Dave and I had a great time putting this show together, and I had the opportunity to produce an episode of the AGP for the first time in well over a year. It felt good to get my hands dirty again, and I think Dave appreciated the break.

• Visit the AGP Blog
• Download the show [mp3, 76 mins]
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• Write a review in iTunes
• Follow the show on Twitter

Though it doesn’t quite match some of the other features we’ve become accustomed to seeing in cloud storage like an OS client with drag & drop functionality, it certainly provides a reliable place to store some of your larger files that won’t fit under the smaller 20MB cap that Google places on email. This is quite possibly the precursor to the much lauded and speculated about G-Drive cloud storage service.

via LifeHacker

The collection of technology (some built in-house and some acquired from other service providers like writely back in 2006) has become a key part of Google’s strategy to index the world’s information by providing a way to make Google a first-hand provider and storer of that information.

There were no real major releases with the removal of the beta designation, just a feeling from many that the big “G” must be working on something else at their Mountain View, CA campus.

Since I wasn’t overly impressed with the email functionality built-in to the Flip’s mail program, when it came to Gmail integration at least, I thought I’d come back and talk about something quite a bit more cheerful: running applications on the Flip. The newer operating system on the Flip has a new application gallery called the BlackBerry AppWorld. The AppWorld, at the time of this post, has over 260 applications ranging in price from free through about $50… at least that’s the most expensive one that I saw.

The installation and setup experience is quick and easy. I was able to find several interesting apps to help me through my final week with the Flip. I had the opportunity to play with a number of different apps and explore some functionality that I hadn’t tried on my other BlackBerry.

• Google search app for speedier searching
• WeatherEye to see if the weather guys are right or not (from the Weather Network)
• Snap2Twitter to take photos and tweet them to the world using Snap My Life
• TankAce 1944 Lite to kill some time waiting for the doctor
• HockeyNews to keep track of my Canucks when I can’t find a TV

Having access to the BlackBerry AppWorld is a great step forward from previous methods of getting apps on the BlackBerry. They’ve made great strides in usability and ease of installation, and the new method is similar to the experience on the iPhone , with one major caveat – the number of available applications. The BlackBerry OS is not a new platform for developers, but it hasn’t gained the same following with application developers as Apple’s rival platform.

In addition to downloading from the application store, I’ve also installed the Gmail application from Google. This provides a more seamless experience than trying to use the built-in mail settings as it takes advantage of Gmail’s secure IMAP protocol to exchange messages with the server. This helps to keep the mail on the BlackBerry synchronized with the mail on the server including whether or not messages have been read. IMAP compatibility is something that I’d really like to see RIM implement in future revisions of the BlackBerry OS.

The system allows you to create a single phone number, to which you can aggregate other numbers to have a unified system for voice and messaging.

I’ve been trying to get myself a Grand Central account for several months, but I guess with the lead up to the Google Voice launch they haven’t been creating new numbers for people.  It looks, from a post on the Google Voice help site, that the service will be rolling out over the next few weeks.  The service will first be made available to existing Grand Central users, and rolled out to the rest of the great unwashed as it matures in the next few months.

There’s no indication at this stage if the service will be geographically limited but I suspect that, intitially at least, the service will only offer US-based phone numbers at launch.

The new feature provides a simple task list that can be activated using the labs menu.  To activate this, click on the green beaker at the top of the screen.

The task list in and of itself is basic, and provides a point that Google can use to extend its functionality in the future… features like integration with Google Calendar (yea, they left that out) and the ability to collaborate & share tasks through Gmail.

While this won’t likely satiate the desires of the Getting-Things-Done crowd, it’s a decent to-do list for keeping track of a non-complex list of items.  The most functional advantage that this has over desktop-based task solutions like Outlook is the ability for it to be accessed anywhere you can hit-up your Gmail.

Overall I’m a big fan of Google’s “Labs” concept. Pre-releasing new functionality in an opt-in manner is the hallmark of open-source and the web 2.0 community, and is a principle that the search giant seems to have embraced wholeheartedly.  Here’s hoping we see more useful features coming out of Mountain View.

