On the Google posted a video on its YouTube Channel a very creative ad to appeal to the college crowd. In the ad a boy uses Google Docs to draft a note to ask a girl he met in French 101 out on a date. He uses the social sharing features to enlist the help of his friends in drafting the note. It’s a very cute demonstration of how Google Docs can be used for collaboration.

Today Gmail, Google’s email client, went down. As a matter of fact it’s still down (4:30pm 9/1/09). The minute Gmail went down it seemed as though the whole world jumped on Twitter and asked in some fashion…”Is GMail Down.” Then started the freaking out. I did a quick search on the term GMail in Twitter search and people all around the world were out of their minds without the Google email service.

Drew Olanoff, best known for the #blamedrewscancer Twitter meme, did a video in 2007 about GMail being down. It’s very apropos right now.

Enjoy… what are you going to do check your Gmail? <Insert evil laugh>

<image credit: chattahbox.com>

Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s webspam team, gave a talk at Wordcamp San Francisco this past May (5/30/09). He points out the do’s and don’ts for keeping a blog.

Check out his video below:

Google opened up its latest search engine update to the world yesterday. Though most of the changes are under the  hood and the basic user interface is the same, some subtle changes are occuring. One of which appears to be the the weight that social media profiles and pages rank in the SERPS.

Patricio Robles over at Econsultancy writes:

As you can see, there aren’t many noticeable changes to the UI. In fact, you probably won’t notice much difference at all. According to Google’s Matt Cutts, “this update is primarily under the hood” and has involved “rewriting the foundation of some of our infrastructure“.

And yes, that means that there will be some changes in site rankings. From my limited initial tests, the impact on rankings seems subtle — most of the time.

One exception appears to be social web results. For instance, certain high-profile Facebook Pages appear to be receiving a major boost in the rankings with Caffeine. One commenter on the Google Webmaster Central blog also noted “I’ve noticed more Twitter pages in the results with this version of Google“.

I decided to test this for myself. Using the sandbox I did a search for my name. Sure enough at the #2 spot was my twitter page. When I searched for my company’s name (Goldstein Meda) I noticed another change. The map results were farther down the page. And though a few random results popped in my Twitter account for my business still showed up in the results.

Though there are some subtle differences, I have yet to see anything jaw dropping. The higher ranking positions of social media profiles and pages does give more weight to having a presence on some of the more influential social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin  and YouTube.

In my opinion this is only the beginning social media’s impact on online business and SEO.

I’d love to hear what you think of these developments. Post your thoughts in the comments below.

In the most recent issue of Wired magazine, there is a rather lengthy article on Google and the US government’s fear of the search giant. The main question that arises is whether or not Google is Evil. Their mantra is “Don’t Be Evil,” but is the 11 year old company sticking to this slogan? I want to hear what you have to say leave your thoughts in the comments.

Getting people to your site is only half the battle. Once they’re at your site, having them do what you want is the most important task of any Website. Is your site up to par? Check out the Google Webinar with Tim Ash, a leading landing page optimization specialist and author of “Landing Page Optimization.”

Are you guilty of some of these sins? Discuss them in the comments.

Google makes amazing products and services. I’m only beginning to fully sink my teeth into Google Docs. Here’s a neat video, made by Google, demonstrating how Google Docs can compile information for your into a spreadsheet without all the headache.

Adobe and Google along with their developers network have developed a way for Google Analytics to track Flash. Read more at Mashable and view the video below.

How do you think this will effect the Internet as a whole? Post your thoughts in the comments.

Google’s Matt Cutts answered a great question today on the search giant’s Webmaster help YouTube Channel.

The question was: “How does someone begin to SEO their site on a small budget in an overwhelmed industry such as real estate?”

One of the key points Cutts pointed out was to make your site different from all the rest. Make it useful and memorable and that will help your rankings. Check out the video below.

Google’s Matt Cutts explains on the latest Webmaster Help Video that Yahoo, Best of the Web, other Web directories with an editorial process are not considered paid links. This is because they have guidelines that need to be met and will reject low quality submissions if they don’t meet the right criteria.

This is very helpful and makes sense because both BOTW and Yahoo Directory are actually useful to users as well as Google and the search engines. One thing that always gets me is how Cutts says that you don’t have to worry about going overboard on SEO to rank high, just provide great content. This in some ways is true. Great content should out-weigh Optimized sites, but in actuality it doesn’t always happen that way. I know Cutts really can’t say otherwise, but it just gets a little annoying that he keeps saying make great content and everything else will fall in place, when he knows full well that often that isn’t the case.

Here’s the video. I’d love to hear what you think of this and what you think about Yahoo Directory and Best of the Web.