Like a whale, the web refuses to stop growing. Search engines have to wade through more and more flotsam and jetsam to find useful results. This makes it ever more challenging for them to complete searches quickly. Google’s ‘Caffeine’ update aims to redress the balance and get your search results to you faster – in roughly half the time. But that’s by no means the only change in this major update. Google are always very secretive about exactly how they rank websites and pages (i.e. what makes them likely to be returned from a Google search), but here’s a quick taste of some of the changes announced:

• Apart from looking through websites periodically, Google will search live feeds from social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook. These ‘blended results’ will allow real-time searches of rapidly changing content  
• New ranking factors for websites and pages. For instance, the length of time a domain name has been registered will now affect the ranking, in favour of sites that have been live for longer
• Sites hosted on faster servers now have an extra advantage as Google will give a better ranking for pages being quickly delivered
• New methods for avoiding spam-like sites that pretend to be something they’re not to achieve a high search engine rank.

As Google is in the process of rolling out Caffeine, some people will be using it already, while others might have a few weeks to wait. If you’re eager to see how searches using Google Caffeine differ from the old Google, you can race them side-by-side at http://www.comparecaffeine.com 

Of course, we’re updating our own Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategy to reflect these changes, but first I’m off for some real caffeine.

There’s a lot of smack talked about web developers. Usually along the lines that they’re obsessive geeks who are only comfortable expressing themselves in zeroes and ones.

Here is WMW’s very own Thom Vincent to utterly disprove all that.

In what can only be described as my favourite Christmas present of the year (and it isn’t even the 25th yet), here is what he bestowed upon the agency. Ladies and gentleman, I give you dilettante, polymath and all-round renaissance man Thom – singing Lady Gaga’s Poker Face.

Scarily, it’s rather good. Enjoy.

Ever since Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville first miraculously captured a French lady singing a traditional folk song in 1860 (I preferred her earlier stuff) on his phonautogram, recorded music has been out there prompting debate, discussion and disagreement. And I can confirm that 149 years down the line, nothing’s changed.

We’ve always had music in the WMW office (never the radio, though…can you really classify Fearne Cotton uniformly vomiting ‘brilliiiiaannnt’ and ‘amaaaaaazing’ to anything that dribbles out your speakers as ‘music’?) and how we consume it has roughly mirrored the wider world: we’ve gone from CDs to iPods and, now, we’re using Spotify. Or at least we’re trying to.

At first, the thought of having the world’s biggest jukebox at our fingertips was a mouth watering prospect. Every musical whim could now be pandered to…we would never have to hear a collective groan of recognition as our meagre selection of CDs and iPods was again shown up. If only it had been that easy…

As our digital team hooked Spotify up, the first problem reared its head: who should have access? If everyone could put on whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted to, surely there would be some kind of meltdown in the space-time-music continuum. Did we have to fall back on good, old musical fascism: who’s got ‘good’ taste and who likes Abba? In the end, we decided that a chosen few would have direct access with requests welcomed from the rest of the office.

And to start with, all went well. The novelty of being able to send an email requesting ‘Lust for Life’ and then hearing it broadcast across the office minutes later was invigorating. But, like all novelties, it wore thin. The emails dried up (apparently something to do with having ‘real’ work to do) and with their decline came a new form of responsibility. The chosen ones now had sole control of the soundtrack to everyone’s working day. They’d essentially become full-time DJs.

Now fast-forward a few months down the line. The only in-house emails we receive about the music being played are complaints. Here’s one that went around the office last week:

Who is responsible for this shouting screaming lady??

Bit harsh on Mika, but there you go. So, where did it all go wrong? With the chosen ones no longer being supported by the masses, they played what they liked. Consequently, the music became increasingly skewed to the indulgence of personal taste. Which is fine when you‘ve got twenty or thirty people choosing the tunes. But when it’s just a few, the music becomes more and more esoteric. You only need to look at our playlist to see it happening (in fact, you can see it live here). What’s worse…it never ends.

