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Recently, I had the great honor of being asked by Google to present at Google I/O 2009. Here is the story of my journey including: how to get noticed by Google, getting invited to present at Google I/O, practicing the presentation with my Google contact, the hours leading up to the presentation, the presentation itself, and the after party! I have included some behind the scenes photos and videos as well.
How did I get noticed by Google?
Recently, I saw a beer commercial that said “Rule #1 of how to get the girl: be good looking!”. So here is my rule of how to get noticed by Google “Rule #1 of how to get noticed by Google: use the Google APIs in some kick-ass way!”. Google is building a developer platform and they want to show off developers utilizing said platform. So if you do something cool with the Google APIs, it is easier to get noticed than you may think.
How did I get asked to present at Google I/O?
My main “in” at Google was that anytime that I did something rather cool with the Google APIs, I pinged the Google Employee Developer I met in the Google Developer Newsgroups. I did not expect anything in return from him. I thought “hey I just implemented something really cool and they might be interested”. It turns out that they were indeed interested and extremely friendly. Every time that I implemented something substantially new and cool, we would have an open dialog about what would make my application better and they would say things such as “hey did you know we have the Client Location API, this would be really cool for your site…”. It turns out that I must have pinged my Google contact at the exact right time (with information about major updates to my site). I had just completed some advanced Google Maps coding and once they saw it, they officially invited me to Google IO to be in the Developer Sandbox and to present a session.
Preparing my presentation
So now there I was, Google asked me (OMG!) to come out and speak and they wanted me to send out a rough concept of what I might want to present. Initially I proposed a session called “Building a cool app on an hour a day, a rebel’s view of the world”. That presentation would have been all about the mindset that I had and steps I took to successfully building www.VastRank.com in my spare time. Google liked that presentation, but they wanted it to be more focused on the APIs since that is what a lot of visitors to Google I/O would be looking for.
So I changed my presentation to “Using AJAX APIs to Navigate User-Generated Content”. The presentation was about how do you take all of this information that users have submitted and sort and present it to other users in an interesting and useful way. The title of the session was play on a Don Box title “Navigating the Programmable Web”.
Rehearsing with the Google AJAX API Team
Once I had my presentation prepared, I rehearsed it over two video conferences with Adam Feldman, the Google AJAX APIs Product Manager. Adam was extremely smart, and had a way to hear what I was saying and then summarize some things into a much more compelling concise point.
I arrived to the conference a day early, where I was able to do my presentation in the actual conference room to a group of Googlers. I am so glad that I had that opportunity, because I rushed through my first live run and was 15 minutes short of the target time. I needed to slow down the next day!
The Session: Using AJAX APIs to Navigate User-Generated Content
Here is a link to the full to the official Google I/O Session page which has the video and slides.
The After Party
Google I/O 2009 was a two day event. I presented on day one and at the end of day one Google through a massive after party. Here I took a quick video near the end of the evening.
Cheers,
Jon
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Recently I was invited by Google to attend Google I/O 2009. Google invited me to show off Vast Rank in the Developer Sandbox, and also present a session to attendees: Using AJAX APIs to Navigate User-Generated Content.
Soon, Google will be posting my session on YouTube. I am anxiously waiting for that! In the meantime, here is a very quick impromptu interview of me speaking about Vast Rank and my use of the Google APIs. The interviewers provided me with the questions ahead of time, but I did not have enough time to read them since I was so focused on preparing for my session. So here I am shooting from the hip, answering questions about the Google APIs.
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Back in October I saw a large drop in Vast Rank’s Google SERP. In other words, when people searched for certain terms where a Vast Rank page (normally a college profile) would appear on the first Google search result page for a few weeks, these same searches yielded the same Vast Rank college profile page to show up many pages into the Google search results.
At the time I was worried because I was unsure of what would happen next. This was the first time I really cared about SEO. When I worked at barnesandnoble.com, people would just show up and pump millions of dollars of products through my code a day. It was magic, and I thought, dam I am good! Well, the reality is they have a brand, and I do not!
If your site does not appear in Google Search results, it is pretty much 
death to your site if you depend on organic traffic. Google matters much less if you have a website that people have to use for their school, job, bank account or whatever. But when you depend on organic traffic, you rely on Google.
If your site drops in SERP, the Google webmaster tools do not tell you in general about any penalties on your site. I imagine that this is so that crafty little SEO experts can not reverse engineer some of Google’s algorithms. So during these times of doom and gloom for your site, you are pretty much left to looking at SEO discussion sites and the Google Webmaster Help discussion group.
Luckily, Vast Rank returned to Google’s search
results after a huge drop from October 26th, 2008 – November 5th, 2008. I am posting this to show other webmasters that there is hope if your new site suddenly disappears from Google search results. So take a deep breath, the world is not ending, and wait it out! I’m serious, take a deep breathe, and count 1000-1, 1000-2, 1000-3. Now Exhale. Calm yet? If not, go here, or keep reading, I have proof that there is hope.
