gmail – Official Gmail Blog

If Google Wave Is The Future, Google Buzz Is The Present – Techcrunch

Google Buzz Launches 150+ Million User Social Network – Marketing Pilgrim

Introducing Google Buzz! GMail Social Sharing – Search Engine Journal

How Google Buzz Validates but Marginalizes FriendFeed – Louis Gray

BREAKING: Google Goes Social with Google Buzz – Mashable

Google Buzz: Google Takes On Twitter, Facebook & Even Foursquare – Search Engine Land

Neal Mohan, Google’s VP of Product Management just published a blog post where he highlighted Google’s continuous effort in helping publishers to make money online via advertising.

He than briefly ran through Google’s three primary ad products:

Google Adsense: Adsense has definitely helped a lot of small-large publishers to monetize their traffic and earn advertising revenue against the content that they produce. In 2009, Google’s AdSense partners, comprising over a million large and small publishers, earned over $5.2 billion through AdSense. Everytime a adsense publisher’s page loads, Google automatically maximizes the revenue in real time by showing the most relevant ad from massive pool of advertisers.

Self Ad Serving System: For big publishers, Google also has systems in place where publishers can self serve the most valuable ad to the advertisers directory in order to maximize the revenue (e.g. Google Ad Manager, Doubleclick DFP)

DoubleClick Ad Exchange – a real-time auction marketplace for display ad space that includes ad networks on one side, and major online publishers on the other. Publishers get to choose which network they want to bid and what ads can appear on their sites and which ad space they make available etc. Google uses

The Ad Exchange puts a large number of ad networks (over 65 at last count, including more than half of the largest 20 networks in the US) into price competition with each other in a real-time auction, instead of using pricing assumptions based on historical data, or trying to negotiate prices upfront (usually at a discount). It chooses the highest value ad from these competing networks at each moment, impression by impression.

Google has also published a PDF file that sort of gives an overview of how it maximizes revenue for its publishers. Do read it if you feel like learning more about how each of the products operate. (But I got to tell you, it doesn’t really contain anything new).

My Two Cents

I really like it when a Googler comes out in the official google blog and tells the world how wonderful everything is. Well I think anybody can say with certainty that Google does everything in their power to maximize the advertising revenue (Duh!). That is exactly what their whole business is built upon. Did they find any other good source of revenue for the shareholders yet? (Nada!)

But I’m curious to know how much of that ‘maximized revenue‘ is actually going to the publisher’s pocket? Didn’t I hear somebody say that Google is going to publish the percentage cut for adsense? Well I certainly don’t see that figure in the blog post of Neal wrote. If a company is truly open (like Google), I think it should give some indication on how much out of the total they are paying their publishers. Don’t you think that the publisher has the right to know that they are getting X%? And they can get X + 2% if they reach a certain level of performance? I believe releasing that information will actually motivate the publishers to work harder and make google more money in the process.

But anyway if you are keen to find out how much that $5.2 billion is out of Google’s total ad revenue, you can just refer to Google’s quarterly reports – Q1 2009, Q2 2009, Q3 2009 & Q4 2009. Just make sure you have your calculator around .