Pretty much like Dropbox.  Except Google-ified.

I’ve been a faithful Dropbox user for a few years now, and it really has become an indispensible part of my workflow. All my things are synced and working on files from home or the office is brain-dead simple. Thanks to Dropbox referrals, I’m currently rocking 20GB of free storage, and depending on what project I’m working on, I am using only a little or a pretty decent part of that allotment.

Enter Google Drive. I applied for my account yesteday afternoon and come late evening, I had an email saying it was ready for me. I downloaded the Mac app, which looks and behaves just like Dropbox’s app. After syncing up with the mothership, it downloaded everything that was in my Google Docs folder. Which is OK, I guess, though I didn’t really need it. I use those in Google Docs.

Google Drive works just like Dropbox in that it puts a folder on your computer where you can drag files/folders to and they automatically sync up to your account. I found the uploads to be fast and unobtrusive. I found a way to un-sync my Google Docs, which freed up a little bit of space (I have a lot of Google docs.)

Here a few thoughts…

I like Dropbox’s public folder, where I can put things, right click on them and get a URL that I can share easily with people. That’s been handy for uploading ZIP files, large photos, you name it, it’s been super easy. Just this week, Dropbox added a feature to allow you to create a link to any file in your Dropbox. This is interesting, as it’s not a direct download but a link to Dropbox’s site and users can download your file from there. I saw a comment yesterday on Reddit I believe that said “isn’t this what got Megaupload in trouble?”

That basic functionality is missing, at least right off the bat, in Google Drive. There’s no public folder. To make a document shareable, I have to go to the browser-based version of Drive and select sharing, and much like Google Docs, I can pick people who can see my document or open it up to the whole world. I wish it was a little easier.

My other thoughts were about pricing. With Dropbox, new users get 2GB for free. With Google Drive, users get 5GB for free. Obviously, 5 > 2. But I’ve referred enough people that I’ve got 20GB from Dropbox. 20 > 5. But, Google allows people to buy more space. Isn’t that nice of them.

For $2.49 a month, I can get 25GB of storage, and as a bonus, I’ll get 25GB in Gmail as well. That’s a pretty interesting price point. What really caught my eye was for $4.99 a month, I could get 100GB of storage and syncing. That’s a crazy prize. 100GB at Dropbox will run you $19.99 a month. It will be interesting to see if Dropbox lowers their prices in response.

The thing here to remember is that Google has the biggest storage and data network in the world. Dropbox uses Amazon’s S3 service, so there is fixed costs it has when it comes to storage. That 100GB of storage from Amazon will run the average person $10, but at how much data they store, I’m sure they get a huge price break. Still – $4.99. Wow.

And then there’s privacy.

Both Google and Dropbox have had their share of privacy issues recently, and may people are freaked out with Google having access to all kinds of data now that they can use to index and ultimately sell ads against. This tweet from Merlin Mann was interesting.

Yes, if you store your data in Google Drive, they will have access to it. In fact, if you read their TOS, they’ll do more than access it:

That’s kind of scary. Dropbox’s terms are a bit less scary (H/T Jesse Lavery.) Are you willing to trade your info for the convienence of having your files anywhere and everywhere? Something to think about.

TL/DR; Google has free cloud storage, you can pay for more, privacy is something to pay attention to.

I’m going to be honest here. I haven’t been swept up in the Google+ hype of the last few months. I just haven’t, I don’t know, gotten it. To me, thus far, I haven’t seen the killer app or need that Google+ fills that Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn doesn’t. So, I haven’t spent a lot of time there, and have seen lots of duplicate content across my various networks.

This week, Google allowed brands/companies/schools to start having their own Facebook-Fan-Page-ish Pages inside Google+. I, like many other web and marketing folks, created a page for my University. The setup process was fairly simple, and I had the profile setup in a few minutes.

Now what?

Do I re-post content we’re already posting to over 5,000 fans on Facebook, or should we be creating content just for Google+? These are the types of questions that I guess many teams are now wrestling with.

Having just spent a small amount of time, I have some questions about managing a Google+ page.

1. Am I the only person who can administrate this page? I see that one the circles/streams available on my Page is one called “Team Members,” but its not clear if I add people to that stream/circle if they are given the right to post on the page.

2. My page displays the 2 people I’ve put in the Team Members circle on our home page, and shows that we have 11 followers, which isn’t bad for two hours. Unfortunately, I’m not seeing a way to see who the followers are.

I can now see who is following me, and choose to add them to one of my circles. This is a marked difference from Facebook’s model, which is more one way the two services are different. If you’re a fan of JCU on Facebook, as an administrator I don’t have access to your page and personal info. Not sure what the right model will be here on Google+.