Below is a screen screen shot from Vast Rank’s Google Analytics page. The screen shot shows traffic from launch day until today (notice the huge drop in traffic in October-November).
I updated quite a few things on Vast Rank during the downtime period: accurate sitemap last mod dates, unique title tags, better meta descriptions, etc. Some of these items were called out in the Google Webmaster Tools for Vast Rank, and other items were just common sense items that I needed to get to implementing (i.e. accurate last mod dates in the xml sitemap). However, I think the biggest reason I saw the huge drop was that Vast Rank was so new.
If you are a webmaster experiencing SERP drops, it would be great for you to post a comment so we can collectively share our experiences!
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OK, so even though I’m a “.NET Developer”, I’m really not just a “.NET Developer”, but at this point it is the technology stack that pays the bills around here, so lets just keep it at that for the sake of this post.
Recently I bought a refurbished MacBook Pro, that had all of the 
upgrades for the Feb 2008 Rev. (7200 RPM Drive, 2.6 Ghz Intel Peryn Dual Core, 6MB L2 Cache, 512 MB Video RAM, etc). My main use for this machine currently is for all of my personal software including Cubase SX 4.5 (an audio sequencer), loads of VST plugins, samples, pictures, videos, etc. In addition to running those apps, I can now run the iPhone SDK.
I have quite a few software product ideas right now, and some of them are iPhone apps, some of them are web based, and some are some cross platform desktop app ideas.
So without thinking logically about any of this, I started digging through the iPhone SDK and Developer Videos. I gave myself all kinds of reasons that this would be an ok use of my time, like “hey learning other languages makes you a better developer”, “hey seeing other architectures is good too”, “oh, I consider myself a software designer because I create applications that are well designed that people want to use so maybe I should learn more about Apple”, “ “this iPhone market doesn’t really seem too saturated, and I bet I could compete with a lot of leading apps”, on, and on, and on.
Then reality kicked in and I said to myself, WTF am I doing here? I’m going to spend my time managing memory in Objective C? I’m going to create an app that sells for a couple bucks and then hope that it sells how many apps to be somewhat profitable? Hmm, umm, and what can I use this Objective C experience for the next time I’m deep in ASP.net, WPF, javascript or CSS?
So I went from one extreme to the other and now I’m kind of sitting in this nice little pocket of gray where there is no clear answer. I figure I’m just going to finish up some web oriented features that I want to get out onto Vast Rank (internationalization is coming!), and kind of poke around with Cocoa, UIKit, Objective-C, and XTools for fun on the side. After I play around with the SDK for a little bit, I can see if I want to commit to taking on some of the iPhone app ideas I have.
Are you a .NET or Java developer considering developing an iPhone app? Do you think it is a good use of your time, if your app does not take off? I’m still on the fence right now.
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I built Vast Rank integrating a lot of different pieces of technology, ASP.Net, ASP.NET AJAX, Google Maps API, Google Ajax Search API, Google Custom Search, CSS, and the list goes on and on.
I have been a Microsoft oriented developer all of my life so when I built Vast Rank, I wanted to find a decent profile system and forum system based on .NET that I could build on top of. Community Server was by far the best platform to use when I started developing Vast Rank in 2007.
One of the challenges that I faced was that I wanted to extend the Community Server User Profiles in such a way that those profiles can be queried based on the extended properties. Before you follow this post any further, if you are considering going down path, ask yourself “do I really need to query these extended attributes?”, because it gets complicated. If you don’t need to query this extended user profile data, but just store and display it, then I suggest using the out of the box ExtendedAttirute storage mechanism that comes with CS. It is a heck of a lot less work.
Anyway, I spent the time extending user profiles and detailed it in an old post here. In that post I went through changing the source code in the CS SDK, but here I will post a few blurbs from the CS forums that I posted about how to extend CS User profiles without changing any CS SDK source code. I originally did these modifications in CS 2007, then I rolled them into CS 2008.5 in one day. (Some of the CS code changed a little but it was easy to fix up my extensions to align with these changes). So the big payoff of using this new strategy: ease of upgrade to new versions of CS.
The basic “A Ha” moment for this new extension strategy was, hey doesn’t CS use the provider model? Maybe I can hook in at that level to override and extend the CRUD and search operations. Well that worked.
I am posting some CS specific source code directly from Vast Rank here:
Download
Since so many people were interested in more details around this new strategy, I slotted an hour out of the many other dev things I’m working on to put this up for my friends over in CS land. I figured it was better to get something into your hands than nothing at all…
So… the code posted does not compile because it depends on Community Server (which you can download from them) and my own Service / Data Access Layer (which I’m not posting:) ). But, if you are pretty good dev you can look through the code and get some “A Ha” moments.
