Looking for a new job? Try this....

 Someone just sent me this which has tickled me greatly.




Love it!  (Although personally I would suggest that if you are not maintaining a profile on LinkedIn you should too, just as good practice, irrespective of whether you are jobhunting or not).

Apply the same principles to people looking for info on the category / product area your brand operates.  Are you prepared to pay to insert your brand message in those broader-than-your-brand-name searches, so that you put yourself in the running for the click? I'd be seriously thinking about it.  Otherwise you are missing a heck of a lot of opportunities potentially.

Perhaps I'd better go and set up that Adwords account so no-one mistakes me with my alter-ego landscape gardener in Wales :-) Or the one in Brisbane, or the one in Kent, or the 23 year old that I found on Facebook.  It raises interesting questions about your personal social web brand management strategy.
I have some deliberate views on that topic, but I'll save them for another day.

Got your Google Goggles yet?

We know that Google are going to be busy announcing all sorts of things this week and so far I've seen real time search going live  (so now I have Tweets relating to my query) appearing in my search results:

Then, going back to my point yesterday about everything getting more and more mobile, they're also launching Google Goggles, an augmented reality / visual search app for Android powered phones. (Not to be confused with Google Goggles in Gmail which makes you do maths questions to stop you sending emails you'll regret when you've sobered up!)

Shame Google Goggles doesn't seem to be enabled for the UK yet, so I can't tell you what I think about it in reality, as I can't find it in the Android store. :-(    In principle it will let me use the camera on my Android powered phone to find things relating to the content of the pictures I take.  (I also heard Snaptell ( a visual search engine that's been around for a while now) got snapped up by Amazon. Smart.)

Theme of the week in Google videos seems to be having two engineers presenting every new development (is this a rip off of the Mac v PC idea form Apple?!). At least this one's animated to make a change.

The future is already here...

It's just not evenly distributed yet... said William Gibson (a Canadian science fiction writer, in 1999).

George Orwell published his visionary work 1984 in 1948. Futurology is a fun field to play in.

Yet, increasingly the stuff that dreams and films are made of are becoming reality. Remember the film Minority Report? There was lots of stuff in there that made me go WOW when I first saw the film. In 2002. I watched it again recently. 7 years later and an awful lot of those futuristic notions are now possible or accessible to the masses.

Mobile search is just one of those areas of rich opportunity, and a clever Dutch company have recently launched Layar - an augmented reality mobile browser / search tool, combining location based technology with search for super-relevant search results whereever you are. This is seriously clever stuff, but real. Already. It's just not evenly distributed yet, but it's coming to a smart phone near you, very soon.

The implications for brands and services is pretty exciting for those prepared to spend some time getting their head around something that seems pretty futuristic. Watch this: