New Year's resolutions & OKRs

Hello, 2011!

Every quarter at Google we write these things called OKRs: Objectives & Key Results. Each individual has OKRs, each team has team-level OKRs, and Google itself has company-wide OKRs. Objectives are big-picture things that you want to accomplish: achieving world peace, making users happy, becoming an awesome roller derby skater. Key results are measurable ways that you will quantify your progress toward said objectives. Key results for achieving world peace might include reducing the number of people killed weekly in conflict zones by x%, or reducing nuclear weapons stockpiles by y%. Key results for becoming a rollergirl might include getting onto a roller derby league, or getting your 25-lap time down to ≤ 4 minutes.

There are several things I like about the OKR system. It not only requires you to set goals for the quarter, but to think about why you're picking those goals. What objectives are you trying to achieve? Just making a to-do list of things you need to finish this quarter doesn't ensure that those things are meaningful. Listing objectives first, and then KRs based on those objectives, forces you to think about where you want to go before you think about how you want to get there.

At the end of each quarter, we grade each of our KRs from 0.0 to 1.0 depending on how well we met each goal. Setting measurable KRs is important because then you can grade them quickly and objectively, unlike a qualitative goal such as "Get better at [blah]" (what does "better" mean? How do you know when you've reached it?). If your key result was to write 5 blog posts and you only wrote 3, you score a 0.6. Easy. Average each set of KRs to see how well you met each objective, and average all your KRs to see how well you met your goals for the quarter.

But maybe the thing I like the best—especially when I start to think about OKRs outside of the workplace—is that you're supposed to set stretch goals. At Google, if you're performing well and meeting expectations, you should be hitting ~0.7's on your OKRs. Fully meeting an OKR (scoring a 1.0) means you went above and beyond and accomplished something extra special. This encourages people to set aggressive goals and to try to achieve more than they think is likely. It's actually looked down on if you get too many 1.0's too many times in a row—it means you're not setting aggressive enough goals for yourself.

I used to make New Year's resolutions in the half-assed way that many of us do: as an overly-optimistic wish list of what I'd like to become in the next year (more fit, more successful, less stressed), rather than a list of things I intended to achieve. I'd think big but inside I secretly wouldn't expect myself to be able to achieve that much, so I'd never seriously try to reach the goal. The problem with New Year's resolutions is that we see them as binary: in December, you can either say "I achieved that resolution this year," or "I did not achieve it." If you resolved to go to the gym 3 times/week and at some point you missed a week or two, you've already failed that resolution and there's less incentive to keep going for the rest of the year: even if you go 3 times/week for the rest of the year, you won't have fully met your resolution. This type of black-or-white assessment of goals practically guarantees that you're setting yourself up for disappointment.

For the last several years I've set something that's closer to "New Year's OKRs." They're stretch goals, and I think of "optimum performance" as scoring 0.7 on them. If I resolve to go to the gym 3 times/week and I miss a week or two, I'm still scoring a 0.96 on this goal, which is damn good! In fact, I could miss 13 weeks (hey, stuff happens) and still score 0.7 and feel good about myself. I've also noticed myself setting more and more measurable goals, such as "Design & publish 4 knitting patterns" rather than just "Design more patterns." It feels really good when you can score a solid 1.0 on a goal and know that it's not just because you're allowing yourself an overly-generous interpretation of "more" or "better." I still set qualitative goals too—be less judgmental, take the bus—but I feel like the score-things-as-OKRs-rather-than-resolutions perspective has helped me feel like I can set aggressive goals for myself and actually expect myself to follow through on them. Now, even if I feel guilty about slipping up on a resolution, that one slip isn't able to derail my ability to follow through on the resolution for the rest of the year and to feel good about my accomplishments at the end.

Here are some of my New Year's OKRs for 2011:

• Finish knitting 3 sweaters
• Design & publish 1 sweater pattern
• Knit 11 shawls
• Buy more often from independent yarn dyers
• Get my unfinished knitting projects under control (I'd like to have ≤ 3 at the end of the year. Don't ask how many I have right now!)
• Be less judgmental
• Take the bus to work in the summer

What are yours?

Google Tech Talk: Hacking English

Since my last post on a Google tech talk was such a hit (well, as much as anything on a blog that averages 10 visits/day can be considered "a hit"), I've been meaning to blog about another great talk I attended. It was called "Wordmaking: What it takes to succeed in hacking English and invent a new word," and was much more light-hearted than the talk on plurilingualism. Here's the abstract:

Learn the basics of word formation in English, get "raw materials" for new words, and invent your own word (and have it critiqued) before you let it loose into the English language. The maker of the "best new word" (as voted on by the participants) will win a new dictionary.

The speaker was Erin McKean, a dictionary evangelist, lexicographer and editor of dictionaries. She's a very entertaining speaker, and even has a Murphy's Law-style law named after her:

McKean's Law: Any correction of the speech or writing of others will contain at least one grammatical, spelling, or typographical error.