The code has a sample configuration where I load my overridden version of the the CommonDataProvider. That file in my project is called “VRSqlCommonDataProvider” and it shows how I extended the CRUD and search code. I also included a few of my theme files where you can see where I integrate the extended data (creating, editing, viewing, and searching profiles). There are also some sub forms and helpers in there. You’re just going to have to dig through…
Here are a couple of links to my “A HA” moments from the CS forums. You can test these things live at http://www.vastrank.com
Please chime in on this post if this helps ya, or if you have any feedback. As I said it’s a little sloppy but I wanted to get something into my friends hands over on the CS forums.
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Edit: I posted an update to my findings here.
Vast Rank was steadily growing since its launch (a month ago) and last week was at its peek with a lot of organic (search) traffic from Google.
I saw this drop start on Saturday, October 25th and as a result I have started to dig into the Google Webmaster Guidelines and the world of SEO. It looks like Google has algorithms that determine whether your site is “spammy”, and may penalize a site that it thinks is spam. Since Vast Rank is so new and has a fairly low Page Rank, I am concerned I may have fallen prey to this algorithm.
The tough part about all of this is Google may or may not tell you if you are under one of these penalties. I believe this is so that people can not use these warnings to reverse engineer their algorithms.
For the most part, I am hoping that my major drop in SERP is because my site is barely a month old. However, I am taking a serious look at Vast Rank to see where I can improve things. Here are my top tasks:
- Create accurate last mod dates in my SiteMap for all College Profiles and for the ratings & comments pages
- Make sure my title Tags are unique
- Review all meta description tags
The accurate last mod dates are going to be the most challenging but should only take a few hours to get it all setup.
Edit: I posted an update to my findings here.
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Every Friday night, my fiancée Nicole and I head out to CBO the best Pizza place I have ever been to. There are a lot of reasons that we love CBO (pronounced C-BO by the locals here at the Jersey shore) but here are a few that come to mind: all pies on the menu can be ordered on wheat crust, all of the ingredients are fresh and of the utmost quality, the service is top notch, it is clean, and the ambience is great.
We found out about CBO when Nicole ran into one of our friends Jen who happens to work at CBO.
We always start off the night with the excellent Arugula salad and bruschetta with fresh mozzarella.
I took this picture of the two pies we got tonight on my iPhone. Nicole usually orders a Pattie Pie on wheat – easy on the cheese (pictured on top). A Patti Pie is basically a gourmet pizza topped with bruschetta. I keep it real and order a Sausage and Peppers Pie (pictured on the bottom). I keep it unreal by getting it on wheat as well:)
The night is capped off with fresh cookies from the amazing bakery next door to CBO.
On Saturday morning I eat all the left over’s. If you live in Jersey or come to visit, come check out CBO for that great pizza indulgence without the “I shouldn’t have ate that” feeling afterwards.
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I did a lot of work on Vast Rank in my spare time and I am really proud to have Vast Rank recognized by the Google API team. Vast Rank is now a featured project on the Google Maps and Google Search API.
Featured Projects are somewhat buried on the Google API pages. The first screen shot here shows where Vast Rank is featured on the Google Maps API page. The second screen shot below shows Vast Rank featured on the Google AJAX search API page.
Special thanks goes out to Ben Lisbakken on the Google API team for being so helpful with my questions and for hooking me up with the featured spot on Google.
Recently, I had the great honor of being asked by Google to present at Google I/O 2009. Here is the story of my journey including: how to get noticed by Google, getting invited to present at Google I/O, practicing the presentation with my Google contact, the hours leading up to the presentation, the presentation itself, and the after party! I have included some behind the scenes photos and videos as well.
Recently, I saw a beer commercial that said “Rule #1 of how to get the girl: be good looking!”. So here is my rule of how to get noticed by Google “Rule #1 of how to get noticed by Google: use the Google APIs in some kick-ass way!”. Google is building a developer platform and they want to show off developers utilizing said platform. So if you do something cool with the Google APIs, it is easier to get noticed than you may think.
My main “in” at Google was that anytime that I did something rather cool with the Google APIs, I pinged the Google Employee Developer I met in the Google Developer Newsgroups. I did not expect anything in return from him. I thought “hey I just implemented something really cool and they might be interested”. It turns out that they were indeed interested and extremely friendly. Every time that I implemented something substantially new and cool, we would have an open dialog about what would make my application better and they would say things such as “hey did you know we have the Client Location API, this would be really cool for your site…”. It turns out that I must have pinged my Google contact at the exact right time (with information about major updates to my site). I had just completed some advanced Google Maps coding and once they saw it, they officially invited me to Google IO to be in the Developer Sandbox and to present a session.
So now there I was, Google asked me (OMG!) to come out and speak and they wanted me to send out a rough concept of what I might want to present. Initially I proposed a session called “Building a cool app on an hour a day, a rebel’s view of the world”. That presentation would have been all about the mindset that I had and steps I took to successfully building www.VastRank.com in my spare time. Google liked that presentation, but they wanted it to be more focused on the APIs since that is what a lot of visitors to Google I/O would be looking for.