If you’re interested in some background you can check out the original post I wrote explaining the experiment.  The key lesson with all of this however is that Content is King (or at very least a Duke) and you need to respect that above pretty much all else if you ever expect to get ranked.

It’s a pretty simple proposition really, I’ll put together what I know about SEO with regular posts to the site.  Hopefully between now and next Friday night I’ll be able to get the site on Google‘s radar.

What are my chances?  No idea, but you can check out the post explaining the Google – WordPress experiment on the new site at kickjoey.com.

I’m relaunching with a bit of a project in mind: get this site from a PageRank 0 to a PageRank 1 in 7 days.  Impossible? Probably, but I’ll try it anyway.

Why PageRank? Because I’d like to start doing reviews here that I can collect on. Yes, paid blogging. I didn’t really want to to advertorial posts on kdmurray.net, but it’s something I’ve wanted to try out.

What next? Well, time to find some content to do reviews on over the next 7 days, and try to get some links pointed here from some other websites.

Let’s see if we can get this site on Google’s radar in only 7 days.

I saw a rather significant spike in traffic as millions of Gmail users checked out the blog, and a few hundred of them clicked through on the trackback which showed up as a result of the post.  Go figure.

We’ve identified the source of this issue and fixed it. In addition, as with all issues that affect Gmail and our other services, we’re conducting a full review of what went wrong and moving quickly to update our internal systems and procedures accordingly.

The post does not provide any real detail as to the source of the problem, only an acknowledgment and an apology for the inconvenience.

The outage provided people with extra free time on their hands to try out their artistic abilities in describing the problem.  This was my favourite of the GMail Fail Whales:

Image Credit: Todd Garland of HubSpot, this copy from YoavShapira’s photostream.

So yea, apparently email is critical to most people’s regular day.  Whoda thunk it?

One of the most popular photo editing programs for Windows has to be Google’s Picasa.  Though it’s not the most full-featured image editing on the market it’s free and great for managing photos and albums, something that isn’t a strength of more full-featured applications like Photoshop and Paint.NET.

On the Mac, the most obvious photo organizer is Apple’s own iPhoto.  iPhoto does a decent job of organizing photos, though it does have its drawbacks and it’s not free.

A free Picasa would not only challenge iPhoto, but would also channel users into using Google’s online service Picasa Web Albums.  One question raised is how this will affect competing photo management services like Photobucket and industry leader Flickr.  Reality is it will probably do little to the market since OS X users make up a relatively small percentage of the software market, but what it will do is make Picasa a true cross-platform tool.

This plugin does a great number of things and has an options screen as long as my arm.  Aside from having the ability to ignore administrators, it also has the ability to add in tracking to all of your outgoing links and downloads.

If you use WordPress and you use Google Analytics you need this plugin.

The real big seller for me was the ability to embed the presentation in your blog or website. Now, admittedly I’m not super-impressed because it’s using an I-Frame instead of a regular Embed tag like a YouTube video… but it’s definitely a start!

Based on the tutorial posted on the site I put together a short slide-deck tutorial of my own both for practice and as a demo!

For the tutorial, I’ll turn you over to my short slide deck.

For those who may not know, IMAP is the bi-directional email protocol which makes Outlook so successful in the corporate environment.  With this feature enabled, I think it won’t be long until we see an even tighter outlook-like integration of Gmail and Google Calendar.

But that’s not all, folks!

By visiting the Google Labs, you’ll find that there’s an even more enhanced version (the “experimental version”) of search in the pipeline. I’ve got a brief overview of some of the features, and how you can put them to work for you now!

Additional Views: Timeline and Maps

With your Google search, you can choose to have the search return a timeline or a map with the search results. This is a very interesting feature as it can provide some visual aid to help you with your search results.

The timeline is constructed using date/time data extracted from the search result pages. The timeline will allow you to drill-down to a more granular view if the topic has a broad history.

The map search really looks to be nothing more than a new way to search Google Local. Nothing all that groundbreaking here.

You can use this today in your searches very simply by adding: view:timeline or view:map to the end of your search query. Below are a couple of examples:

Star Trek view:timeline

NHL Teams view:map

Keyboard Shortcuts

I’m a huge fan of keyboard shortcuts for very nearly everything. I find that sometimes a mouse is just too clumsy a method for navigating some computer systems, particularly those that require you to type in other things (like search engines!) Google has implemented a few shortcut keys in the experimental version which may just save you those few precious moments of frustration.