The talk was about the productivity of English (the degree to which it lends itself to making up new words that other English-speakers can understand), and the building blocks that make that possible. English has inherited a lot of words and grammar from various language families (principally Germanic and Latinate), so English speakers have a lot of morphemes (the building blocks of words) to play around with—prefixes, suffixes, different roots that mean the same thing.

I think my favorite part of the talk was the obvious glee that Erin took in playing with language, and all the new words I learned (both "real" and made-up) from her talk. Here are my favorites, which I encourage you to incorporate into your daily speech:

catachresis (n.)

A linguistic error that comes to be accepted as "correct," usually because it's so common.
Examples: apron used to be napron, but people heard "a napron" and started interpreting it as "an apron." Strait-laced is more commonly misspelled as straight-laced than correctly spelled; so who's to say how long the "incorrect" version remains incorrect, if a majority of people are using it?

epicene (adj.)

Gender-neutral.
Example: English-speakers have been trying to invent an epicene singular pronoun for years, but none have ever really stuck so we usually end up saying "they" even for singular referents.

nonce (adj.)

A nonce word is a particularly time- or place-specific word (which is thus unlikely to catch on as a word that survives the test of time).
Examples: Excaliburger, comcastic.

pregret (n.)

The knowledge that you're about to do something you will later regret having done.
See also: prevenge.

The word that I'd like to get traction for is kez, meaning "fake cheese, or any plastic-like substance trying to pass itself off as cheese." Which brings me to this great website I heard of recently via Says You, a public radio show that every linguaphile should check out: Addictionary.org, where you can make up words, vote on other people's submissions, or submit definitions in search of words. Go to Addictionary and vote for my word.

Have you coined any words?

Calling Ondrej Elleder

Let's do an experiment.

I have a Google Alert set up on my name, so (presumably) whenever someone blogs about me I'll get an email with the link and can check it out. I'm wondering whether this is somewhat common, or just among tech geeks. So let's drop the name of one of my friends from college, and see if this post makes its way to him across the internet.

His name is Ondrej Elleder (read a bit about him here), and this postcard that he sent me was another find while I was cleaning out old papers this week. One of the biggest things I miss about college is living and socializing with such fascinating, diverse and entertaining people. Linguaphiles who would write postcards like this:

To: The discreditable SUSAN MOSKWA

Susan! Hail, by mail, from the city of the FLAIL! Whyever the FLAIL? This be the reason, Missus: It was the favourite weapon of the Hussites. And don't you ask me who the Hussites were! :-S Contemplate instead the Freudian symbolism of having the flail for a weapon.

Happy New Year,
Ondřej

First steps with Google Analytics & Webmaster Tools

After setting up Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools for your site, there are a couple quick settings and tweaks that I'd recommend:

1. Set your preferred domain.
   Decide whether you want your website to be referenced with or without the www prefix (example.com vs. www.example.com). In your Webmaster Tools account, navigate to Tools > Set preferred domain and select the radio button next to your preferred version of your domain. I'll talk more soon about how to set this preference on your own server as well (so that anyone visiting your site will know which version you prefer).
2. Remove yourself from your Analytics traffic reports.
   You probably don't want to include your own visits to your site in your reports. To fix this, create a filter in Analytics for each IP address from which you frequently access your site. I've created filters for my home IP address and my office IP address. Here's how to create the filter. If you don't know what your IP address is, a site like WhatIsMyIP.com can find it for you. Note that if you frequently access your site from a public location (such as a library computer or your local cafe), filtering out traffic from that IP address will also exclude from your reports anyone else visiting your site from that location.

If tools like Analytics freak you out, or you want to dig deeper but don't have the time, consider contracting an Analytics Authorized Consultant. These companies have in-depth knowledge of Analytics and can provide hands-on setup and support if the do-it-yourself style of the Help Center isn't enough for you.

Previous: Installing Analytics & Webmaster Tools

Google Charts & Gadgets

I got a bee in my bonnet today to play around with Google Gadgets and Charts. The charts in Analytics are so beautiful that I wanted to play with sometihng similar on my own, so I decided to add a gadget to my iGoogle page showing my lap times from skate practice. Every month our coach times us skating 1 lap and 3 laps, so what better way to track my improvement than to throw it into a graph, right?

A word to the wise: although you'd think that gadgets would be an easy way to get started with Google Charts (whose Developer Guide is pages long and details dozens of URL parameters), I actually couldn't figure out how to make them work. The line graph gadget requires a field labeled "Data source URL", which means you need to encode the data you want to display using one of Google Charts' data encoding formats, which is non-trivial (especially for someone expecting the plug-and-play simplicity of most gadgets), and the gadget comes with no instructions whatsoever (do I need a full Charts URL? Just the data parameter? Can I add in additional chart parameters?). I spent long enough researching data encodings and chart URL parameters that I figured I might as well create my own charts from scratch rather than using the gadget.

