Now it appears that Google might have plans to deploy a vast navy of ships, loaded with data centers, and powered by the sea’s waves!

According to The Times:

The company is considering deploying the supercomputers necessary to operate its internet search engines on barges anchored up to seven miles (11km) offshore.

The “water-based data centres” would use wave energy to power and cool their computers, reducing Google’s costs. Their offshore status would also mean the company would no longer have to pay property taxes on its data centres, which are sited across the world, including in Britain.

Right now, Google’s navy exists only in the form of a patent application–which means it may never see the light of day.

Here’s an idea for Google. Google Gyms! Connect the treadmills and exercise bikes to your power grid and use the heat from the servers to keep the swimming warm!

Quick, I need a blank patent application, stat! 

Comments

A new power line might decrease the likelihood of blackouts and even (eventually) reduce costs.  So far, so good – you might imagine that DuPont would support Dominion Virginia Power’s plan to run one.

But Kendra Marr writes, “[S]oaring towers and high-voltage lines could devalue its property,” and a cofounder of DuPont told her that the company has been unable to either support or oppose the idea.  The Northern Virginia Technology Council also failed to pick a side.

If such situations are duplicated elsewhere, this could conceivably lead to problems for ever-expanding companies like Google and Microsoft.  Granted, Google in particular tends to “wow” and win over locals, and a recession might make just about anything look appealing, but it seems that nobody connected to the Dupont issue is as enthusiastic as one might expect.

Is this the end of all tech growth?  Of course not.  Still, it’s an interesting indicator in light of the scary stock market.

The first paper, to be published in the December 2007 issue of the Journal of Advertising Research, suggests that advertisers should focus on "old fashioned" word of mouth tactics, where the collective spreads the message, rather than a "few elite and highly connected believed to have the most persuasive power." 

The findings contradict traditional advertising practices, where celebrity endorsements are standard practice. But people are not only more likely to trust an endorsement coming from a friend, but are also eager to pass the message along.

The study was co-authored by James Coyle, assistant professor of marketing in Miami’s Farmer School of Business and of interactive media studies, Elizabeth Lightfoot of CNET Networks, and Ted Smith and Amy Scott of MedTrackAlert.

“We find that trying to track down key influencers, people who have extremely large social networks, is typically unnecessary and, more importantly, can actually limit a campaign or advertisement’s viral potential,” said Coyle, in a statement.

“Instead, marketers need to realize that the majority of their audience, not just the well-connected few, is eager and willing to pass along well-designed and relevant messages.”

News of the study comes just a day after another bit of research, conducted by Saint Joseph’s University’s Dr. Natalie Wood and published by the Journal of Political Marketing, found that celebrity endorsement of political candidates can actually drive voters the other direction.

“In terms of voting behavior, family and significant others are more influential than celebrities in engaging support for a political candidate,” said Wood. "At first glance, it would appear that the money and time invested in celebrity support is wasteful.”

Wood also says that young voters sometimes rebel against political endorsements, and that it may be better if celebrities encouraged voters, rather than whom to vote for.

Hat tip to Guy Kawasaki

Here is a recap of the SES Chicago posts in case you missed any:

• Meet the Web Analytics Players
• Igniting Viral Campaigns
• Keynote Speech – Rodney Dangerfield School of Search Marketing
• Keynote – Seth Godin & 14 Trends to Avoid a Meatball Sundae
• Big Site, Big Search
• Actionable Social Media
• Usability and SEO
• Are You Ignoring the Power of Images?
• Snowy & Festive at SES Chicago
• SEO and Development – Get It Together
• Personalization, User Data & Search
• Podcast and Audio Search
• Strolling the Exhibit Floor at SES Chicago
• Images and Search Engines
• Managing PPC For Multiple Clients
• So You Want to Be A Search Marketer?
• Landing Page Optimization Clinic
• Kevin Ryan Unplugged
• Do Your Keywords Account for Local Vernacular?

Comments

Tag:

Google’s team announced a couple of updates to the feedreading service on the Google Reader blog. One of the new items, discovery, involves recommending blogs to the viewer.

Discovery draws from what the person reads in Google Reader, and what has become part of that person’s Web History. The Discovery page lists new feeds, including their title, description, feed URL, number of posts per week, and number of subscribers.

The viewer can subscribe to a recommended feed by clicking a button. Alternately, a “No thanks” link removes the suggested item from the list of recommendations.

Once the individual adds some recommended feeds, the process of organizing them comes into play. Unless they prefer to dump all the feeds into one group and scroll through them alphabetically, the Google Reader user can drag and drop feeds into folders.

The drag and drop functionality also allows for reordering feeds within a list. Rival products have had this feature for some time, making Google a little late in delivering theirs.

The Reader blog touts the way Discovery can suggest new feeds for people hints at some behind the scenes work with Google’s Blogsearch, though it isn’t mentioned in the post. Blogsearch doesn’t get much publicity; it’s just there, and has become a highly effective way to look for information in blogs.

follow me on Twitter

In this case the comments probably played a big role in the uniqueness of the documents when compared to one another. From a purely hypothetical point of view what if you cloaked the unique factors and served them only to the bots. What if you took some standard non unique data feeds and uniquified them on the fly.

Serve your real visitors lovingly written marketing copy, serve the bots some really unique substitute and replaced copy with a bit of relevant RSS mashedup style copy, hypothetically speaking of course.

Contact …

Fans of Agent Pendergast from the novel Relic and its sequels should remember him counseling the museum to not rely on its overly sophisticated security system during a major society event, taking place while a hypothalamus-eating serial killer was on the loose.

The security system turned out to have a single point of failure, with disastrous results. Rackspace suffered a similar indignity, one that could not be put aside like a well-worn paperback.

Sites like GigaOm and 37Signals, the latter a software-as-a-service company, both experienced downtime as a truck took out a transformer near Rackspace’s Dallas facility. Rackspace explained what happened in a statement on their site:

In the second incident at approximately 6:30 PM CST Monday, a vehicle struck and brought down the transformer feeding power to the DFW data center. It immediately disrupted power to the entire data center and our emergency generators kicked in and operated as intended.

When we transferred power to our secondary utility power system, the data center’s chilling units were cycled back up. At this time, however, the utility provider shut down power in order to allow emergency rescue teams safe access to the accident victim.

This repeated cycling of the chillers resulted in increasing temperatures within the data center. As a precautionary measure we decided to take some customers’ servers offline.

"Our Internet infrastructure despite all the talk is fragile as a fine porcelain cup on the roof of a car zipping across a pot-holed goat track," Om Malik said of the outage.

Jesse Robbins at O’Reilly Radar looked at the incident from the SLA perspective, giving credit to Rackspace for having a clear agreement with its customers. That SLA promises a 5 percent credit per 30 minutes of downtime, which should salve the disruption for the affected customers.

follow me on Twitter

Even setting aside the environmental impact, this qualifies as a good deed; in a post on the Yodel Anecdotal blog, Chris Page noted that the Brazilian village most affected by the hydropower only had access to diesel generators before.

Still, the main motivation was the company’s drive to go carbon neutral.  Page wrote, “Yahoo! has decided to offset its 250 thousand metric ton carbon footprint from 2006 . . . .  What does 250 thousand metric tons look like?  Think of taking 35,000 cars off the road for a year, or turning off the lights on the Vegas strip for two months.”

This is a fairly big deal, in other words.  And it’s also a fairly smart PR move – Yahoo’s getting some publicity and “green cred” even as it accomplishes its pre-established goals.

On a less serious note, I have to point out that we all figured Google would be the world power within 20 or 30 years.  If Yahoo’s generating electricity, though, it could change that outcome.

Dogpile users report that they are particularly satisfied with the limits placed upon paid advertising within search results.

This study is in its fourth year and looks at overall consumer behavior, experience and satisfaction within a number of search functions.

While Dogpile has a long way to go in the major search engine race, it is nice to see an underdog (no pun intended) holding its own against the major search engines.

Comments