What circles should I put them, since I’m encouraged to do that in the Google+ model. Students? Alumni? Faculty? Friends? Parents? Sounds like a minefield and a timesink having to determine what bucket a person should go in.

3. Where are the analytics? Facebook’s insights are pretty decent, but so far, I’m not seeing anything in terms of analytics for my Google page. How many times are my posts being viewed? What are the demographics, broadly speaking, of my audience on this site? What are the trends. Google has a killer app in Analytics, it should be really tied in here. If there isn’t marketing stats available here, I don’t see us really spending a lot of time focusing on our Google+ page if we can’t determine the ROI or value of having it.

4. I can add video and photos, but wouldn’t it make sense if I could link my institutional YouTube account and have videos I share there automatically get pulled in here? I could manually share them, but that’s an extra step that seems unnecessary. I should be able to hook the two together.

Honestly, at this point, I’m rather unimpressed with Google+’s page offerings. I think Farhad Manjoo said it well in his post at Slate:

I know this sounds unfair: Facebook had years to add all the features it has now, so why should we demand that Google create a perfect substitute at launch time? But that’s just the thing—taking on a behemoth like Facebook is an unfair fight. Google seems to think about its social network in the same way it thinks of any other kind of software—as a “product” that it can design step-by-step, starting with a small number of innovative features and working up from there.

We as web and marketing folks have been spoiled by Facebook and their fan page offerings, so much so that we expect any competing, new product to have all the same, if not better, functionality.

I’ll be keeping an eye on our Google+ page and placing content there, but it won’t be the first place I think to post content, which Facebook is now for us.

One of the new features in the newer versions of Google Analytics (GA) is the ability to track event actions on a link. This can be not only clicks, in our case, on a button, link or graphic, but you can setup javascript triggers when a user starts, stops or pauses a video, for example.

Setting this up is pretty straightforward. First, you’ll need to add a quick snippet to your GA embed code, if you aren’t already. It’s the trackPageview function. You’ll add it under the line in your GA code where you’re account code is. For example:

<script type="text/javascript">

  var _gaq = _gaq || [];
  _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXX-X']);
  _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

  (function() {
    var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true;
    ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';
    var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);
  })();

</script>

That will allow you to start tracking events on your pages. To add the event tracking action to a specific element on your page, you add a line of code that looks like this to your a tags.

onClick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Videos', 'Play', 'Baby\'s First Birthday']);"

There are three fields there to pay attention to. The first is the category field. In the above example, it’s Videos. You can have multiple categories on a certain page. On our WordPress sites, we’re specifically tracking banners and small image buttons, often on the same page.

The second field is the action variable – which in the example above is Play. For our WordPress pages, we use the term Click. Through javascript and PHP variables, you can make your actions very specific, such as:

_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Videos', 'Play - Mac Chrome');
_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Videos', 'Play - Windows Chrome');

And finally, the label. Above, it's Baby's First Birthday. For our uses, we tailor this to the specific banner or button getting clicked. After a few days, we realized it would also be good to know what site the visitor was on. As with the other fields, this should be tailored to the specific content being clicked on. In the video example, you'd have something like this for different videos being played:

_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Videos', 'Play', 'Gone With the Wind']);
_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Videos', 'Play', 'Huckleberry Finn']);

To our user, our links look like this:

<a href="http://sites.jcu.edu/newsroom/?p=1697" onClick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Taters', 'Click', 'Princeton Review Best in the Midwest (Site: JCU Newsroom ID: 1694)']);">
<img src="http://webmedia.jcu.edu/newsroom/files/2011/08/princeton_review-700x230.jpg" alt="Princeton Review Best in the Midwest" />
</a>

In our WordPress templates, it looks like this:

<a href="<?php echo $url; ?>" onClick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Taters', 'Click', '<?php echo get_the_title($ID)." (Site: ".get_bloginfo('name')." ID: ".$id.")"; ?>']);">
<img src="<?php echo $img[0]; ?>" alt="<?php echo get_the_title($ID); ?>" />
</a>

We are tracking the individual banner that was clicked on, as well as the site the banner appears on. We add an additional field for our own, the actual ID of the banner asset. We do that just in case we need to find one quickly, or two banners get named the same thing. It’s happened.

That gives us a very nice report in GA that looks like this:

We can very easily filter by a specific site to see what buttons and graphics are getting clicked on. You could also add this to any static link as well, but I’m specifically interested on what specific calls to action are getting noticed by our users.

