DIY PR by Penny Haywood Calder

Good to see Edinburgh Castle on Google for St Andrew's day

Labels: Google, Scotland

If you're anything like me, Google stores a lot of your data. This blog (brilliantly customised to be hosted on my website by shopfitter.com). Most of my photos are in Picasa web albums. If someone comes up with a snazzier solution, how do you transfer all that stuff?

An engineering team at Google looked into this and concluded that, although you can get data out of any Google product, some are easier to work with than others. Thus was born the tongue-in-cheek Data Liberation Front (DLF). The DLF now reckon they have liberated about two thirds of the Google products, making it easy to get your data out again.

The DLF is a smart move. As InformationWeek point out: the "move comes as the company is being assailed by competitors, interest groups, and the government for its online ad dominance and its digital book ambitions." In PR and the news game: timing is all.

It's also smart as people don't like feeling trapped and this makes other data storers look less liberal.

If you need to change apps, have a look at DLF's site & blog:

http://www.dataliberation.org/
http://dataliberation.blogspot.com/

The Data Liberation team "hosts the Google Blog Converters open source project. This project also powers a hosted conversion service with support for migrating from WordPress, MovableType, and Livejournal."

Labels: Blogger, cloud computing, data liberation front, Google, Google apps

Google's forthcoming Wave looks like email meets instant messaging, only better (imo). I think it will be rather handy for working on collaborative projects - and in PR, what project isn't collaborative these days? Good for fine-tuning press releases, articles, online PR materials, web copy and other marcoms text.

Wave is due to be launched later this year.

As MicroSoft tries to move into Google territory with Bing and Google is attempting to venture into MicroSoft territory with Wave, the first video below provides an overview of both Bing and Wave. It also demonstrates the added value that good media analysis brings to a subject, if you compare it to the second video below, but that was a preview for developers, and it does contain a useful demo of Wave.









(you can skip the long preamble - the actual Wave demo starts c6 mins 30 secs into the video).


I've already blogged on Bing. With Wave I like the almost instant transmission of characters as people type in replies, so you can be formulating your response and not staring at a "X is typing" message. I don't think speaking through a keyboard can ever be truly like a conversation, as Google claims, but I think it does look more conversational than instant messaging.

There's a very neat trick where you can take some bits of the online conversation to selected recipients and the ones missed out don't know. And easily add others in later - there's a neat playback facility the newcomers can use to replay the wave construction sequence to make sense of it unfolding.

Nice one Google.

Labels: Bing, collaborative working, Google, online PR, search, Wave