Unlike before when an album would come to a natural conclusion prompting someone else to put on a new one, Spotify just plays and plays. Even if your playlist finishes, it will find something else from its infinite archive. So, left unattended, potentially anything can be played. And when heads are buried deep in work, this can go unnoticed until everyone in the office starts unwittingly flapping in sync to ‘The Birdie Song’.

Now I’m not saying some of these problems didn’t exist before; one man’s TUUUUNE! is another man’s (pinches nose with fingers). But, by spoiling us with its riches, Spotify has certainly exacerbated them: we can play anything we want, so what we play should be perfect. Gone are the days of someone putting on the first office-friendly thing to hand only to be greeted with one giant shrug from the whole team.

The unrest got so bad that last week our digital guy did the 21st century equivalent of picking up his ball and going home…he unplugged his cables and took them home.

He’s since calmed down and brought them back, but who know how things will turn out? Maybe we’ll give more people access to Spotify in a bid to restore the status quo. Maybe we’ll instigate an albums-only policy to create more cohesiveness. Maybe we’ll conclude that Spotify is great for the individual but not the collective. Maybe we’ll all learn to listen in harmony and take a more ‘C’est la vie’ approach to music we don’t like.

Actually, that gives me an idea…B*Witched, anyone?

A #dystopian tale of human enslavement and microblogging

Chapter Two
Sticking it to the man was easier than I thought (my line manager Keith was very understanding). Just six weeks later I was in Frisco International Airport queuing for a hire car. Suddenly I was the most spontaneous guy I knew – including Pete in MIS, and I know for a fact he goes snowboarding twice a year.

Who’s a ‘tedious, flatulent middle-management drone’ now, Linda? If only my ex-wife could see me now. I could just imagine the look on her face. Not much of a pay-off for ten years’ investment in Botox treatments, but I’d take what I could get.

I booked a room in the nearest Holiday Inn, grabbed a shower and got ready to meet my own personal Jesus. I considered phoning ahead. But what was I thinking? They probably don’t even have phones at Twitter. I still had my head stuck up the legacy paradigm, and I needed to upshift quickly. A man like Biz is gonna recognise a soul mate on sight. He’s spent the last five years in a dark room eating pizza and developing social networking systems. He’s the ultimate people person, for chrissakes!

Minutes later I was on the road, Twitter HQ locked into my TomTom. 164 South Park, San Francisco. South Park. Like that’s a coincidence! Classic. Still chuckling, I wound down the windows, loosened my tie and edged my Nissan Pixo right up to just below the speed limit.

“You have arrived at your destination,” announced TomTom finally. The adrenaline was pumping like the first time I tagged an inaccurate tax rebate. I switched off the engine and glanced round the half-empty car park. It looked pretty normal. In fact, it looked a lot like a business park. A really dull business park. But of course it would! They don’t want people just dropping by unannounced. That would be weird. Freakish. Criminally actionable, even.

I put the Pixo in park, clambered out and waited for a sign. Well, I say waited. I saw one pretty much immediately. A massive great Twitter sign. That was good enough for me.

Steadying myself with a deep breath, I strode confidently towards my goal. Slowed down. Realised I was heading towards the loading bay. Did that thing when you pretend you were just checking out something over there but, with that task now completed, you’re free to proceed in the opposite direction.

Cock-up styled out, I approached my date with destiny. Nice door. All big and glassy. Business up front, but you just know there’s a party going on behind. The kind of door that…No, enough delaying. Here we go. Here we freakin’ go! Let’s do this. I reached out, hesitated, then thrust my trembling digit forward.

