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Google Groups can also be a promotional tool of sorts for your website/blog. You can either create your own individual Google group about the topic of your website, or you can search for existing groups with similar subjects. It can be a great way to "network" your website. Inside these groups you can post messages about whatever you like. Once these messages are up anyone in the world can comment on them. Most of these groups below are there for people to ask technical questions or get feedback on their site. Just make sure when you do post a message to include your url so people can easily click on your link. These are a couple groups I have found that you might find useful. The first is Blogger Review, this is a google group that is specifically design for getting feedback on your blog. For all of you Google Pagecreator fans, you can try Google Page Creator Discussion Group, this group is in place to help you with errors and get input on your creation. The final group I will give to you is Promoting Your Site, this is a group that was created by "Google-Power" very recently, and is designed to find the numerous ways to get your website or blog in front of people. If you have a tracking program like Google Analytics, you can see the traffic from Google Groups for yourself. Good luck building your "web" of contacts! Let me know if you found any other Google Groups that were useful to you, I know there are quite a few groups out there, it's just hard to find the great ones.
Google Picasa has become one of my favorite freeware product releases. It wasn't until recently though that I realized how easily Google's photo software could be used as a way to drive traffic to your site. The first step will need to do is take a few pictures of what your business or website is all about. For instance, if you are a fence company, you would want to take pictures of all the different types of fences that you install. If you run a florist shop you would take shots of all of your various plants and flowers. Next, simply select the pictures that you would like to make a movie/slideshow. Hold down the CTRL key to highlight multiple pictures. Once you have selected the pictures, go up to "create" in the menu and then to "movie". Now, you will select the second delay between the pictures. I personally like the full 5 seconds, but you decide. Then, you select your movies screen size. In this case the smaller the movie size, the smaller the file size, so keep this in mind. Next you select your compressor. I have been using Indeo, but you can choose. Remember, the more you compress the smaller the file size, but the lower the quality. Finally you just hit ok and wait for the movie to render. Congratulations, you just created your first movie for your business, or web site! Now you can upload this movie to Google Video and ad a link to your site, maybe some keywords and let the traffic flow.Check out this example of a florist! orThis one I designed for a fence company!
Google released today a new version of Google news service. You will now be able to search through it's vast database of news articles from such publications as the New York Times, Forbes, The Financial Times, Time Magazine and Washington Post. Some of these articles date back as far as the 1700's! The articles will show a few lines of text and then you will have the option to be re-directed to the provider if you would like to view the entire article. (Much like Google's Book Search) The best part about this service is that it will show the articles in chronological order, so you can see how news stories were viewed throughout history. For instance, you could see how differently the media portrayed Iraq and Afghanistan in the past, and see how it evolved into the situation we are in right now. This is just another tool in Google's race to organize the world's information.Don't forget to visit our article on becoming a webmaster!
Google announced today the available of many out of copyright "classic books" for download. These writings include the works of Dickens, Shakespeare, Joyce, and Dante. With Google Book Search they are now just a click away, and best of all they are all free. Google has been working in partnership with the University of Michigan, Standford University, Oxford University and the New York Public library in this endeavor, which began in late 2004. Basically, they are scanning all of these books page by page to make the content searchable. Just imagine the possiblilites of being able to search thousands if not millions of books just by typing in a word or phrase! I have a feeling that kids these days will have a much easier time with books reports, to say the least. Many copyrighted books are also available to search, but Google only displays a small sample of text of these copyrighted books. Google just got one large step closer to organizing the world's information with this mind-blowing project. I know you all you bookworms will certainly love this one! What do you think of this project, and Google's stance on copyrighted materials?
Google today highlighted it's offering of a suite of personal productivity applications just for business called "Google Apps For Your Domain". Basically, what Google is doing is integrating it's e-mail, calendar, instant messages, web site creation (pagecreator) and Internet phone (google talk) into a bundle designed for specifically for small businesses. This will be a free service that Google offers to small businesses that sign up for the program. Each individual in the company will be able to have their own seperate account. Google is also expected to release a premium fee based service later on in the year for larger organizations. They had released a similar service just for it's e-mail service called "Gmail For Your Domain" back in February of this year. While Apps for your domain is impressive, the real story here will be when Google implements their Writely program and spreadsheet application in this "Google Apps".
Yesterday, Google released it's newly acquired program Writely to everyone in the world. Writely is a word processing program that was gobbled up by Google in March of this year. Writely is no Mircosoft Word though, it is a completly web-based program that allows users to store, compose, and even share their documents with others on the net if they so choose. This seems to be another push towards storing even more info online for Google. You can now access your documents from any computer in the word and edit in real-time. This would even work well in a business sense, as employees can colaborate on the same document from different parts of the world. Try it out, like most things from Google it's free so you have nothing to lose. Let me know what you think of Google's Writely below in comments.