So what is the +1 button? I’ll let Google describe it:

+1 is as simple on the rest of the web as it is on Google search. With a single click you can recommend that raincoat, news article or favorite sci-fi movie to friends, contacts and the rest of the world. The next time your connections search, they could see your +1’s directly in their search results, helping them find your recommendations when they’re most useful.

Some major media partners have started to use the button, and Google is adding it to its Blogger service. I noticed a few blogs with it today. Here’s what it looks like in action.

Here’s a +1 button I’ve added to this blog post, if you’d like to try it out.

If you’d like to add the button to your site, Google’s got an easy-to-use wizard here.

At this point, I’m not sure if I’ll be adding it to my University’s pages. We’ve got decent sharing solutions in place, but if this +1 button starts to pick up some buzz, we’ll take another look at it.

This week, Google opened up their URL shortener, goo.gl, to people to be able to make their own links. Once logged in with your Google account, you can start creating links.

While I like being able to see who else has tweeted/shared my bit.ly link, Google’s analytics for shortened URLs are nice. Here’s a sample:

It’s interesting that they give you a QR code for each short url you create. This is built using Google Charts and what’s interesting is you can call an image for any link you’ve shortened at Goo.gl by adding .qr to the URL.

I made a shortened URL yesterday, http://goo.gl/SPUM, and here’s the corresponding QR code for it:

News alerts, blog mentions, press mentions, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Ping*, Diaspora, and so on and so on.

I was reminded today that there’s one place I often forget to check.

Google.

Yes, good ol’ Google. It’s the biggest referrer of traffic to our site. It knows and see all.

Funny story…

We’ve started a carpool at work. On our way in today, someone saw an alumni sticker on the car next to us for Alabama A&M. I hadn’t heard of the school, and wasn’t sure what the A&M stands for.

So, being stuck in traffic, I quickly Googled them on my iPhone.

Here’s what I saw:

That’s not good. I doubt that, in addition to a degree, you can get Xanax without a prescription there.

Something strange is happening, because their page does have valid META tags.

<meta name="description" content="Welcome to Alabama A&amp;M University, located near Huntsville, Alabama."> 

I think it’s time for their IT and web staff to dig around and see what’s going on, then resubmit the site to Google.

The moral of the story here is make sure that in your daily Googling, you make sure to check out your institution’s page.

By the way, the A&M stands for agriculture and mechanical.

* – not yet, but still

I was interested in this post by Ted Rheingold, founder and CEO of Dogster, saying that the campaign and keyword codes that we all add to our links to specifically track them in Google Analytics may be hurting our search rankings.

He says:

…for each custom UTM code you make for a page a search engine thinks you have that many pages. It’s been assumed Google was smart enough to not track URLs with UTM codes as different then the actual URL of the page. (ie. www.dogster.com is the same as www.dogster.com?utm=campagin1) though it wasn’t well known is Yahoo or Bing knew to ignore the UTM codes. But then it was suggested that Google wasn’t treating the links as pointing to the same page. We recently removed them from our emails and other external placements. I noticed twitter did too.

While I’m not ready to take all those links off our email campaigns and web pages, there are a few things you can do to ensure that Google doesn’t potentially penalize you for having what it sees as duplicate content.

The easiest may be to make sure your site has a canonical URL meta tag.

Google likes these tags. They say:

It’s a hint that we honor strongly. We’ll take your preference into account, in conjunction with other signals, when calculating the most relevant page to display in search results.

This is trivial to add in many CMS templates – you just echo out the main, correct URL for the page in the <head> area of your site. Your canonical URL should look like this:

<link
rel="canonical" href="http://highedwebtech.com/2010/08/10/do-google-analytics-tracking-codes-hurt-your-google-rankings/" />

That’s the easy thing to do to make sure Google knows what content is the right one.

The other is to set up a series of 301 redirects in mod_rewrite, effectively recording the analytics hit then redirecting the user to the correct page. I don’t know about, but mod_rewrite gives me a serious headache.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain\.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

You can read more about 301 redirects in this blog post by Kyle James at Doteduguru.

I’m not sure if Google really does penalize you or think you have double content. It’s just good practice, however, to have canonical URLs and they may reduce the chance that Google downgrades you for duplicate content.

There are ways to do interesting type on the web. I’ve tried many font solutions for the web, including sIFR, Cufon, and TypeKit. Now, Google has entered the web fonts game with their Google Font Director and Font API.

Of all the solutions out there, I’ve found Google’s to be the easiest and fastest to implement. All you need to do is call Google’s special CSS file with the font you want to use, and add it a call to the font in your CSS file. That’s it. Seriously. I changed the H1 tags on this site using Google’s method and it took less than a minute from start to finish.

Google has launched their offering with 18 fonts – both serif and sans-serif in a variety of weights. If you’re going for a more serifed type like Georgia or Trajan, you may be interested by the OFL Sorts Mill Goudy or Old Standard TT. If you need a sans-serif type, there is Yanone Kaffeesatz, Molengo and Cantarell.

To get started, you select the fonts you want to use (one or several), the font weight(s) you want, and then call Google’s CSS. Here’s an example:

<link href="http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Josefin+Sans+Std+Light" rel="stylesheet" 2="type='text/css'>

That code will call only Josefin Sans Std Light. If you’d like additional fonts, you can tack them on. In your CSS file for your page, you call the font this way:

h1 { font-family: 'Josefin Sans Std Light', arial, serif; }

And that’s it. You aren’t limited to just headers, you can apply a special font to any tag you like.

Google has a nice font previewer that you can use to not only see what your text will look like, you can also apply some CSS effects, such as transforms, decorations and letter/word spacing to see the effect on a particular typeface. What’s also nice is Google will give you the appropriate CSS for the exact look and feel you like. Here’s an example:

body {
  font-family: "Lobster", serif;
  font-size: 63pt;
  font-style: normal;
  font-weight: 400;
  text-shadow: none;
  text-decoration: none;
  text-transform: none;
  letter-spacing: 0em;
  word-spacing: -0.058em;
  line-height: 1;
}

It will be interesting to see if Google adds more typeface choices over the coming months.

While not completely shocking, I was a bit surprised that Google was one of the advertisers in yesterday’s Super Bowl. It’s not that they don’t have the money, heck, to them, the $2.9 million or so that an ad spot costs is a drop in the bucket, but more it’s what they’re selling: search. Not apps or Gmail or YouTube or AdWords or anything. Search. Their “core” product.

We all search the web, dozens of times daily. And for many, Google has become a verb. The ability to search Google’s catalog is becoming ubiquitous, even my mothers uses Google 411 to search things out when she’s out and about.

In case you missed it, here’s the ad.

Personally, I really like it. Why? Because it’s simple, yet shows you how many different types of things you can find thanks to Google’s catalog. Jobs, shops, maps, you name it. Lots of little clever tricks too – like how they misspelled the “Louve” and it corrected the spelling.

This spot, unlike many other spots, didn’t try to be crass or crude, or go for a cheap laugh. It tells a cute story, simply and easily. It couldn’t have cost much to produce, and will live on and be featured on its own platforms like YouTube. I and people like me who spend hours a day using Google’s products most likely aren’t the target audience for this spot, but rather the more casual user who perhaps didn’t know you could get the kind of results you can from Google.

Locally, I saw one commercial spot for the University of Akron, who ran a nicely produced piece here in the Cleveland area. You can learn more about the spot from the University’s site here.

Note to my colleagues at Akron – get that video in YouTube. I just searched for your school’s name there to try to embed the video and one of the top results is students there reacting to the infamous “2Girls1Cup” video.

Trust me. Do not Google that.

In addition to my regular job, other job, side work, speaking, parenting and more, I’m one of the faculty advisers at our campus radio station, WARC 90.3 FM. It’s fun – I get to hang out with students and listen to tons of great music.

For as long as I’ve been here, student DJs would record every song they played on a sheet of paper and leave it in a box at the end of their show. As a station, we report what’s being played to places like CMJ – it helps them track what’s popular and what’s being played at colleges around the county. Labels also like to know what types of music we’re playing so they can send us new stuff to check out.

Collating all that paper and trying to figure out what was being played was a giant pain. It took quite a bit of time and effort, and we realized there had to be a better way.

So, a few years ago, I cobbled together a quick web app that allowed DJs to record their show’s playlists on a computer that lived in the studio. It worked pretty well for DJs, but it was still a bit of a pain for the people charting.

There was no easy way to enter in that week’s new releases. There wasn’t easy ways to count or organize playlists and tracks. Most of that is my fault – I didn’t have the time to really create a great app.

This year, we’re fixing that. We’re letting Google do all the heavy lifting. Since we transitioned our students and staff to Google Mail and Apps this summer, all our students have easy access to Google Spreadsheets. I created a quick form, that looks like this:

It’s set as the homepage of the studio computer and for DJs, the process really hasn’t changed that much. For the music director, his life has become much easier. Google Spreadsheets let you quick organize, parse and get out data quickly into many different formats. We can have multiple people getting in and working with the data. So far this semester, it’s been great. Here’s a look at the backend:

So far so good. I’m happy with it, our DJ’s are happy and our general manager and music director are happy. Wins all around.