Beeeeeeeep…

How will our dashing protagonist be received at Twitter HQ? Will he be offered a soda, coffee or restraining order? Or is there, in fact, a dark secret lurking at the heart of social networking’s current belle du jour – a dark secret strongly hinted at by this blognov’s subtitle and that, were it not to exist, would make aforesaid subtitle highly misleading if not downright erroneous? Give us a break. We’re working on it…

Isn’t humour funny? Get it right and you’ve a tool to create something truly memorable. Get it wrong and there’s no better way to look like a wally. For a painful example of the latter, just ask for my ‘Weekend at Bernie’s’ funeral story.

So, does humour have a place in the serious world of corporate comms? Done right, the answer’s a resounding yes. Something I was reminded of today when one of my half-arsed Google searches culminated in a couple of very entertaining, but very different, videos.

First up’s a Microsoft training video from 2004.

Admittedly, it does help if you’ve got a couple of million hanging about to splurge on some big name comedians. But you can do it on the cheap too; and why do the all the work when you can get your people to do it for you? Last year, Deloitte launched a project asking employees to make short films that addressed the question ‘what’s your Deloitte?’. The results weren’t half bad. Take a look at this one.

Both are great examples of how to create some engaging comms by not taking yourself too seriously.

There was a time when the published opinion was solely the province of the professional. (To be clear, the distinction I make here is not qualitative, but rather one of access. There were and indeed are many, many poor writers who still manage to earn a living doing it.) No longer. The era of Web 2.0 – if you’ve just fallen asleep, I quite understand – has not just lowered the barrier to entry; it’s taken a fire axe to it. But is this a Good Thing?

For the sake of argument, let me first cast aside the multitude of great blogs out there, the breathtaking creativity of some of the UGC created for video games, the guilty fascination of following a minor celebrity’s Twitter feed, the sheer number of relationships only made possible through Facebook, Bebo and co, and the sporadic genius of homebrew youtube videos. Ah, the joy of the monologue.

Let’s instead take a more ‘glass half empty’ perspective. Specifically, the growing belief that just because you have something to say, other people must be interested in hearing it. Like some ghastly mass therapy session, there’s considered to be some intrinsic value in sharing your views with the world. I emote therefore I am.

Worse still is the prevailing belief that some kind of universal human truths can be garnered from this litany of self-expression. Because everyone knows a Facebook profile is a genuine reflection of your personality and not – not even a little bit – a platform to show the world the best possible version of you.

Nimbly nipping back to some semblance of relevance, I wonder if companies have had more success than me with their tentative first steps into this brave new world? It strikes me that no one seems yet to have resolved the fundamental tension between a medium that is personal and spontaneous, and the desire for organisations to control their brand (though this control has always been an illusion – you don’t own your brand, your customers do, etc).

There are successful examples, of course. Visa made youtube’s Dancing Dan the star of a global campaign, which is either an unorthodox way of reverse engineering brand advertising or simply the New Sponsorship. Sony’s infamous PSP ‘flog’ (fake blog) fiasco is only one example of the sinister PR practice of paying ‘influencers’ to post marketing fluff pieces on social networks. Neither of these routes seem particularly sustainable or robust to me.

In fact, the failure (thus far) of the world of business to crack the world of the empowered user can be summed up by the fact that by far the most common and reliably effective use of these new channels is good old fashioned advertising. And let’s be honest – if big business ever did manage to genuinely adopt social networks as effective marketing tools, the residents would be off before you could say ‘Stick it to the man’.

Here’s my two cents: the immediate future of Web 2.0 from a business perspective lies in replicating the model of social networks to provide new tools for collaboration and knowledge sharing within the company. Like the Tweet that tells me you’ve finally passed that tenacious kidney stone, perhaps it’s just one of those things that’s best kept between friends.

N.B. To paraphrase Sideshow Bob, I appreciate the irony of appearing on a Web 2.0 platform only to decry it, so don’t bother pointing it out.

In the spirit of dangerous debates that will run throughout this nascent blog, feel free to let us know if you’ve got an entirely different take or, better still, if you’ve had personal experience of putting Web 2.0 to work for your organisation.