inter:digital strategies

Although they’re not willing to give their own information to the US government, Google can certainly provide you with all the information you need from the government. Today, Google announced their specialized Google search for United States government sites at the federal, state, and local level.

With the inevitably sprawling nature of government, this has potential to be a really handy service. I’ve certainly occasionally found myself searching for a piece of government information having only a vague idea of what agency I might be needing to look at. Hopefully, this will make that kind of search a bit easier.

I’m particularly intrigued by the option to create personalized feeds of information from government agencies – so few agencies have jumped on board the syndication bandwagon, and it’s very challenging to keep up on their activities.

A little uncertain whether I want to sign in to personalize
my Google government search, however. On the offhand chance that Google does someday have to give up their search data, how do you feel about the government having a catalog of your searches on the government?

Hmmmmm…..

For anybody who thinks that mobile and internet content isn’t going anywhere, a post from the Ask.com team on the 2006 Daytime Emmy Awards exposes the possibility of some notable success. Ask pointed out a brand new category of Emmy – the award for "original entertainment programming created specifically for non-traditional viewing platforms, including computers, mobile phones, iPods, PDAs and similar devices". Although wordy, this new award clearly covers a wide variety of new media formats. How long do you think it might be until this grand "catch-all" category is further divided into individual awards?

As the world of alternate media grows, the likelihood of greater audiences and notice grows alongside. The variety of nominees for this award is incredible – everything from the TV offshoot of a popular drama series to a video blog describing the day-to-day events of "Jerry" to unique online adventure game/story.

The Emmy awards are no longer exclusive to television. But that’s only fair – popular media is no longer exclusive to major media publishers in general! If you have a brilliant idea and a little time, you can publish your thoughts, opinions, stories, and video or audio recordings online at minimal cost.

And, of course, so can everybody else.

I suppose that this is the core reason that internet marketing exists. As long as only a few thousand tech geeks were using this strange new technology "online", the world of internet marketing was irrelevant. But today, when major corporations are producing web-only or mobile device customized media, you’re going to need a lot of thought and planning to make your own online presence viable. Yes, anybody can publish – but publishing is not the same as success.

It’s important to think of the internet as having a relationship to the world of vanity publishing. It’s always been the case that anybody could publish a book if they had the money and the desire – the internet has merely rendered this task easier and cheaper.

Once you’ve taken your business online, you need to spend the time and effort to convince the world that your venture is more than just a vanity affair – do the work involved to create valuable content, useful tools or provide a great product.

Just a few days ago, I wrote about this great idea of combining Google Local with Google Transit. I still think it’s a great idea – and apparently, Google has already been thinking about it. Yesterday, Bill Slawski posted a patent on customizing travel directions, which talked about an idea of being able to produce multiple sets of travel instructions through the Google interface.

In itself, this isn’t exactly related – but he also referred back to an earlier patent, Visually-oriented driving directions in digital mapping system, which included a discussion of a related advertising scheme where businesses may "bid or otherwise pay to be included as a waypoint." Fundamentally, this is what I was discussing. It’s not quite as, well, free as what I had in mind – but it would serve the purpose.

Unfortunately, if the system comes forward as a purely advertising supported service, it’ll inevitably be incomplete. It may depend on cost – if priced the same way as the yellow pages, most business may well jump on that bandwagon very quickly. There will always be those small businesses which I’d love to support if I could only find out about them, however.