Here's what I ended up with: The left axis shows my 3-lap times, the right axis my 1-lap times. I was actually surprised by how closely the curves match each other. I only have 2 months of data (I missed January), so I'm looking forward to a few more months' worth to see how the charts grow over time.

Google Tech Talk: Plurilingualism on the internet

Google hosts a surprising number of really interesting tech talks about language. Back in July I attended a particularly good one by Stephanie Booth, about plurilingualism on the internet. Here's the abstract:

More people are multilingual than purely monolingual. Yet the internet is a collection of monolingual silos. Where are the multilingual spaces? How can online applications assist the people who bridge the linguistic chasms, instead of hindering them? How do present applications decide what language to present? IP address or keyboard locale detection are clearly bad solutions. How could this be done better? This talk addresses some localization issues, but beyond that, questions the very way languages are dealt with on the internet.

It's definitely worth watching in full, but if you want the highlights, these are some of the more interesting ideas I took away from it:

• Code-switching! I'd forgotten there was a term for it. Code-switching is awesome, especially as a form of word-play. Everyone should try it.
• Stephanie is multilingual, and when she blogs she prefaces each post with a short summary in the language in which it wasn't posted (that is, posts in English get a synopsis in French, and vice versa). This lets her reach two language communities at once, without the tedium and mess of double-posting each post in full. Check out these recent examples.
• "Some people really resent being shown languages they don't understand."
  Google develops software with a global reach, and we put a lot of care into trying to make sure users get our products in the right languages; but this quote was an interesting reminder that getting it wrong can provide a very negative experience for a particular user. Right now, for example, we use IP address as a factor in determining which version of Google search to show. If you're browsing from a US IP, we'll show you www.google.com in English; if you're browsing from a French IP, we'll show you www.google.fr in French. But what if you're browsing in Switzerland? We'll show you www.google.ch, but should we show the German, French, Italian, or Rumantsch version? We generally default to German, which—statistically—is the right answer, but for all the French/Italian/Rumantsch speakers is clearly the wrong answer. And what about someone from China who's road-tripping across Europe? She's probably going to want to see Google in Chinese, rather than being served a different language every time she logs on.
• The lang and hreflang attributes are underutilized and offer some really cool potential for ways of understanding documents and hyperlinks. The most common use of lang is in the <html> tag, to define the language of an entire webpage: <html lang="en-US">. But you could also use it to define smaller subsections: stick it in a <blockquote> tag when you're quoting a different language; stick it in a <div> or a <p> if you have a section of text in a different language (for example, a summary at the top of a blog post!).
  
  The hreflang attribute is even more interesting to me, since I'd never heard of it before. From W3C:

  The hreflang attribute provides user agents with information about the language of a resource at the end of a link, just as the lang attribute provides information about the language of an element's content or attribute values.

  So if you link to a cool website in Spanish, you could throw <a hreflang="es" href="www.example.es"> in the <a> tag. The thing about these attributes, though—especially hreflang—is that they're underutilized because no technology takes advantage of them. But no technology takes advantage of them because they're underutilized. If we ever find a way to break out of this Catch 22, I could imagine some cool opportunities (visualizations for language targets, applications in search and social networking... the sky's the limit!).

Answering an age-old question

Which came first, the chicken or the egg? What is the sound of one hand clapping? And what happens when you give 16 Googlers ice cream, two limousines, two hours and no agenda?

Why, they go to Microsoft, of course. :)

Google Kirkland recently held an office decoration contest to celebrate our expansion into a new building in Kirkland (we Googlers are fond of office decorations). The Webmaster Tools team won by a landslide. Our prize? A limo ride to the local Ben & Jerry's shop, and ice creams all around. But we had the limos for two hours, so we decided to use the extra time to swing by Microsoft's Redmond campus to see if we could get a sneak peek at the beta version of their Webmaster Portal.

In the end we didn't make it much farther than the lobby (due to not knowing the last names of any of their team members), but good times were had all 'round.

Have a funny story about a team outing? Photos of your quirky office decor? Share them with us!

You say potato, I say linguistic train wreck

While checking out the new search queries data in Google Webmaster Tools this week, I noticed that I rank #2 for [separate wheat from chafe] (thanks to my last grammar rant). I was all ready to draft a follow-up post in the hopes of reaching a few more unenlightened searchers:

• e + s is not pronounced [ex].
  So stop saying 'excape' instead of 'escape', and please stop saying 'expresso' instead of 'espresso'. Look it up. Really. It's espresso.
• fiancé != fiancée
  If you choose to use the French word for "person to whom I am engaged", please be aware that (although they sound the same when spoken) there are two versions of the written word: fiancé is masculine, fiancée is feminine. A pre-husband is not a fiancée, nor is a pre-wife a fiancé, unless there's something they haven't been telling you.
• nuclear
  I might be able to forgive him for stealing the election... twice... invading Iraq, ruining our international reputation, destroying the environment, attempting to constitutionally ban gay marriage, running our debt sky-high, and spending most of his time on vacation, if only Bush would stop saying 'nucular'. There's no vowel between the 'c' and the 'l', buddy. It's 'new' + 'clear'.
  ...Though on second thought, I probably wouldn't forgive him even then.

