Edwards portrays himself as a hapless naive soul in over his head, which makes for a fun narrative. There are plenty of good anecdotes, like the time when Matt Cutts’s wife had the idea of baking free “porn cookies” as a reward for everyone who helped test the new Google porn filter – “Search for porn, get a cookie” was the unmissable incentive. There’s also an account of the challenges of establishing Google in China, when Edwards is sent there to find a new Chinese name for the brand because “while Yahoo’s name translated as ‘elegant tiger,’ ours was rendered with characters that meant ‘old dog.’”

The section about how the company reacted on and after September 11th is really fascinating. I remember at the time wondering what the decision-making process was behind the content which appeared then on the Google homepage and it’s interesting to see this explained.

Since the story ends over six years ago, when the author left Google in April 2005, it doesn’t provide an up-to-date insider’s view of how Google operates today. However, there’s still a lot here which is helpful for understanding the issues the company now faces. There’s a vivid picture of the culture clash between engineering and marketing in an engineering-lead environment and some memorable vignettes of bosses Larry Page and Sergey Brin – such as the following anecdote, where Sergey sets out his ambitions for Google’s future:

“Speed is an issue for me,” [Sergey] said, “… If search engines were faster and better, they could be integrated into your thought process.” He saw Google becoming an invisible component in every user’s decision-making, not just a tool for finding a particular fact. Apparently “brain-integration” was one of our hitherto undisclosed corporate goals.

Sergey’s stated aims for Google becoming an “invisible component” in every user’s decision making is revealing – given that recent critiques like Siva Vaidhyanathan’s “The Googlization of Everything” and Eli Pariser’s “The Filter Bubble” have lamented the effects of Google’s “invisible” personalisation and default options in shaping the way people are now receiving news and other information.

Another fascinating section for current concerns about the company comes from the discussion of attitudes towards privacy issues. Now that governments across Europe are legislating on providing explicit opt-outs for tracking cookies, it’s interesting to see the stated reasoning behind Google’s initial cookies policy. Edwards writes:

What if we let users opt out of accepting our cookies altogether? I liked that idea, but Marissa [Mayer] raised an interesting point. We would clearly want to set the default as “accept Google’s cookies.” If we fully explained what that meant to most users, however, they would probably prefer not to to accept our cookie. So our default setting would go against users’ wishes.

…so it was better not to open the issue up at all. The vehemence of management insistence that there were no privacy issues with Google indicates that they were very aware that privacy concerns could be a serious problem – such as in the following account of Sergey’s reaction to early PR problems with Gmail:

Sergey paced the office like a tiger in a tiny cage, commanding us to set up a war room to deal with the problem, demanding we put up more information on the site, and insisting that we tell everyone, “There is no privacy issue.”

The conflict between Google’s need as a company to make money out of mining user-supplied data for ad personalisation and it’s desire to portray itself as a friend of user privacy is obviously something which continues to this day.

There’s also an interesting account of how Google’s original social network “Orkut” got set up, in a section called “The Antisocial Network”, which shows how Google lost out on an opportunity to compete with Facebook early on.

Edward’s narrative overall is undeniably rose-tinted, but he doesn’t avoid criticism of Google where it’s due – as in this part of his closing analysis:

Is Google secretive? No question. Arrogant? Maybe. Tone-deaf to the concerns of the very users it claims to serve? Occasionally. But evil? I don’t think so.

This is a fun read for a business/tech book and I’d definitely recommend it to anyone’s who’s interested in Google, search or the history of the web.

I’m Feeling Lucky – The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 is written by Douglas Edwards and published by Allen Lane.

Related posts

Review of Googling Security: How Much Does Google Know About You?

I reckon the test should be reasonably straightforward for anyone who uses Google Analytics regularly. The trickiest part for me were the multiple choice questions where you need to select “all that apply” and aren’t sure how many you have to tick. I think these were probably where I lost my 6%.

Tips for passing are:

• Make sure you carefully watch the video lessons in Google’s Conversion University. Nearly all the questions I was asked could have been answered from the information there.
• Pay especial attention to the sections on e-commerce tracking and AdWords integration if you don’t use these features yourself, as you’ll definitely be asked questions about them.
• Also read an up-to-date Google Analytics book, as there were a few questions I wouldn’t have known the answers to just from the Conversion University videos. I read Justin Cutroni’s Google Analytics from O’Reilly during the week before the exam. This was only published in August, so doesn’t contain outdated information, and packs a lot of content in a concise form. (O’Reilly books also have an advantage at the moment of being available really cheaply in the iPhone App Store – if you can bear the finger-strain of all the page swiping.) Alternatively, you could try the second edition of Brian Clifton’s Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics. (See this review of the previous edition which I wrote a couple of years ago.)  The Google Analytics Channel videos and anything written by Avinash Kaushik are also very worthwhile for additional background study.

