The journey of an email – as told by Google

5 Replies Christopher Roberts

Today, when I opened up Google, I saw something new. In the past Google has used the space directly below the search box to notify users of holiday events, privacy policy updates, tributes to industry legends – such as the Steve Jobs tribute, among other things.

Google's Tribute to Steve Jobs

Google's tribute to industry legend - Steve Jobs

Today however Google is using this spot to advertise its new feature, which lets you follow the journey of an email: ‘The Story of Send’.

Google's homepage with a link to 'The Story of Send'

Google advertises 'The Story of Send: Follow an email on its journey.' on its homepage

When you click the link, you are taken to a page on Google’s Green website (.google.com/green) which tells you how you can

“Take a journey through Google’s data centers by following an email along its path.”

Click ‘Start the story’ and the journey begins! Google takes you through an interactive journey of a Gmail email, from when you hit send on your device, to when it arrives at its destination.

The tour takes about 5 minutes (around 50 if you watch all the videos) however, as we all know, the journey of a real email, takes seconds – if that sometimes.

It is evident that the project is meant to be promotional for Google, as it points out all the good points along the journey. For example, how they have ‘built an extensive Internet backbone across the U.S.‘ to speed things up; how they ‘protect your message with a wide range of security measures‘ and how their data centres use ‘50% less energy than typical data centers‘ etc.

What the journey fails to point out is the less desirable things that go on. One example being how your email is read (or spidered) by Google Bots/Spiders, keywords are picked out, and then relevant ads are displayed alongside the message. Another being how Google want not only to own the systems which deliver your emails, but also the infrastructure (the cables and power) which gets it there – is that not a bit of a monopoly?

I like Google, I think it does a wonderful job, and it is great that it offers us all so much for free, however they do also do a good job of covering up the stuff they don’t want us to here.

Check out the video below for more. I found it and tweeted about it a while ago, however never really found an article for it to go in.

So, have you taken the journey yet? Aside from the obvious PR (public relations not PageRank) stuffed in, it does make interesting viewing.

More interested in talking about the ethics of Google? Add your view below 🙂

Why not talk about them both!

Your views?

Good blogging practice – publishing reliable information

11 Replies Christopher Roberts

The web is massive bank of data, which is far too big to be regulated. Because the web can’t be regulated, it is very easy for false information to spread – fast.

If you are a blogger, it is really important that you publish information which is reliable and trustworthy. Don’t copy what the crowd says unless you know they are right, as this is not only misleading to your readers, but can also see you get penalties dished out from search engines. If you get a reputation for publishing unreliable content, the likelyhood is that your readership will fall.

When you publish something that you have found out elsewhere, you need to make sure that it is accurate and reliable, before you publish it.

How to Mythbust Rumours

When you find information, on the web, in order to ensure that it is reliable, it is always a good idea to check that it appears elsewhere. A general rule of thumb is to check that what you are reading is the same on 3 other sites, one of which is a highly reputable site.

So what is a reputable website?

Government Websites

There are a few way so to identify if a site is reputable or not. One way is to see if it is a government website. Any site which is government run is likely to be very reputable. Government websites usually end in their own unique domain name extension. If you live in the USA, government sites end in .gov or .fed.us, in the UK .gov.uk, in France .gouv.fr, .gc.ca for Canada, India’s extension is .gov.in and the list goes on.

Major News Corporations

Government sites won’t always report things that you want to verify though, so there are other ways to tell a reputable sites. Big news websites like BBC.co.uk/News and Guardian.co.uk will usually only publish information that is factual and accurate, so you can usually trust them.

The Guardian's logoThe information they publish is likely to be accurate, however it may not be impartial, so that is something to watch out for. Often news firms will take a political side, and therefore report news in a certain way – and may only publish part of a story.

High PageRank Sites

Google PageRank is calculated largely by the number of backlinks a page or site has. If a website has a very high PageRank (6+) then it is likely that it has a lot of other sites linking to it, most probably because it publishes a lot of high quality content, which people find useful and therefore link back to. High PageRank sites aren’t always trustworthy, but the higher up the spectrum of PageRank you go, the less likely it is that a site is going to be providing false information.