Yup, I was ready. But then I saw this article on YOUmoz. It argues that one man's grammar tragedy is another man's wordplay (using the examples of mondegreens, snowclones, and eggcorns):

You'll find these linguistic occurrences are popular on satirical websites like Fark and SomethingAwful, in cartoons and TV comedies, on the radio and in movies. Custodians of grammar may frown at the decay of 'proper English' but the laziness of online writers is a boon for observing the hyper-evolution of our language.

I shelved my draft and lamented having become a codger at 25.

But I think this commenter summed it up well for me: it's not that I don't like change in language. I love linguistic puns, code-switching, and other creative forms of breaking the "rules". I love hearing language twisted for clever or comedic effect; I just don't like hearing it twisted out of ignorance.

My phonetics professor in college used to dream of the day when everyone would learn the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) in school and mispronunciation would become a thing of the past. News anchors would no longer hesitate over the pronunciation of foreign names. You would no longer be asked to phonetically transcribe your name using English characters (most frustrating exercise ever!) so that the principal can read it out correctly at graduation. And Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! wouldn't get to make fun of Bush for needing a phonetic cheat-sheet in his speeches.

While we're on the subject of language, I found this article on the language of the Berkshire Hathaway annual report both insightful and reassuring. At least I'm not the only neurotic out there.

Google Experimental (who knew?)

One of the things I love about Google—and that drives me a little crazy—is that they're constantly coming out with so much cool stuff, both big and small, that it's hard to keep up with it all. I'm loathe to say impossible (since sites like Google Blogoscoped do a pretty bang-up job), but I'd rather spend my free time listening to NPR or playing cards than stocking up on Google press releases. So I miss a few things here and there.

Just last week I found out about Google Experimental: Google is constantly running experiments on their search pages, but usually you only stumble into them by chance (and often don't know you were in one until you think about it later and go "Wait a minute, did I really see [whatever] on that SERP?"). But apparently, with Google Experimental you can explicitly enroll yourself in certain experiments to try out new features that Google is testing for search. Cool, huh?

Looks like it's been in Labs since May. Apparently I live under a rock.

A Saturday in Dublin

I've got to say, it's good to be back home. Traveling is exciting but it's also tiring and unfamiliar. Adam and I spent our second week in Dublin in nearly back-to-back trainings, meetings and conferences. We'd originally planned to take Friday off and do a long weekend in Galway, but we ended up staying in the office on Friday just to unwind and have informal chats and follow-up with all the folks we'd been training and talking with all week. Also to raise a pint with a friend to celebrate his imminent return to the US of A. As much fun as it sounds to go traipsing around Ireland, I think the Friday was well-spent, since one of the biggest benefits I got out of this trip was getting to know the Dublin-based Googlers better which has heightened my sense of commitment to them.

I did get to spend Saturday being a tourist, however, before flying back to the US on Sunday. Adam took the train up to Howth, and I stayed in Dublin and just spent the day walking around, mostly in the Temple Bar area. Being in Seville had reminded me that I'm a somewhat abnormal tourist: rather than rushing around to see all "The Sights," I'd rather take my time, check out some places that real people (dare I say locals?) might actually frequent, stop when I want, and just savor the time.

It was in this sort of spirit that I spent an hour sitting on a street corner listening to this Dublin cowboy playing some of the best slide guitar I've heard in I-don't-know-how-long. I have to admit that the Josh Bell experiment crossed my mind; who cares if I have no idea who the hell he is, if the music is so good it makes me want to stay until my butt's fallen asleep? I also went to an open-air book market, a "fashion" market (clothing and jewelery), and a really fantastic farmer's market in this hidden little square that I just happened to stumble across.

After wandering for awhile, I walked back out toward the river (like most significant European cities, Dublin has a river running through it) and saw crowds of people lined up along the river and on the bridges. One of the onlookers told me that it was the Liffey Swim; apparently once a year hundreds of people jump into the River Liffey and swim a couple miles downstream. It's one of the big events of the outdoor swimming season. And I happened to arrive just a couple minutes before people started launching themselves from the starting line:

The swimmers had to go through a decontamination shower when they got out of the river (yum). More photos from the day available in my Picasa web album.

Sojourn in Seville

More notes from my Europe trip... I arrived in Dublin on a Tuesday, and then on Wednesday turned around and flew (along with a bajillion Dublin Googlers—or is that Google Dubliners?) to Seville in a monster double-decker jet. I can't remember ever being on a plane this big. Luckily I was still too sleepy (thanks, jet-lag) to put much energy into worrying about how something that large can fly.