Below are a few links to “exam tips” posts in other blogs which I found helpful when preparing for the test:

• Tips for Preparing for the Google Analytics IQ Test
• Google Analytics Individual Qualification Tips – I Just Passed My Test
• Passed the Google Analytics IQ Certification

Search Engine Optimization Secrets

One of the title’s main selling points is its currency. This is the 2010 edition of the book, which is updated annually to take account of new developments. (However, the ‘SEO for 2011′ part of the title is a bit optimistic for a book published in the first half of 2010.) There’s a special report on how to optimize your site for better ratings with Bing, coverage of Google Caffeine and up-to-date screenshots of the various online tools and services covered.

The worst aspect of the book for me was that the version that’s on sale is plainly unfinished. The copy I bought from Amazon a month ago still had editor’s comments included in the text. Being up to date is great in an SEO book, but it would still be nice to get a properly finished product.

Search Engine Optimization Secrets: SEO for 2011 is written by Mike Monahan and published as a Kindle ebook by MediaWorks Publishing.

Related posts

See other SEO-related reviews: Building Findable Websites, Where Search Meets Web Usability and The Truth about Search Engine Optimization.

If you’re just beginning to grapple with a content audit, below are some articles, books and example spreadsheets which you should find helpful.

Articles

Doing a Content Inventory, (Or, a Mind-Numbingly Detailed Odyssey through your Web Site)
This short 2002 article by Jeffrey Veen is a good starting place for learning about content audits.

The Content Inventory: Roadmap to a Successful CMS Implementation
Article by Kassia Krozser which depicts content auditing as an essential part of a CMS implementation process. Helpfully points out that content inventories ‘almost always take longer than anticipated’.

Doing a Content Audit or Inventory
This blog post by Scott Baldwin includes some useful suggestions for applications which can speed up the auditing process by automating some of the listing process.

How to do a Content Audit
Hilary Marsh provides practical tips on content auditing, including advice to start at the highest levels of the site before working downwards and to be careful when ordering columns in Excel that you don’t just change the order of a single column.

A Map-Based Approach to a Content Inventory
Interesting article by Patrick C. Walsh, describing how he used Microsoft Access and Visio to create a maintainable site map and content inventory at the same time.

Why you shouldn’t start IA with a Content Inventory
A heretical article by Leisa Reichelt suggesting that starting redesign projects with a content inventory can be undesirable in that it immerses the designer in the existing way of doing things and constrains their ability to take a fresh approach. This provoked several responses, including an interesting rebuttal from Donna Spencer and The Rolling Content Inventory by Louis Rosenfeld, who champions content inventories as an ongoing process rather than a one-off exercise for redesign projects.

Books

Communicating Design: Developing Web Site Documentation for Design and Planning by Daniel M. Brown (Peachpit Press, 2007)
Contains a chapter on content inventories, with some helpful suggestions on formatting, linking an inventory into other website documentation and presenting the results of an inventory at meetings.

Content Strategy for the Web by Kristina Halvorson (New Riders, 2009)
Has detailed practical advice about auditing content and tying the findings into an effective content strategy for your site.

Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy by Ann Rockley (New Riders, 2003)
A thorough treatment of all aspects of content management. The chapter that covers Performing a Content Audit is available free online.

Sample spreadsheets for content inventories

I’ve already mentioned Jeffrey Veen’s article Doing a Content Inventory, which has includes an Excel template for an inventory. It lists Page ID, Page Name, Link, Document Type, Topics, Owner,  ROT (Redundant, Outdated or Trivial?) and Notes. It uses colour coding and indentation to reflect hierarchy.

Donna Spencer provides a simple content inventory spreadsheet on her blog. It includes fields for Navigation Title, Page Title, Files, Last Updated, Owner, Comments and whether the content needs to be deleted. Again, there’s use of indentation to indicate hierarchy and an example of freezing the Navigation Title column in Excel, so that it’s always visible as you scroll to the right – a nice technique to use for presenting large inventories.

Finally, the Seneb Consulting site has an example content inventory by Sarah A. Rice. It includes use of Excel’s Group and Outline features to allow the reader to expand and collapse groups of content, as well as instructions for using the Split Screen feature when dealing with larger inventories.

The title provides a great introduction for complete newcomers to either social networking environment, but the course is sensibly structured so the starter videos on basic account set-up can be skipped by people who already have personal accounts. Setting up business accounts on Twitter and business pages on Facebook is then covered in full, with discussions and demonstrations of all the available functionality. Useful caveats are also provided when necessary. For example, you’re shown how to automatically import your blog into your Facebook page, but also warned why you probably don’t want to do this and given a sensible alternative.