If a website is a PageRank 8, 9 0r 10, unless they have manipulated Google’s algorithm (through black hat SEO, which will only work for a short while, before Google catches them) then the site is likely to be extremely reliable and reputable, therefore you should be able to trust the information, data and facts that they produce.

1,000,000 to 1

If 1 highly reputable site is saying one thing, but 1 million other (not reputable) sites are saying another another, then the chances are that the 1,000,000 sites are just recycling the same false information, creating a massive bank of false information. This is one reason why you should be really careful who you trust on the web, and also make sure that you verify information with at least one reputable site. Be careful who you trust.

Academic Research

Verifying information with at least 3 sources, one of which is reputable is something which is also advised in academic research. Therefore if you use the same standards on your blog, you can’t go wrong! Search engines and readers alike will respect you for providing good quality, highly reputable content.

Technology Bloggers Policy

Every time I write an article and quote information/statistics etc. I always try to follow the 3 and 1 rule: check the information appears on 3 other sites, at least one of which is ‘reputable’. This means that everything I write should be reputable.

The post guidelines ask all writers to ensure they use the 3 and 1 rule, however we cannot guarantee that all writers do. In our Privacy Policy, we state how we try to ensure all content is true and factual, however it is always advisable to independently verify information for yourself.

Do You Verify Your Content?

Do you always try to ensure that you use the 3 and 1 rule when publishing information? That not only applies to blog posts, but also to comments. If not what measures do you use, or don’t you think it really matters?

Apple and some bad press

13 Replies Jonny Hankins

This week I would just like to do a short follow up on Christopher’s article entitled Why do we stick by Google and Apple but not Microsoft?

I will start with a little story about my 6 year old boy. He loves making things and last week he made a laptop computer from cardboard. It has keys with letters on it, a mouse and a black screen with icons. When it was finished he showed it to me, pointing out the detail, and said “I am not going to put the apple here on the top though, because they don’t all have apples”.

This is the power of branding. In a few years when he wants a laptop of his own what will he want? The one with the apple?

My kind of branding

My kind of branding

Recently though here in the US I have met a few people that do not use Apple products in principle. The reason I think is the bad press that their working practices have received in US newspapers.

I am not in any way endorsing these reports, but I feel that they are worthy of analyzing in a bit of detail, both for their content and their political or ethical standpoint.

The New York Times ran an entire series in which it looked at the human costs of the iPad and apple revolution, and you can read it here (not too long).

The opening lines speak of an explosion in which 2 people were killed as they polished iPad cases. This is not the only reported explosion either, and there are plenty of cases of people being burnt as they use chemicals without proper safety procedures, excessively long days spent entirely stood up and child labour.

It is not just Apple though that use these manufacturing plants however, and the scale of the operations is incredible. One of the names often cited for criticism is Foxconn, and they do a lot of Apple’s assembly. They have 1.2 million employees in China, some plants have more than 100 000 workers, they operate 24 hours a day, can call upon their work force at any time and start production within minutes of receiving orders. This is what the technology of today requires and produces.

Apple do have a code of conduct within its supply chain, drawn up and expanded upon since 2005. Audits are conducted and violations unearthed and they say that this is a sign of their commitments to improvement, but some say that the fact that they problem is continuous points to a toleration of non compliance.

Last year they found 4 deaths and 77 injuries within their production system, and several suicides. Now one death or injury is too many, but with a workforce of well over a million accidents will happen, and some might even see this as a good record. Apple state that they train their workforce and explain their rights to them.

One thing is for sure, the stakes are high and there is a lot of money to be made but Apple is a demanding company. And they are not the only ones with dodgy working practices, but seem to be singled out for criticism.

Why might that be I wonder? Maybe it is because as Christopher hinted they inspire such loyalty amongst their users, and some circles do not like that.