Sign in with a Google Account

Google Sign-In

Step 1 is to head on over to http://google.com/places and sign in with your Google account. If you don’t have an account, you can create one by clicking on the blue Sign Up Now button above the sign-in box. Remember that signing up for a Google account is not the same as signing up for Gmail. It’s simply an account that you can use to connect to Google services.

Assuming that this is your first visit to Google Places, click the large “Add a New Business” button, after signing in.

Locate your business

Your Business Location

Next step is to locate your business listing in Google Maps. Complete all of the required information about your business’ location and add as much optional information (email, web address, description) as you can. As you enter information, a map with a business location marker will be created on the right side or the page. When everything is correct, click the Next button. All of the information that you add on this page can also be edited later.

If a listing for your business already exists (which is very likely), you will be able to claim it. Otherwise, you can add a new listing.

On the following page, you can add photos, videos, hours of operation, payment types accepted and additional details.

Validate your listing

Validate Your Listing

Before your listing can be shown as owner verified, Google will validate the information submitted, either by calling the phone number in the listing or sending a postcard to the business address. Either way, you will receive a validation code to enter on the following page. It’s best to get this validation code by phone right now, while you’re looking at the page, although you can come back and enter it later. Once validated, your listing will appear on Google Maps within one day.

Now what?

Now that your business is listed and verified, information from your Places page will be shown whenever your business is displayed on Google Maps and in general Google search results. You can also take advantage of some additional custom features on your Places page.

QR Code Poster

QR code and print-out poster

QR codes are square bar codes that can be read by the digital cameras in most smart phones. By scanning the code, a mobile version of your business’ Places page is automatically displayed on the phone’s browser.

Print out a QR code poster and make it available at your place of business for customers to scan and get more information about your business.

Coupons

Enter a few lines of text and special offer print-out coupons will appear alongside your business listing in Google Maps. You can set an expiration date and specify which of your locations will accept the coupon. Coupons appear on your listing within a few hours of being added.

Post to your place page

For time-sensitive notices, you can add a text message of up to 160 characters to your page. The message will automatically disappear after 30 days.

Y’know what I’d like to see?

I’d like to see the main street of our nearest city (Sonora, CA) sporting QR posters in every shop window. The sidewalks are full of tourists who could be scanning them to find out more about each business and taking that information home with them. In a rural community like ours that is largely dependent on tourism, taking advantage of a no-cost outreach opportunity like shouldn’t take a second thought.

I am willing to help any Tuolumne County business owner, at no charge, with setting up a Google Places page. Please contact me.

I thought this would be a good opportunity to recycle a post that I wrote in 2008 about that most basic building block of the Internet, the domain name.

Master of Your Domain

Every business and many individuals need their own domain name. This unique alpha-numeric address becomes the name used to identify you in a web site URL or an email address. The great things about a domain name are that 1) you own it and 2) it is portable anywhere on the Internet. You keep the same identity, regardless of which Internet Service Provider (ISP) or hosting company you use. There is however, a lot of confusion about how to register and then use a domain name, as well as their actual function in the structure of the Internet.

Why a domain name?

Every computer on the Internet (even yours) has an address and, being machines, these addresses are numeric. They are referred to as IP Addresses (for Internet Protocol) and they are written in dotted-decimal notation; four numbers, each ranging from 0 to 255, separated by dots (e.g. 147.132.42.18). Even in the early days, when the Internet was used mainly by computer scientists and academics, they realized that referring to everything on the Internet using dotted-decimal notation was not going to fly. So a system was devised to use a domain name interchangeably with its IP Address. In other words, a domain name is a pointer to an IP Address.

In the beginning (and up until 1998), all domain names were registered and maintained by a single entity, called InterNIC (Internet Network Information Center). It was a fairly technical (and expensive) process to use but it had the advantage of being orderly. After that, the business of registering domain names was semi-privatized and domain name registrars began sprouting like mushrooms. The best news about this was that prices dropped drastically. The bad news was that many of them were no less confusing to use, some adopted predatory business practices and others went out of business in relatively short order. But love them or hate them (and I know of few people who love them), the domain name registrar is the first stop in acquiring your own domain name.

Note that many hosting companies (i.e. companies that provide web site and email services) are also domain registrars. You can often get a package deal for domain name registration and hosting services but it is not required that you use the same company for both functions. Where ever your domain name is registered, make sure that you retain control over the domain name record (see below).

What’s in a name?

This is the last bit of technical information, I promise. Every domain name ends in a top-level domain (TLD), the letters after the last dot. The most common TLDs are .biz, .com, .edu, .gov, .info, .int, .mil, .name, .net and .org. You can use any of these TLDs in your own domain name, except that .edu domains must be registered by educational institutions and .mil domains are reserved for the U.S. military.