We were all travelling to a Google conference in Seville that lasted for three days and covered a variety of topics specific to our EMEA offices and markets. It was quite interesting for me to hear about our business from that perspective; Google is a global company, but sometimes it's easy for American Googlers to forget about this since we develop our products in English first and most of us aren't too tapped into what's going on in foreign markets.

It was raining and in the 50s when we left Ireland, but sunny and over 100° when we stepped off in Spain. The Dubliners were particularly excited since apparently it had rained in Dublin for the last 60 days straight (!). After checking in to our hotels we wandered around downtown Seville for the rest of the afternoon, meeting Googlers from various offices all over Europe (Seville city center was completely swamped with Googlers, it was kinda other-worldly). I love that all the folks I met were friendly, engaging, and easy to hang out with even though we'd only just met.

Like many European cities, Seville has its own feel and lots of intriguing architecture and city layout that are unusual to my American eyes. Most of the streets are unbelievably narrow and winding (good luck giving directions in this city!). Even with a map you'll get lost at least 5 times before you make it anywhere. I can't imagine how anyone deals with having a car here. Many of the streets seem not to be wide enough to even fit a car. Lots of building exteriors are painted with the same dusky yellow color:

While I was in high school I spent a couple weeks in northern Spain (Burgos), but I'd forgotten about the Spanish evening schedule: lunch starts around 2 or 3p, and instead of dinner at 6 or 7, people go out for tapas at that time and then have dinner as late as 10p. As a high schooler I thought it was a great setup (that way you can hang out with your friends all afternoon/evening rather than having to come home at 6 for dinner and then not being able to escape again for the rest of the night); but this time around it just left me wondering how people digest so much fried food so late in the day. The Sevillan specialty dish is apparently frito variado (assorted fried fish), and Adam and I ended up one night with an entire fish, sliced into rings and then fried and then plated in the order that it had been sliced (head and tail and all), so it still looked like a fish, just with some space in between. It was tasty (and this coming from a girl who doesn't like fish), but I don't think I could handle it on a regular basis.

After the conference was over I stayed the weekend in Seville with a few other Googlers and did some sight-seeing. One of my favourite parts of the city was the river (Guadalquivir) that runs through Seville. Something about it reminded me of the Seine in Paris; probably the wide stone walkways down by the water, and all the people biking and strolling down there. Souvenirs brought back from Spain: a tiny oil panting of a street scene from a street vendor, and a really nasty cough (both of which I still have three weeks later...).

Two weeks in Europe

I just flew in from Dublin, and boy are my arms tired!

Adam and I just got back from two weeks in Europe, most of which was spent in the Google office in Dublin. The Dublin office is completely fascinating (for a language geek like me) because it's very international and anywhere you wander in the office you can hear people speaking to each other in French, German, Turkish, Swedish (often at the same time!)... We've been taking advantage of their international expertise and spent the last couple weeks working to improve our webmaster communication efforts outside the sphere of just the USA or the English-speaking market.

So the single biggest thing that struck me upon arrival in Dublin was (and you're gonna laugh): there are no bugs! I'd forgotten from my time in England that there are no screens on the doors or windows there. You can leave them all open—even when it's dark out, and the lights are on inside—and no bugs come in! It's amazing! I have no idea why this is the case, but it's so.

Actually Ireland reminded me a lot of England in some ways. The driving on the left, of course; but also the styling of their street signs, the storefronts, the architecture of their houses. I was trying to describe what makes the buildings different from in the US, and the best I could come up with (aside from all that classic red-orange brick) is that the building-fronts are very flat.

The neighborhood in which the Google office is located used to be not-so-desirable, but is undergoing a rejuvenation (at least, according to my cab driver). Observe all the cranes:

I did do a day of touristing around Dublin [edit: details here], but most of my time was spent in the office at breakneck pace: back-to-back meetings most days, giving presentations, talking one-on-one with people, even answering Q&A on a panel at a conference. It was a fairly overwhelming couple weeks, but definitely worth it. Meeting all of the international Googlers who were there was not only a pleasure (one of them is a fellow Rubik's Cube enthusiast!), but gave me a new perspective on the importance (for Google) of building our international presence. Now my challenge is to synthesize all the information I whirlwinded through and to bring it back in a useful form to my colleagues stateside.

Three things on my desk

One of our friends/acquaintances blogs for Cranium, and while checking out their blog I was tickled by their recurring "Three things on my desk" posts. It seems like Cranium has a lot in common with Google in this respect: fun office, creative people, sense of humour.

In honour of my team's move to our new building, and subsequent redecoration of our (awesome!) new space, here are three things on my desk:

1. 3rd place trophy from the search engine slot-car racing showdown at Alan's Vintage Tub & Bath-hosted dinner during SES! Too bad it was third out of three, hehe. :(
2. Pink flamingo pen. Back when I worked in a café, we made everyone sign their credit card receipts with a pen just like this. Ahh, those were the days... It significantly lowered our pen-stealage rate, that's for sure.
3. Devil ducky. What office is complete without one of these?

Keep It Web Based, Even If You Don't Trust the Servers

John C. Dvorak recently wrote a scathing commentary of web based applications. He makes some great points, specifically about WGA having serious issues beyond technical difficulties, and the problems with single point of failure. But he goes on to declare that web based applications are flawed and that we could be at least as successful if we reversed the trend toward online services and returned to client-only applications. I think this conflates the issues, and I disagree with this attack on the vision of web based applications.

The problems due to single point of failure are caused by a failure of implementation. I want to focus on the vision aspect of Dvorak's article. The benefits of web based applications are due (among other things) to powerful, inherent concepts: available always, available anywhere, and available with anyone.

Available Always

Dvorak writes,

What happens if the system fails? The damage wouldn't be too bad if you backed everything up, but then why use the online system in the first place?

System failure, backup, and recovery are details which any software product should handle by itself, rather than Dvorak's model of "control your own data". Putting aside privacy issues for a moment, as a user I don't want to have to maintain my own data.

Consider the automatic save feature that's been built into Microsoft Office apps for a long time, and since then copied by many others. It's automatically saving everything you do, so you, as the user can focus on your work. However, even this just punts the issue to your hard disk which might fail at any moment. I have to confess, I don't back up my hard disk (who does?). Instead, I try to use systems which handle this piece for me as well. Web based systems are very well placed to do this, better even than client applications because the implementation and maintenance are completely in the hands of the service provider, rather than the user.

Available Anywhere

Dvorak also writes,

What happens if the timeline goes the other way? In this instance, you'd start with server-based online applications, and then suddenly a new technology—the desktop computer[appears...] "Now control your own data!" "Faster processing power now." "Cheaper!" "Everything at your fingertips." "No need to worry about network outages."

I believe that "everything at your fingertips" means I don't have to carry my own computer around with me everywhere. I love having my email client anywhere. I love having my blog writing software just a URL away. And my goal tracking software is available to me, no matter what computer I'm using. And I get consistent performance (nearly) every time for all of them. I don't need to worry about carrying my data on a memory stick. I don't need to worry about buying proprietary, licensed software. I just need the only thing I ever should: me. I need nothing else to be productive and get work done.

Available with Anyone

At one point Dvorak writes,

Easier to share files? So how hard is it to attach a doc file to an e-mail anyway?

Smooth collaboration goes beyond packing up your bytes and handing them over to someone else. Susan and I planned our whole wedding using Google Docs and Spreadsheets. If we had done this in a client-based spreadsheet app we would have ended up with at least 5 copies of the spreadsheet, all out of sync. The synchronization and collaboration features of web based applications were key to our success.

Back to the Failure

Towards the end of his article Dvorak writes,

What is often lost in individual analyses of how to proceed with your data-processing needs is the concept of "being at the mercy of a single company." It's something that you need to avoid at all costs.

He makes a really great point! We don't want to end up with single point of failure (through software or policy). However, and I won't dive into details, I believe that you don't have to "be at the mercy of a single company" to use "cloud computing". This is admittedly non-trivial, but there's a great start-up idea hiding here. In any case online service providers better get on board with this, since Dvorak is correct in this point.

In the end, I would argue that being at the mercy of a single computer, and, worse, at the mercy of a single person (i.e. yourself) is no better, if not worse, than being at the mercy of a single company. And that particular issue is surmountable itself, as I predict we will begin to see in the near future.

Traffic Building: Measure Your Readers

Identifying viewers, and what they want to read, is a really critical part of building traffic. Susan and I installed Google Analytics some time ago, so we've been tracking our traffic fairly consistently over the last six or so months. We get a pretty good view on where our traffic comes from (go Google organic search! including some keywords that I'm particularly proud of), and which content our readers are coming for (mainly front page; but, from me, also Welcome to Amazon's EC2 and Seattle Conference on Scalability).

Google Analytics and Feedburner are a couple of ideas for tracking site traffic. But I'm more interested in hearing what you have to say, so please comment and include why you read our blog (e.g. "Susan works at Google!" or "Nick is an awesome tech master!") and how you like to measure your traffic.

Seattle Conference on Scalability

Databases are dinosaurs. This is what Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon, had to say. And I think those three words do a great job of summing up the Seattle Conference on Scalability, which I attended last weekend.

The conference started off with a keynote by Jeff Dean of Google, giving a nice overview of the Google File System, MapReduce, and BigTable. Marissa Mayer also gave an brief history of some of the many challenges Google has faced in the last five or so years. I won't recap everything, check out the agenda for details. All the sessions should also be on YouTube by now.

"Databases are Dinosaurs". Vogels put this statement on the screen, and my first thought was that I had made a bad decision by skipping the YouTube session. But I was pleasantly surprised. You can read the details of Dynamo in an upcoming paper, it's going under the name "HASS" academically. A quick search indicates it's not out yet.