The other neat thing about this is that the next and previous buttons will move to the next or last page if you’ve already arrived at the bottom of a page of results.

Hacking this one into your daily life isn’t quite as easy, you must add &esrch=BetaShortcuts to your search URL. You can however use this Google Link as your starting page to incproprate it.

Left and Right hand Search Navigation

In the “Spooky Google” category are the new adaptive left and right hand search bars. These attempt to ascertain other search refinements which may help you find what you’re looking for. I say “spooky” because I assume they’re using your personal search history to decide what to show…

The left-hand bar is much like a drill-down bar. It will show search options which are more specific than what you initially searched for. The example provided is “ipod” will show things like Patents, Products and news, with specific searches for “ipod accessories”, “ipod software”, “ipod reviews” etc… See it in action here or enhance your search URLs by adding: esrch=RefinementBarLhsGradientPreview to your search URL.

The right-hand bar shows similar information in a smaller package. It adds an option to see Blogs which didn’t appear on the left side bar. See it in action here or enhance your search URLs by adding: esrch=RefinementBarRhsPreview to your search URL.

This feature is not as polished as the first two. When I changed the search term from ipod to Macbook, all of the specific searches disappeared. But I guess that’s why they call it experimental.

Final thoughts?

As time moves on Google will continue to provide additional enhancements to its search engine. The most useful feature, for me at leasts, is by far the keyboard shortcuts. The adaptive search navigation has potential, but obviously still needs work. With challengers like Search Wikia on the horizon, things will need to continue to improve to keep searchers coming back.

One of the new features is a drill-down world map, which provides a bit of an easier view of where your visitors are coming from.  Some more detail from the “what’s new” email that was sent to analytics subscribers:

• Email and export reports: Schedule or send ad-hoc personalized report emails and export reports in PDF format.
• Custom Dashboard: No more digging through reports. Put all the information you need on a custom dashboard that you can email to others.
• Trend and Over-time Graph: Compare time periods and select date ranges without losing sight of long term trends.
• Contextual help tips: Context sensitive Help and Conversion University tips are available from every report.

This is a great new look for the Analytics tool, which in fine Google tradition has been kept as a free service for everyone in the web community.

You can read more detail in the Google Analytics Blog post by Jeff Gillis from the GA team.

Good on ya, Google.  I’ve enjoyed looking through the GA changes over the last week or so and will do so in more detail in the coming days and weeks.  Now if you could just fix that pesky 10MB file limit in GMail….

Enter a series of add-ons for various operating systems which allow you to use your GMail account as a file storage location. They provide the ability to store files in an Internet accessible location, and retrieve the files from any computer which can access GMail and the internet.

Now, if you’re thinking this sounds like it would be a very slow mechanism to transfer data you’re right. These plugins essentially need to perform all the same functions as any other email client to send and retrieve the files. But it’s a case of accessibility vs. speed. For those files you just can’t live without, this may be the solution for you.

It can also clutter up your account a bit. If you still have a bunch of GMail invites, send one to yourself and set up a separate account to use as your “G Drive”.

For Windows users, download GMail Drive. For Mac OS X users, download gDisk.

Analytics also integrates with Google’s AdWords to provide a method of accurately tracking click-thru’s and other statistics vital to the ad campaigns.

Now for those of you who are saying that this is yet another piece of Google’s ever growing arsenal of world conquering capabilities you’re probably right. But hey, it works well and the code it uses on your website to track the hits doesn’t leave any ugly banners or images. And did I mention that it’s free?

Give it a shot. I did, and it’s here to stay (at least until they decide to charge for it!).

However, after reading her blog last night and giving some thought to the fact that she’d mentioned the tabs don’t show up on the Mac I had to go check it out. I’ve checked it out on several machines now and here’s what I’ve found:

It looks like they may finally have the bugs out, and are supporting pretty much every mainstream platform available. Kudos Google! (Though I’m not sure my employer will be so ecstatic when I’m spending all of next week tweaking my new Google IG layouts…)