The really valuable part of the title for many people will be its advice on using Twitter and Facebook strategically for business marketing, with special emphasis on increasing viral effects via ‘word of keyboard’.

For me some of the most interesting advice here included:

• Ways to cross-promote blog posts, Twitter feeds and Facebook pages.
• Advice on measuring the impact of Twitter and Facebook use – vital in a lot of business environments where the tools can be regarded as time-wasters.
• Tips on using Twitter, Facebook and companion tools like Tweetdeck to search for business opportunites and ideas.
• A useful breakdown of all the differences between pages and groups in Facebook – something I’ve never very clearly understood.
• Discussions of the terms of use for Twitter and Facebook. I hadn’t realised that Twitter forbids links in tweets to websites which are against its terms of service.

This is a fun title which is definitely worth a viewing if you’re a lynda.com subscriber with any interest in social marketing.

Social Media Marketing with Facebook and Twitter by Anne-Marie Concepción is available on the lynda.com training site.

Related posts

Review of WordPress.com Essential Training – another lynda.com title.

Among the more useful areas covered for web project management are:

• An emphasis in several contributions on agile project development, involving frequent interaction with clients to evaluate features as they’re created.
• Reflections on the inevitability of scope change after requirements have been finalized and ways to deal with this. A good tip is provided on planning possible scope reductions from the beginning of a project in a controlled way by grading requirements according to their business value and the degree that they have dependencies for other requirements. The nice-to-haves with no dependencies are the obvious candidates for culling if necessary later on.
• Encouraging simple solutions over complex ones – including in code development.
• Finding alternatives to long pointless meetings – frequent instant ‘standup’ meetings are recommended by several contributors.

97 Things Every Project Manager Should Know: Collective Wisdom from the Experts is edited by Barbee Davis and published by O’Reilly.

Related posts

Free ebooks for web project management

This is the striking viewpoint of Kristina Halvorson’s book on content strategy which lays bare the complexities of content production. She offers plenty of common-sense advice about how to build website text into a key business asset, keep control of it over the long term and set measurable objectives for success.

Key to this is developing an appreciation of the political nature of content, engaging with content providers and giving reviewers plenty of notice for their contributions. ‘Don’t leave content management to your CMS’ is the clear message. You need people for meaningful, actionable content and the key person required is someone in overall charge of content – an editor-in-chief empowered to say no to the business when necessary.

The content audit is thoroughly explored as a content management tool. There are useful practical tips here, such as using indented outline numbers in your audit documentation - 1.0, 1.1, 1.2 , etc – so you can easily link specific pieces of content to matching references in the site map and other documents later. There’s also an interesting discussion of the use of page tables for content planning and advice on how to include qualitative judgments in your audit as well as just conducting a quantitative analysis of content

There’s a whole chapter on content maintenance – a subject you rarely see people write much about. This advises developing a maintenance plan, having enforceable well-documented rules and using regularly-scheduled qualitative audits to question the ongoing purpose of each piece of content. The latter point draws on Gerry McGovern’s useful advice that all content ought to be regularly reviewed and removed if it’s not meeting a business objective or helping users achieve a task.

The book has a lively pugnacious style which makes it an easy read about a subject that could easily have come across as dull. The author makes a stack of suggestions which anybody working on websites could benefit from. However, reading it only confirmed my pre-existing assumption that content strategy can be a hard sell.

Improving the status of content creation in most organisations involves fighting against the general assumption of management that ‘anyone can write content’. Within the professional web world it’s up against the status of more exciting and saleable web disciplines in design and development and specialisms like SEO which contribute more transparently to improving the bottom line. In this context, long-term content maintenance is never going to be generally considered as important as implementing an exciting new content management system or launching a flashy new site design. Recognising the centrality of textual content to a successful web presence is therefore always going to be difficult to sell to a lot of organisations, but this book is one of the best pitches I’ve seen so far.

Content Strategy for the Web by Kristina Halvorson is published by New Riders.

Related posts

Letting Go of the Words is another recommended book on writing for the web which I reviewed last year.

I thought this book provided a good solid introduction to the issues surrounding monetizing blogs. It has plenty of tips which will be useful to any blogger – whether they’re interested in making money or not.  Despite the “six-figure income” bit of the title, the authors don’t push any get-rich-quick scams, but instead emphasise the time, hard work and discipline it takes to succeed. The personal blogging stories they provide in the introduction are particularly effective at getting this across – for example, this is Darren Rowse on his posting frequency:

“… there have been countless nights when I’ve worked into the wee hours of the morning blogging. Though I have better boundaries these days, it wasn’t unusual for me to post 50 times per day over 12 hours in front of the screen. “

This kind of makes me feel inadequate about my inability to manage one post a week…

The book starts with a chapter on “blogging for money” which looks broadly at different monetization methods for blogging and ways of measuring your blog’s success. This builds nicely into the second chapter on niche blogging, one of the core techniques for getting money out of blogs. The authors look at the benefits of finding the right niche and give detailed guidance on how to pick a profitable niche, considering:

• Are you interested in the topic? Do you have experience or expertise in it?
• Is the topic popular? Is the niche growing or shrinking?
• What’s the competition, and what’s it neglecting?
• Will you have enough content?
• Is the niche able to be monetized?
• How wide should a niche be?