"You can't have high availability and high consistency at the same time." This statement is what really opened my eyes to one of the biggest challenges in web scale data management. Coming from Werner Vogels—CTO of Amazon, and a highly respected academic to boot—this is a strong statement. Conventional data management systems guarantee consistency and, following from the above statement, can never make strong high availability guarantees. I believe this to be the essence of Web Scalability.

Do you have an opinion on web scalability? Leave a comment and let me and our readers know.

Peoplewatching at the Googleplex

My report from my week in Mountain View wouldn't be complete without a big Hullo! to the folks who showed me such a great time while I was down there—so thanks to Ben (my mentor-for-a-week), Greg (for letting me lurk in his office), Brian & Katina for starting to clue me in to the landscape of search quality, Matt C for making me feel welcome, and an extra-special thanks to Matt S and Adam for, well, keeping me out of trouble. :-)

The timing of SMX couldn't have been better, in that I got to meet a bunch of Mountain Viewglers in Seattle the week before I went down to California for my training, so I had some familiar faces to look for. Between the champagne breakfast, the outdoor movie, and the evening of waltz and polka (most exhausting dance ever!), I'm definitely looking forward to the next time I have an excuse to go back.

I'm probably going to start sounding like a broken record saying this, but the coolest part of Google so far has definitely been the people I've met. Everyone has some surprising hidden talent (or two... or ten). Everyone has some endearing personality trait or quirk or interesting personal history. Those that blog always leave me wanting to read more. Like everyone else, I love hearing Matt's insights on search and technology; but I'm equally fascinated by how Adam writes so directly from the heart. Some Googlers blog so engagingly it's as if they were right there talking to you; others have gorgeous grammar and beautiful sentence structure (yes, I'm a language nerd!).

I'm still trying to figure out what kind of blogger I need to be. Obviously I'd like to contribute unique and useful content to the internet (goodness knows there's enough trash out there already!). But my best writing always tends to come out in informal media—journaling, letter-writing, etc. Perhaps I should just straw-poll you guys: would you rather read something affective or analytic? Quantitative or qualitative? "Life as a Googler" or "Life as a rollergirl-in-training"? :-)

My first week as a Googler

As many of you have heard already, after 9 months working as a contractor in internationalization testing at Google Kirkland, I've joined the Webmaster Central team as a Webmaster Trends Analyst. I've been doing i18n testing for Webmaster Tools for awhile, but I'm really excited to join the team full-time and to take on a role that lets me interact directly with our users and webmasters. My mission (should I choose to accept it) is basically to facilitate communication between Google and webmasters: to make sure that we're hearing what webmasters have to say (about search quality, Webmaster Tools, you name it), and to communicate out as much as possible so that Google doesn't feel as impenetrable as it used to.

As I make my way around the blogosphere I see a fair amount of posts on interviewing at Google, so I probably don't need to rehash that whole process (quick synopsis: I actually enjoyed most of my interviews for this position, which probably means it will be a good fit).

My first week was an interesting romp. One's first week as a full-timer is spent at the main Googleplex in Mountain View, CA, going through various trainings and learning about some of what makes Google tick. Having already been around for awhile, some of this was interesting to me and some was old news. The best part, I thought, was meeting new people down in Mountain View and seeing what the campus feels like. It certainly has a different feel from the Kirkland office: more collegiate, more bustling, more people working late, more people randomly wandering the halls or playing pool. Just more, I guess. Kirkland is a great location for anyone who wants to strike a sane balance between work + home life, but Mountain View certainly has that famous Googley feeling that everyone loves to talk about (ball pit, anyone?).

In Kirkland there are banks of snack bins in the hallways—cookies, chips, gum, etc.—free for the taking. In Mountain View they've left the healthy stuff out (fruits, granola bars, carrots + hummus) and put all the really good goodies in a vending machine in which the prices are based on how unhealthy each snack is for you: 1¢ for each gram of sugar, 2¢ for each gram of fat, etc. How clever is that?? It's like a double-deterrent from eating trash (it costs you, and it makes you conscious of how unhealthy what you're about to eat is).

I continue to be seriously impressed with my colleagues, especially those running the webmaster communications circuit (conferences, blogging, forums, etc.). And I'm talking about the Googlers you've never heard of, as well as those who have become mini-celebrities in the community. Most of them are just as amazing offline, if not moreso: they're engaged, they're thoughtful, they're smart, and they seriously care about what we're doing and about the impact that we (as a team) and they (individually) can have on people. I just hope that I can help continue to convey this to the outside world. How can a handful of people make hundreds of thousands of webmasters feel like we're listening and responding to each of them? (For anyone with an answer, by the way, that's not entirely a rhetorical question.) It's a big challenge and an incredibly important one.

Final note: unfortunately, my tenure w/ Webmaster Central begins just as Vanessa leaves us; but we'll be carrying on with the things that were important to her, and have big plans to continue growing the Tools and contributing to the community in ways that I'm sure she'd be proud of. Best luck, Vanessa, I hope you find what you're looking for at Zillow!

