tigho is forcery, nyc, real estate, advertising, tech

Google has redesigned Google Profiles, the profile pages that all Gmail users can set up with pictures and information about them.

If you set your Google Profile to be visible to everyone, then it will likely be at the top of the Google search results when someone looks up your name, which makes it an important part of your personal brand.

The new Profile looks a bit more like the Info page on your Facebook profile, with your photo in the top left corner, essential information about you below, while a scrapbook of photos and more detailed info about your occupation, employment, education and whereabouts dominates the biggest part of the page. The new design is not groundbreaking in any way, but it’s much nicer than before and it gets the job done.

In a blog post announcing the new Profiles, Google reiterates that Google Profiles are designed for individuals, not businesses; Google claims it’s working on “new ways for businesses to engage with their customers,” and hopefully we can expect some updates there in the near future.

To edit your profile, visit profiles.google.com.

Photo: New York Times

Frank Rich is joining New York Magazine, beginning in June. Rich will be an essayist for the magazine, writing monthly on politics and culture, and will serve as an editor-at-large, editing a special monthly section anchored by his essay. He will also be a commentator on nymag.com, engaging in regular dialogues on the news of the week.

“Frank Rich is a giant — a powerhouse critic of politics and culture, a rigorous thinker, a glorious stylist, a skeptic and optimist at the same time. There is just no one like him in American journalism,” said New York editor-in-chief Adam Moss. “He is also a friend. I have had the privilege to work with him for almost 25 years. Since the day I came to New York, I have hoped I could persuade him to join us here. I'm ecstatic that he will now be bringing his wisdom to our growing audience. This is a very big day for New York.”

Rich joins the magazine from the New York Times, where he has been an op-ed columnist since 1994. He was previously the paper’s chief drama critic, from 1980 to 1993. He has also been the front-page columnist for the Sunday “Arts & Leisure” section and senior writer for The New York Times Magazine. Rich will continue in his role as a creative consultant to HBO, where he is the executive producer of Veep, a pilot currently in production for a comedy series written and directed by Armando Iannucci and starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus.

“There is no greater newspaper than the Times,” said Rich. “I leave the paper with deep affection for both the institution and my many brilliant colleagues, and with much gratitude for the opportunity the paper gave me to serve in two dream jobs in journalism. I’ve spent much of the past year talking to friends inside and outside the Times about what might be most exciting for me next. It was impossible to top the idea of reuniting with my friend Adam Moss, who has played a crucial role in my writing life since the late eighties and who, as editor of the Times Magazine, was instrumental in my transition from arts criticism to broader essay writing. The role Adam has created for me at his revitalized New York Magazine will allow me to write with more reflection, variety, and space than is possible within the confines of a weekly newspaper column — and, for that matter, will allow me to stretch the definition of a magazine column.”

I'm a bit confused why a 2 bedroom with a Balcony is 25K less than a 2BR without, valuable information nonetheless.

Is the impression—the longtime currency of online advertising—on its way out?

It could be. Three major advertising/media trade organizations, IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau), the ANA (Association of National Advertisers) and the 4A’s (American Association of Advertising Agencies), have announced a new initiative aimed at simplifying online ad measurement and metrics. The groups have hired management consulting firm Bain & Company and the strategic advisory firm MediaLink to help with the effort. And everything is on the table, including possibly ditching the impression as a currency.

The new initiative, Making Measurement Make Sense—announced at the IAB’s Annual Meeting in La Quinta, Calif.—won’t necessarily have a lot of teeth. But the three groups are hoping their efforts carry enough influence to enact serious change in the online ad industry, which continues to struggle to pull in its fair share of brand advertising, according to many prominent executives.

What the effort will entail is still unclear. During a press briefing, leaders from each of the three groups spoke in vague but grandiose terms.

According to Sherrill Mane, the IAB’s svp of industry services, the goal of the initiative is “to change everything we do when we transact digital media." Why? “To make it more brand hospitable.”

The group acknowledged that digital media is still not hospitable enough to brands. Digital buyers are faced with half a dozen sources when planning campaigns, including Nielsen, comScore, Quantcast and Compete. Different sites and ad networks sell using varied definitions of ad impressions. Video is even more muddled and disorganized.

“The supply chain is messy and ineffective,” said Mane.

Yet these industry groups won’t have a lot of authority, other than issuing guidelines or a whitepaper that they hope will guide brands, vendors and ad buyers. But Mane and her counterparts said that this issue has major momentum, particularly the support of the industry’s leaders.