Chapter 3 is about setting up a blog. Most of this is pitched at a basic level for people who haven’t tried blogging before – including a step-by-step guide to setting up a hosted blog at WordPress.com and a discussion of the benefits of hosted vs. self-hosted blogs. However, there are still some tips here which more experienced bloggers could gain from – especially in the discussion of factors to consider when choosing a domain name.

Chapter 4 is about blog writing. It’s probably the section of the book which will be most useful for all bloggers – not just those who are seeking to blog for profit. Topics covered include providing useful content, researching readership and writing tips for blogs. My favourite bit in this section is the list of 20 types of blog post – which should come in very handy if you ever get completely stuck for something to write.

The next couple of chapters are about actually making money, covering “blog income and earning strategies” and “buying and selling blogs”.  These provide wide-ranging coverage of issues surrounding advertising and other methods of earning income from blogging – including a short look at  indirect income earning strategies like freelance blogging, magazines and books, speaking, consulting and employment opportunities. The buying and selling section includes a discussion of flipping (buying blogs to sell them). There’s also coverage of how to value blogs and where and how to buy and sell them.

After a short section about blog networks, there’s a chapter on “blog promotion and marketing” which is definitely worth reading. It discusses building flagship content, commenting and linking generously, getting attention through link baiting, running competitions, using social media, SEO and tips for increasing page views on your blog.

The book is rounded off by a couple of short chapters covering “secrets of successful blogs” and “creating something worthwhile”.

Overall it’s a useful read – and it managed to motivate me at least enough to get me to write this post.

ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income by Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett was published last year by Wiley.

Related posts

For people looking to start using WordPress for their blogging efforts, see my review of  WordPress.Com Essential Training.

The following resources provide some answers (and will probably also raise some more questions…)

Paul Boag provides some useful advice on website surveys on his Boagworld site. Creating a better survey summarises twelve ways you can make your surveys more effective, including avoiding distracting your users by the way you promote your survey and remembering to consider best practice for form design.  Improving your site with user feedback is also interesting. It looks at the role of questionnaires and surveys within a range of options for getting feedback, including face to face, web stats, search queries and third party applications. Importantly, it also discusses how to assess feedback once you’ve collected it so that you can decide which suggestions to implement.

Analytics Basics: Visitor Surveys and Mazimize Surveys’ Effectiveness are two pieces by Neil Mason on ClickZ. Advice here includes to be clear about your survey’s purpose and to keep it short and simple. Remember the need to test surveys before going live and make sure the survey complements your brand as “poorly executed online surveys can damage the brand whether they live on the site or are sent via e-mail”.

The Three Greatest Survey Questions Ever is a nice blog post by Avinash Kaushik advocating a simple approach to survey implementation. The “three greatest questions” are:

• What is the purpose of your visit to our website today?
• Were you able to complete your task today?
• If you were not able to complete your task today, why not?

From the same blog, see also Got Surveys? Recommendations from the Trenches which includes discussions of  benchmarking for surveys, the usefulness of open-ended questions, targeting survey participants, integrating your survey analysis with clickstream data and the benefits of using surveys as a continuous and ongoing measurement system.

User satisfaction provides advice on website surveys from the UK guidance for government websites on Measuring Website Quality, including suggested core questions for surveys.

How to make an online survey work is an article from Webmaster-Now by Phil Blasco which provides general advice and some suggested questions.

How to build response rates for online surveys is one of several useful articles on the Demographix site. It considers a key issue with online surveys – how to increase response rates. Suggestions include using incentives if appropriate, thinking carefully about the wording of the survey invitation and best practice for promoting a survey on your web site.

10 Tips to Improve your Surveys is an article on the Zoomerang site. Among other suggestions, it emphasises keeping questions simple and rating scales consistent through your surveys. It also suggests sending reminders to people who have not completed the survey to boost your completion rate.

Once you’re ready to create your feedback survey, there are now plenty of online survey solutions available to choose from. If you want to trial one before you commit to spending money, then  SurveyMonkey, PollDaddy, Zoomerang and SurveyGizmo all have free basic services with paid-for professional versions

All the papers are free, but require registration on the site.