There are other TLDs, such as two letter country codes and those that are privately administered (such as .mobi, for mobile devices) but these are beyond the scope of this post.

The portion of the domain name before the last dot is where you can get creative. However, you are restricted to the letters a-z (case does not matter), the numbers 0-9 and the hyphen. Spaces are not allowed. This part of your name must be unique across the entire Internet. It has long been true that there are no English, single-word domain names available for registration. If there is one that you must have, you may be able to buy it from its registered owner, as transfers are allowed. If you owned a name like fund.com, you too could sell it for $10 million.

You may have noticed a second dot in some domain names. The name before this dot is called the sub-domain. These names do not need to be registered, since they are guaranteed to be unique by being attached to your primary domain name. Sub-domains are used to divide domains into logical areas, like a web site, a blog or a media server. The most common sub-domain is “www” and this is usually aliased to the same IP Address as the primary domain name. Note that sub-domains require configuration in your domain’s DNS record and that’s the next step in the process…

Don’t you hate it when people lie to you?

I know I said there would be no more technical stuff. You believed that? When you register a domain name, you fill out a bunch of information that becomes your domain name record. This record is held by the domain name registrar and you should have access to this record. Now listen to me: make sure you have (and keep track of) the username and password that gives you access to your domain name record. It can be a huge pain if you don’t have access to this record when you need it (like when you decide to move your web site and email to a new hosting company).

A very important part of your domain name record is the location of the nameservers for this domain. A nameserver is a computer on the Internet running DNS (Domain Name System) software, which is usually operated by an ISP or hosting company. Its location is expressed as a domain and subdomain (e.g. ns.hostingcompany.com) and there are usually at least two of them, for redundancy. Its purpose is to resolve domain names to IP addresses. If a nameserver cannot resolve the address locally, it will search other DNS servers for the correct record, a process called DNS recursion.

For each function that your domain will perform (web site, email, sub-domains, etc.) there will be one or more records in DNS, on the nameservers specified in your domain name record. Don’t worry, you should never have to deal with these records directly but your ISP or hosting company will.

If you decide to change the location where your web site and email are hosted, the location of these nameservers may also change. See why it’s important to have access to your domain name record?

Where to register

There are two types of registrars: those who are accredited by ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) and everybody else. There are several hundred accredited registrars worldwide and thousands more who resell though them. For what it’s worth, I use GoDaddy.com as my registrar, although I don’t use them for any other services. I find their prices reasonable ($7 – $10 per year, depending on TLD type) and I like their administrative interface for managing multiple domains. The amount of advertising and upselling they do during the purchase process is pretty irritating though. Just keep clicking the links that say, “no thanks, go directly to checkout”.

Conclusion

Registering your domain name independently from your hosting provider gives you the most flexibility when setting up Internet services. Your domain registrar and hosting company or ISP work together but need not be the same company. When you purchase a domain name, its domain record resides with the registrar. Within that record is a list of the nameservers that have knowledge of your domain name and the corresponding IP Addresses of the computers on which your various domain services are hosted.

References:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_name
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_Name_System
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_registrar

Image by A. www.viajar24h.com

Surprisingly, owners of small, local businesses share a common interest with mega-corporation Google, Inc.  One of Google’s goals is to know what people are looking for so well that they don’t even have to search for it.  Try this: type the word “weather” into the Google search box (on the Google site, not in your browser’s toolbar).  Before you even click Search they have displayed a weather forecast for the location from which you are connected to the Internet.

This is just one of the first steps towards becoming aware of the context in which you are seeking information, in order to return more relevant results.  Mobile devices equipped with cameras and GPS can be even more aware of their surroundings, providing Google with even more information to work with, presumably leading to ever more tailored results.  Remember that Google is in the business of providing advertising to as many eyeballs as humanly possible and they seem to have determined that the best way to do this is to be relentlessly useful.

Google’s famous slogan, “don’t be evil”, can be debated at this point but that’s not the subject of this post. If you are a small business owner, it is almost certainly in your interest to provide Google with as much information as you can.  One way to do this is through the free Google Local Business Center (http://google.com/lbc).  The LBC is a part of Google Maps, although information entered there is shared with Google Search results.  Here, watch the ad:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjeCmHwqVpU

Here’s the thing: if they don’t get the information from the business owner, they’ll get it from somewhere else, such as an online Yellow Pages provider.  That information is likely to be incomplete, at best.  Businesses should be in control of their own information, especially when they’re given a ready-made tool, such as the LBC.

