Looking Ahead at Google and Social Media: Weekly High Five

Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.  This week’s theme is “Looking Ahead at Google and Social Media.”

#5: Internet 2010 in numbers

Those who do not study the past are doomed to repeat it. Throughout 2011, many employees and consultants will be putting together presentations and plans for implementing social media strategies. This list of figures and statistics should provide some good raw material.

Link: Royal Pingdom

#4: Arm Yourself With Content, For Goliath Is Coming

One of the best things about inbound marketing is that is levels the playing field between small and large businesses. The bad news is that the word is getting out regarding how effective this strategy is and the big businesses will likely be jumping in in 2011. I predict that most of them will do it poorly at first, so you do have time but the clock is ticking.

Link: Hubspot

#3: So Google, You’ll Be Dropping Support For Flash Next, Right?

This is a little more technical than I typically get on this blog, but it could turn out to be an important maneuver in the burgeoning clash of the titans (Google and Apple). Google is making a move to replace one method of encoding Internet video (H.264) with its preferred version (WebM). The former is a proprietary technology whose future licensing costs are uncertain while the latter is an open source standard. One article suggests that it is more about infrastructure costs rather than throwing a punch at Apple. Either way, it’s the users and web developers who will be caught in the middle (as usual).

Link: TechCrunch

#2: How Media Will Relate to Facebook in the Future

I just met with a company that owns multiple newspapers and it was interesting to see the company politics from the inside out. This is a very old school industry that is not at all comfortable with the Web 2.0 technologies that are disrupting them. This article describes how the UK Independent is starting to realize one of the fundamental differences between its print and digital consumers is granularity.

Link: ReadWriteWeb

#1: Google already knows its search sucks (and is working to fix it)

Last week’s #1 article in this position was “Can Google Get Its Mojo Back?” There was lots of discussion all week about the increasingly successful “black hat” SEO techniques that are degrading the quality of Google’s search results pages. This article presents a very interesting perspective about why Google was successful in the first place (scalable design) and theorizes about why it will be able to “fix” its search. I’m not sure I buy the latter, but the former was an interesting perspective.

Link: VentureBeat