Category: Productivity

• From the July, 2006 issue of Business 2.0, a list of 50 people who matter now. Cool to see David Allen on the list.
• Internet partly to blame for your lack of close friends. I knew this thing was bad for us.
• Boeing Connexion may be shut down. Too bad, the service is great. Back to watching movies on an envelope-size screen?
• The Chinese tourists are coming! But they spend nothing on hotels and food, apparently saving up for the Hugo Boss discount store (?).

I’ve had a brief look at the newly launched Google Trends. While the ability to compare popluarity of searches is interesting, what really interests me the most as a PR professional is the ability to chart Google News data.

News and media analysis usually takes a lot of time and energy. Sure, you can buy that kind of job from companies specializing in it, but that costs money. Also, sometimes you need the results instantly or want to play a bit with the data because you haven’t really decided what you’re looking for (or even at). In that case you can’t ask someone else to do it.

If Google Trends could make this easier, that would be nice. Do they - or could they? Let’s look at an example.

In this Google Trends search I take a look at “apple” during 2006. You can see there are peaks in both search and news volume when Apple presented new Intel Macs in January, and when Apple unveiled software allowing Macs to run Windows XP (this coincides with Apple the music company suing Apple the white plastic company, but I suspect the software is the real reason for the increase in volume).

What does this tell us about the media coverage of Apple? Two things; that it peaked during those two or three events and that it lead to an increase in search. Not so surprising. And if you’re at all following Apple, you already knew that.

What if I wanted to know the quality of the media coverage, either from an Apple perspective (”I hope it was good!”) or from a competitor perspective (”I hope the reviews killed them” or maybe “what did the media say about feature so-and-so that I’m planning to rip off”)? I’d still have to do it all myself; media search, extensive reading, evaluating each item, marking keywords, putting together the charts and so on.

All this could be made easier if I was able to get the set of news stories behind the graph, assign keywords or values to each item, and then have that data fed back into the graph. That would make it possible to create a graph of positive and negative coverage as well as to identify what is causing it. Or evaluate it in any other way I want to.

The possibilities are endless. Google, please continue to improve this excellent product!

• The myth of “keeping up”. Good thoughts on how to cut the fat from your information diet. But most importantly, it’s about why it’s such a bad idea to compare your own productivity to that of several other people combined. You just can’t win that comparison.
• Microsoft’s China Card (Business Week). They are clearly, as the article puts it, “trying to make up for lost time” in their relations to China. But will they be able to break Chinese piracy? Maybe, with a little help from their newfound friends.
• The Times Emulates Print on the Web (Technology Review). The headline in one of the screenshots says it all: “Microsoft Software Will Let Times Readers Download Paper”. If that’s what you’d like to do I’m sure this will be great!