I have a challenge for my own local community of Sonora, CA.  Let’s get every business in  Tuolumne County to claim their listing or add a new one if it doesn’t exist.  Keep those listings up to date, link it to your web site, add coupons (yes, you can do that), solicit reviews and use this free tool to its full potential.  Tourists and locals alike search these listings every day and I’d like to know if providing them with better information can have a positive effect on our business’ bottom line.

Please let me know in the comments when you give this a try and what your experience is (even if you’re not from Sonora).  Take a few minutes and put your business on the map.

Map by Matt Brown.

Dropbox

This drop-dead simple service allows for the synchronization of files between multiple computers. It uses software running on each computer to detect when files in the “dropbox” folder have changed and reflects those changes to an online server. Any other computers connected to this account will reflect the server changes in their own dropbox folder.

Favorite use: Designate a “public” folder to store all the PDFs, slideshows, videos, etc. that I want to make available for public consumption. Each is given a public URL that can be used as-is or shortened using a URL shortener like bit.ly.

Find at: https://www.dropbox.com/

Google Chrome

The Chrome browser satisfies my need for speed. Program load time, page load time, online applications, all are noticeably snappier than the other browsers that I have available. Now that extensions are available (provided you are on Windows), it’s a viable alternative to Firefox or IE. Be warned however, that it’s still a very new and somewhat unfinished product. I haven’t yet recommended it to my mother.

Favorite use: Running other Google applications. Gmail, Google Docs, Calendar, etc. feel like they’re running locally, rather than in the cloud. I also really like that the search bar and the address bar are one and the same. Whatever you need, just type.

Find at: http://www.google.com/chrome

Google Docs

Word processor, spreadsheet, presentations; these are the big 3 document production applications. Most people have had them on their computer, in one form or another, since the 80s. Moving them online however, brings them into the 21st century. For anyone who works on more than one computer, the benefit of centrally located and sharable documents far outweighs the (mostly minor) feature limitations of Google Docs.

Favorite use: The shared grocery list that my wife and I update throughout the week and then print out to take to the store.

Find at: http://docs.google.com

Aardvark

Aardvark is a question and answer application that communicates via web, IM, email, Twitter, or iPhone. Ask a question and you’ll begin receiving answers from real people within minutes. Tell them your areas of expertise and from time to time the system will ask you to answer specific questions submitted by others. The IM interface (which is what I use) is especially friendlyand understands responses like “accept”, “busy” or “pass”.

Favorite use: It feels great when you’ve taken a few minutes out of your day to successfully answer someone’s question. They are usually very appreciative.

Find at: http://vark.com

Twitter

Easy but not simple. Broadcast 140 characters at a time to anyone who cares to listen. Twitter is such an elusive thing that I’ll drag out my party analogy: Think of Twitter like a crowded party. The conversations flow around you and you can choose which ones to focus on and where to join in. If you’ve chosen your party (the people you’re following) well, this can be both entertaining and informative. If you’re at a party with a lot of obnoxious drunks…well, that can be less pleasant. Remember, you get to choose who you follow. If someone follows you and you don’t follow them back, it’s like they don’t exist. If you follow someone who you later decide to un-follow, they’ll get over it.

Favorite use: I still get a thrill when I’m retweeted (“you like me…you really like me”).

Find at: http://twitter.com

Photo by Stuart Caie

There are approximately a gazillion external editors available that will post to a WordPress blog but a couple of factors narrowed my search. First, I didn’t really want to install yet another application on my computer. Second, and this really narrowed the field, I wanted to post my writings to WordPress as a draft, so that I can make final changes within WordPress itself. I’m compulsive enough that I always want to tinker with my posts, previewing them many times, before hitting the “publish” button. Also, WordPress changes quickly enough that it’s unrealistic to expect a 3rd party tool to stay in sync with its features. I wanted to decouple the two.

The writing tool that I settled on is ScribeFire, a plugin for the Firefox browser. Since it’s a plugin, it didn’t require installing any new software and it will publish in draft mode. ScribeFire works with several different blogging platforms, however I have only used it with this WordPress blog.

Installation is the same as with all Firefox plugins: click the “install” button, wait for the download to complete and restart Firefox. Once that’s done, you’ll have an additional icon in the Firefox tool tray and another entry for ScribeFire in the Tools menu. Selecting either of these opens the ScribeFire editor on a new Firefox tab.

Here’s a screencast of ScribeFire in action (for best viewing, use full screen mode):

This blog is rssCloud enabled. How would you know? You probably won’t. Should you care? Probably not today. Why did I bother? Well, you know that I like buttons-that-light-up. But seriously, there will be a benefit, as rssCloud and other real time web technologies pick up steam.

