I sometimes wonder if the engineers and developers at Google wouldn’t have been at home in the Renaissance, since they seem to constantly be thinking of new ways to revolutionize technology, communication, and the flow of information on a weekly basis. As it is, they are finishing out 2011 by releasing a series of new tools and toys that you should know about:

Google Insights. This is an interesting tool that lets you use the world’s largest search engine not just to find information, but also to see what others have been finding lately, too. Want to know which celebrities, music clips, or travel destinations are “hot” right now? Google Insights puts the raw data at your fingertips.

Google Music. Interested in having up to 20,000 songs in the cloud, download them, stream them to play instantly, or sharing them between smart phones and other devices? If so, then this ultra-cool service is built just for you. Google Music is currently only available in the USA, but if you take a trip down South you can activate your account while you are away from your Canadian home. Songs sell for as low as 0.49 each and you can get full albums for as low as $4.99 (US Dollars of course).

Google Chromebook. Want to know what some of the smartest engineers on the planet could do with the concept of a netbook? Not only do these devices – which are coming to big-box stores everywhere this winter – add all kinds of functionality the market, but they also have amazing group-leasing rates for organizations. This one was definitely on my Christmas list… and guess what? Santa had to order it from Amazon.com (not .ca) and delivered it to our Arizona address. You guessed it… not quite available in Canada just yet, but watch for it soon.

If you aren’t already familiar with these new  toys and tools, then I encourage you to take a few minutes to check them out. Not only are they lots of fun, but they could turn out to be incredibly useful, or at the very least, give you a sense of where the Internet is headed.

If there’s one thing you can count on, it’s that Google will likely keep releasing new gadgets, platforms, and pieces of software in 2012. And why not? Although not all of them pan out to be the way the company might envision (does anyone remember Google Wave, which was supposed to revolutionize e-mail?), those same technologies and ideas tend to pop up again later. In other words, Google doesn’t limit their ideas strictly to the products that have been launched… they hold onto the best ones and keep building on them through successive products.

Are you looking for a Canadian speaker who can help your audience to get the most out of today’s technology? Contact me today to find have a look at my speaking schedule and availability. I’ll look forward to chatting. Cheers.

In one of its strongest anti-copying measures to date, Google is now letting users directly report websites that “scrape” content from other sources. In other words, if you catch someone copying from you, you can now raise your hand and tell the teacher.

Of course, duplicate content has been an issue for some time, but the world’s largest search engine has never had an automated system that allows business owners and webmasters to point out violators on their own. This is a great step forward for honest online marketers, and just one more reminder that it’s never, ever a good idea to copy content from a competitor.

Here are three quick implications from Google’s new scraper policy:

Don’t try to copy content. Yes, we said this already, but it’s worth mentioning again. Even if you copy content from someone else’s site and change it slightly, you are likely to be caught. And if you are, there is a better than decent chance that you will be banned from Google, which could do damage to your online business that can never be undone.

And besides, who wants to copy content anyway? Your company isn’t just like anyone else’s, so the text and images on your pages should show what’s unique about your business, and why customers want to do business with you.

Protect your own content. The crux of this issue, from Google’s standpoint, has been that certain marketing websites with “scraped” content were ranking higher than the sites that had originally created it. While that’s likely to decrease now, the fact of the matter remains that there are companies out there that would like to steal what you have, so make sure you are working with a business web designer who can protect what’s on your pages.

Keep fresh content coming on to your business site. In a larger sense, this policy reflects the growing importance that Google and the other major search engines are putting on fresh content and articles. They’ve always mattered, but going forward they will likely influence search engine rankings even more. So, if you can squeeze out one blog post a week, and regular social updates – or get social media done for you – the time to get started is now.

The geniuses working at Google’s Silicon Valley offices must have been pretty busy lately. Not only have they decided to outfit an entire town in Kansas with super high speed Internet, but they recently rolled out their “+1″ feature that allows searchers to share which results they find most helpful. But rather than taking the rest of the month off, as some of us would be tempted to do, they quietly introduced another new feature: Google Guru.

Guru, in a nutshell, is a service that allows users to open up a chat window and ask simple questions they want the answers to. Experts or other users can then help them find the appropriate information, without having to delve directly into Google search interface and find results. What are some of the things people might want to find? Here are just a handful of examples:

• Current weather and forecasts
• Sports scores
• Average prices
• Currency conversions
• Time in a different part of the world
• Geographic questions
• Trivia

… and a lot more. Much of this information could be available elsewhere on the Web, but using guru has the potential to make things faster and more efficient.

From an online marketing standpoint, this probably doesn’t mean a lot for your business at the moment. That’s not to say that it doesn’t matter, however. The introduction of Google Guru means more ties between the world’s largest search engine and mobile devices, more interaction with people instead of search engine spiders, and an overall focus on helping users find the information they’re looking for with minimum effort.

As you consider your online marketing plans going forward, try to find ways to make it easier for people to locate information or do business with you more efficiently. That’s because, as Guru shows us, you’re bound to be rewarded for it sooner or later.

eKzact Web Design and Online Marketing is Calgary’s premier Internet development company. Call us today to schedule a free consultation and find out why!