The search generation

A couple weeks ago Marissa Mayer unveiled Google's new universal search on the Googleblog. But... universal search? Last time I checked, we were still only indexing the internet (and some books that we put on the internet), not the universe. And lately I've actually been wishing that we did index more of the universe.

I'm sure kids my brother's age must be even worse about this than we are, but lately I've really been feeling like Nick and I are part of a generation of people who've had sufficient exposure to internet technologies (such as search) that they've become part of our daily way of thinking. The simple example is that each time my (parent-aged) co-worker asks me a question (including totally random stuff that I know absolutely nothing about), my first instinct is not to say "I don't know," but rather to go straight to Google and search on a few keywords. It seems like the most natural thing to me; while she's always a little taken aback and says "Funny, I never would have thought to use search," or "How do you even know which keywords to search for?"

Lately I've found this "search instinct" popping up more and more, in ways that seem to indicate that search has become less a tool that I use, and more of a way of thinking or interacting with the world. Like when I'm at a restaurant with a 14-page menu and I know just what I want to eat, but I don't know whether it's something they serve. Instead of trying to find it under the appropriate menu category (would chicken fried steak be under 'Entrées', 'Surf & Turf', or 'Homestyle Dinners'?), I just want to be able to search for [fried steak], and know in an instant whether they have it or not. Why can't I search for [avocado] and find all dishes whose name or description contains avocado? Why can't I search for [label:vegetarian] and get a submenu showing only vegetarian entrées, instead of having to page through the full menu looking for the little vegetable icon next to each dish?

Today we stood in front of the spice shelves at the grocery store looking for ground white pepper for a good 10 minutes. Do they really think they're making it easy for you by organizing the spices alphabetically within brand (McCormick A-Z, Penzey's A-Z, etc.) for the name-brands on the top shelves, and then by spice style (savory vs. sweet vs. leafy) on the bottom shelves? And of course the gourmet and bulk spices have their own section entirely... My fingers were itching to query for [white pepper] and be done with it.

Y'know those handheld devices that're all the rage in HCI experiments these days, where you walk around the museum and it tells you about whatever exhibit you're standing in front of? The completely personalized, interactive guided tour? The grocery stores should work on a similar technology, a little hand-held (they could mount them on shopping carts) where you enter search queries and it guides you to the precise location of the item you're looking for. Or tells you whether they're out of it at the moment. This would've been really nice to have when they re-organized the whole layout of our grocery store last month, so that we had no idea where anything was anymore. Or when we had to get two stockers, a cashier, a sommelier, and a manager involved in order to find out whether they carried minute tapioca pearls.

Now that's what I'd call universal search.

SES New York

Last night I got back from four days in NYC at Search Engine Strategies (SES). SES is a conference that's held several times a year all over the world, where web people get together and talk about search engine optimization and related issues. I was there representing Google (!!); technically I was a speaker, I was on a Q&A panel, though I only answered one question ("What is a TLD?"). The conference was a lot of fun and I'm so glad I got to go.

It's kind of amazing how people treat you when they know you work for Google—especially at an industry event. Aside from being really excited to talk to you, they'll ask you every possible Google-related question, regardless of what you actually do for Google or whether you know anything about search/rankings. I found myself saying, "Well, I don't actually work with that product/service at all, but..." way more than "Oh yes, I know the answer to that." By the end of the week I was learning to answer questions at least somewhat usefully. There's a surprising lack of overlap between what you need to know about a product to test it, vs. what users want to ask about it...

I also met some new people (including more SEOmozzers!), and went to a bunch of great sessions. The sessions were probably the best part for me; I know these conferences are all about networking (read: getting drunk), but this was my first one, so I figure it's okay for me to start with the actual conference content, meet a few people in the sessions, and work my way up from there (especially since I'm more of a bookworm than a barfly these days). And especially since, unlike the conferences at my last job, this subject matter is actually of direct personal interest to me.

So I learned about SEO. And keywords. And creating good content. And usability as it relates to SEO (the more user-friendly it is, the more search engines will like it). And the importance of <title> tags. And linkbuilding. Et cetera, et cetera. By the end of the day I'd be really jazzed up and itching to get my hands on one of my website projects. I want to try an experiment, building a site from the ground up (which I've done before) and then employing some of these tools and methodologies that are out there to actually see what happens to it after I put it on the web (which I haven't done before; I've just put together sites, handed them off to the people who requested them, and never looked back). I want to install Analytics, use Webmaster Tools and Website Optimizer (both of which I work on, incidentally!), do keyword research, etc. It'll be a whole new side of the internet for me, which is kind of silly/ironic given that I work for Google; but a good learning experience, or so I hope.

I did go on one fairly decadent social outing—the Vintage Tub & Bath dinner party—but it's late and I'm jetlagged (I was just getting used to that NY time zone!), so I'll save my one photo for a later blog post. Vive SES!