A definition: Use of the <cloud> tag — which has been an unused part of the RSS specification since 2001 — allows feed readers and aggregators (like Google Reader, although they don’t yet support rssCloud) to receive nearly instant notification when the feed is updated. Currently, it can take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours. So, if you were following this blog using an enabled feed reader (and there are very few of them today), you would get new material within seconds of me clicking the Publish button. For most people, their immediate response to this exciting new prospect is, “um…so?”

But there’s more at play here than first meets the eye. Here’s what Dave Winer, the father of RSS, has to say about the use of rssCloud by people like you and me:

The idea is to deliver news faster, without relying on a single company to do all the work.

Until now you could have one or the other, but not both.

You could have the news delivered via RSS, but if you wanted it fast you had to go to Twitter or Facebook or FriendFeed.

The problem with going to a company is two-fold: 1. The company might not be able to handle it. 2. The company might screw with it.

The important idea here is that this method of delivering information is decentralized and beyond the control of a single company, just like the Internet itself. To learn more, take a listen to this Rebooting the News podcast (click the little arrow to play or the link to download). The first half of the show is Q&A about rssCloud.

Why real time?

It’s perfectly reasonable to be wondering if we should really be trying to speed up the flow of information. Don’t we already have too much coming at us too fast? However, it appears that the real time web is more than just faster communication, it’s a different form of communication. Writing in ReadWriteWeb, Ken Fromm says:

As with other recent waves of innovation (Web 2.0 and cloud computing, for example) there is no single definition of what the term “real-time Web” means. As a result, it is used as a catch-all phrase for a number of developments underway. At this point, we can identify that the real-time Web…

1. is a new form of communication,
2. creates a new body of content,
3. is real time,
4. is public and has an explicit social graph associated with it,
5. carries an implicit model of federation.

…Another characteristic of the real-time Web is that it gives the world a new body of content, one that, unlike IM or email’s, is largely public. Plus the underlying APIs allow third parties to make use of the data through programs, thus extending the reach of the content.

The real time web may have the most impact on what we now call news reporting. With the public growing increasingly dissatisfied with traditional news outlets (as evidenced by their frightening decline in revenue), new sources of information are springing up online. Instead of being spoken down to by the mass media, who decide which stories are worthy of our attention, we can speak “across” to one another about anything that catches our interest. Some people will naturally do this better than others and they will gain a following.

Once we have this raging stream of information, we will need better tools for managing and making sense of it all. Those tools are in the future but, I suspect, not the far distant future. RssCloud (and pubsubhubbub, a related technology) are starting to work at a low level to direct the stream in such a way that we can all dip into it. I think we’ll be using it sooner, rather than later, which is why this blog is rssCloud enabled.

Streaming waters photo by Mikael Miettinen

There are two online services that I return to many times throughout the day. The first is email. I always have Gmail loaded in a tab of my browser. In another tab is Google Reader, my feed reader of choice. If you don’t know about feeds, go take a look at the video RSS In Plain English on the Subscribe page. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

So the idea is to keep an eye on the sites that interest you, without having to visit each one separately. Let’s take a look at the type of things you might want to monitor. The image at right was taken from my Google Reader screen. To save space, only my subscription categories are shown, not the individual feeds that I’m following. You can probably figure out the kinds of sites that are being followed in each category but a couple of them are worth special mention.

Community is for information that affects me locally. Blogs from my home town and organizations that I belong to.

Updates contains feeds from software and services that I use. For instance, by subscribing to the WordPress Development feed, I make sure that I don’t miss important updates to the software that powers this blog.

webdancers tracks all of the blogs that my company has developed for other people. All businesses can benefit from keeping track of work that they have done for others or by monitoring important voices in their field. Putting all of this information in one place means that you are much more likely to actually see it.

At the moment, I’m subscribed to 69 feeds. This number changes frequently, as I’m particular about what I subscribe to and it’s easy to add and drop feeds as necessary. In Google Reader, you can also share favorite items from your feeds, which automagically appear on a custom web page which, of course, has its own feed for your friends to subscribe to.

Once you start using feeds, you’ll start thinking about using the Internet in a different way. Instead of having to take a specific action (visiting a web site), you have an always-on connection to information that interests you. The feed reader is your side of the connection. On the other side are a myriad of data sources (just look for the little orange RSS icon or the word “feed”). All blogs have feeds and so do many other web sites and online services. I suggest you start with a few blogs and get in the habit of checking your reader regularly.

One last thing, don’t feel that you have to read every item that comes through your feeds. There’s a handy button at the top of the Reader labeled “Mark As Read” and there’s no shame in skipping as many entries as you want. You can be sure that there will be more later.