  “This is about getting agencies, publishers [on board] with what is best for the industry,” said Bob Liodice, president and CEO of the ANA, who predicted the group would produce some sort of results in six to eight months. “This is a standard setting exercise.”

Added 4A's evp Mike Donahue: ”This is not about being reflective. This is about being actionable.”

When we heard that Google had unleashed a new algorithm in the United States to battle content farms, we were cautiously optimistic. Content farms, which bet they can make more more money on any advertisements than they spend producing very low-quality stories, had come to dominate the Internet's long tail.

But I've had my doubts that Google's machines could weed out these content farms. What signals would allow them to distinguish between high- and low-quality writing? Especially considering that humans are only decent at it.

Luckily, Google has gifted us a chance to do some side-by-side comparisons because they're rolling out the new-and-improved algorithm in the United States first. So, we did two searches for the phrase "drywall dust," figuring it was just random enough. One we executed in the standard way, presumably using the new algorithm, and the other we routed through a proxy server that made it look like were coming from India, presumably using the old algorithm.

And I have to say: Wow, the new algorithm yielded far superior results.

Granted, this is just one search for "drywall dust," but if this is even remotely indicative of how well the new algorithm works, we're all going to be tremendously impressed. The search via India led to seven sites that were producing low-quality or aggregated content, a photo of someone covered in dust, and a blog about an individual's remodel. The new algorithm search yielded very different results. Not only were there less content farms but two specialty sites and five fora made the list as well as a Centers for Disease Control page on the dangers of drywall dust. Having clicked through all 20 links, I can assure you that the information delivered by the new algorithm is much, much better.

Let us know if you have similar experience with other searches. We've been trying out other strings and the pattern appears to hold. We're seeing less content farms and more fora and news websites. For example, check out: "is botox safe" with the old algorithm and the new algorithm. In the latter, I counted five pages from what most would call respectable news sources. In the former, only three made the cut.

Chatter blizzard! There is a flurry of commentary about Google’s change to cope with outfits that generate content to attract traffic, get a high Google ranking, and deliver information to users! You can read the Google explanation in “Finding More High-Quality Sites in Search” and learn about the tweaks. I found this passage interesting:

We can’t make a major improvement without affecting rankings for many sites. It has to be that some sites will go up and some will go down. Google depends on the high-quality content created by wonderful websites around the world, and we do have a responsibility to encourage a healthy web ecosystem. Therefore, it is important for high-quality sites to be rewarded, and that’s exactly what this change does.

Google faces increasing scrutiny for its display of content from some European Web sites. In fact, one of the companies affected has filed an anti trust complain against Google. You can read about the 1PlusV matter and the legal information site EJustice at this link (at least for a while. News has a tendency to disappear these days.)

Source: http://www.mentalamusement.com/our%20store/poker/casino_accessories.htm

Why did I find this passage interesting?

Well, it seems that when Google makes a fix, some sites go up or down in the results list. Interesting because as I understand the 1PlusV issue, the site arbitrarily disappeared and then reappeared. On one hand, human intervention doesn’t work very well. And, if 1PlusV is correct, human intervention does work pretty well.

Which is it? Algorithm that adapts or a human or two doing their thing independently or as the fingers of a committee.

I don’t know. My interest in how Google indexed Web sites diminished when I realized that Google results were deteriorating over the last few years. Now my queries are fairly specialized, and most of the information I need appears in third party sources. Google’s index, for me, is useful, but it is now just another click on a series of services I must use to locate information.

Google Cloud Connect is a Microsoft Office plugin released today by Google. It has been available for testers since November, but it is now generally available. It syncs a user's Office docs with their Google Docs, and adds a toolbar for sharing documents right into Office. We've been asking for offline access for Google Docs for years now, and this is a step towards that.

Google Cloud Connect is available for Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7. Office 2003, 2007 and 2010 are all supported.

Several other services sync Google Docs with offline folders, including Gladinet, Insync, Memeo, Offisync and Syncplicity. We looked at some of these here.

Google has slowly but surely been turning Google Docs into the mythical Gdrive, and we've been tracking that progression.

Google also announced today its 90-Day Appsperience program - a way for those curious about Google Apps to get a chance to try it out for a "nominal fee" for 90 days.

We’ve been hard at work creating a preview of Street Smart Walk Score—an enhanced version of Walk Score that uses walking distances rather than crow-flies distances to calculate your score.

Street Smart Walk Score also looks at the underlying road network to compute the number of intersections per square mile and average block length. These two measures are great indicators of walkability.

Preview Street Smart Walk Score: