I learned quite a few things at SMX West last week, perhaps one of the most irksome was learning Google’s policy about conference presentations. Google does not share or allow any of thier conference presentations to be put online … period.Let’s recap shall we …
- Google thinks it’s ok to go and scan books without asking publishers first, and only removing them when publishers complain.
- Google thinks it’s ok to scrape spider, cache, and archive your content and wrap their advertising around it whether you want them to or not.
- Google’s mission statement is … “Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”
I know sometimes when we get PHD’s invovled sometimes it gets a little hard for them to grasp, so I’ll make it easy for them to understand
If you’ve presented it at a conference it isn’t a big corporate secret, and if your mission statement is making information universally accessible then you need to make it available online … for everyone …
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irksome as it may be, it’s nothing new. I work closely with Google and have never been able to get one of their full presentations. At the most I’ve gotten a couple of individual slides.
Agreed!!! Whats up with having “unavailable” stamped next to all of their presentations from SMX West? What if everyone followed in their footsteps?
Last July there was an interesting conference in Milan on publishing and technology. A nice company from California made a really interesting presentation about digitizing the printed word. So interesting, I decided to do a long write-up. Too bad that unlike the other presenters, the conference slides were unavailable.
The speaker was kind enough to review my draft for egregious errors before posting, but I really would have preferred to have been able to reference the slides, as I explicitly noted here: http://www.antezeta.com/blog/google-book-search/#slides (we’re exactly on the same wavelength, and I doubt we’re the only ones thinking this).
As I think we’ve seen from MC’s blog, slides can be released if PR approves. I would like to think that for the sake of coherence, the powers that be would at least ensure said approval gets integrated into the process. It is really striking to see slides from everyone but G.
So many double standards with Google. Sometimes it really disappoints me with what decisions and directions Google makes/takes.
//g
Here’s my tip:
If you’re presenting on a panel about SearchWiki, make sure you’re prepared to answer questions *about* SearchWiki. Otherwise, I’m going to want to smack you in the face with a pipe.
kthxhugs
I think the interesting moment would come if someone video’d a google presentation -possible, just be subtle
and then posted it to youtube…
But seriously I find it irritating that Google deem themselves to have different laws apply to them.
You can find a bunch of Google presentations on the Google Webmaster Central blog
. We prefer to make them available to everyone (through the blog) as we can, though I admit that we could be doing a better job of getting making all presentations available. Which ones are you all explicitly interested in? Maybe we can put together a blog post with them embedded for you.
Now that’s service at your doorstep! How about the G Local Spam prezo from SMX West?
Michael
Not to disagree with your excellent observation, but Matt posts most of his presentations on his blog.
Ha ha ha this amusing post brightened my morning.
I know that I emailed my canonical link tag presentation to Third Door Media the weekend after the conference. Personally, I prefer the idea of recreating the conference talks with a video later, because then people can get the context behind the slides. Taking slides by themselves without the speaker explanation could get confusing. I ended up making modifications to my slides before I emailed them to the SMX folks because I was worried that some people would misinterpret the slides on their own.
Lisa, I think Corey and Bryan tried to answer SearchWiki questions as best they could, but they’re not always going to be able to answer questions such as “What exact percentage of people use SearchWiki?” automatically. That panel did reveal a lot of new info, from the origin of the name SearchWiki, to how many UI iterations they went through, to all the different ways that search can be personalized, e.g. including city-level. Sorry if you wanted to smack the Google engineers that worked on the project with a pipe after seeing them present and answer the questions that they could for an hour.
@jonah yes matt does, he’s the exception not the rule though.
@matt yes the video thing was cool, i just don’t know that everyone is up to that. There will always be questions people can’t answer but try to find a way to talk to the core issue if possible and not the detail would come off a little less like we’re being stonewalled, with no info.
@Matt: It was a bit more widespread than that. Corey wouldn’t comment on anything about SearchWiki. Not the adoption rate, why it was put in place, what Google was looking at, if people were engaging more with head or tail terms, etc. And that’s fine. You don’t want to give people enough information to tamper/ruin it before you get what you need. But then don’t hold a panel entitled SearchWiki. Because if you do, and then the only question you’re willing to answer is, “where did the name come from?”, people (or perhaps just me) are going to riot.
Good seeing you at West though.
And I was mostly kidding about that pipe thing.
to back up what @lisa said, I think what people want from a presentation is something actionable to come home with. You don’t have to give away the farm but you should at least be pointing someone in the right direction and give them a gentle nudge. Yes it’s interesting to know where search wiki came from and that there where 100 buttons tested, but for conference goers who spent a few days of their lives and few thousand dollars of someone’s money, that’s not an actionable item.
What’s the reasoning for not making this information available? Proprietary materials – a pay per view issue?
They will find their way to a torrent site eventually. Some SEM will put them up. Serves Google up
Sherry, here are a few reasons:
- slides on paper or PPT files can get stale, e.g. we add things in the webmaster console and change the UI there relatively often. I had to ask Third Door to update something that I got wrong in my canonical link tag presentation, for example, because I had sent them PPT.
- slide presentations by themselves often lack the context that you get from watching the speaker
I’ve worked with a lot of conferences, and they each seem to have their own philosophy about presentations. Some want to make them available for free to the public. Some conferences want to put them behind a paywall or put them on a DVD that they sell for hundreds of dollars. Conferences also have different policies on videos; some video the presentation and put it up (for free or for pay). Some conferences don’t want people in the audience to take video. Some conferences want to make speakers sign agreements about what they will or won’t do.
So this is a bit of a complex subject. We do often put up our presentations, e.g. I think most/all of our Developer Day presentations are up online for free. I’m not positive that there’s one policy that will make every (speaker, conference, conference attendee, member of the general public) happy.
Oh, I almost forgot one incident that probably affected Google’s current policy as well. In 2006, the PowerPoint slides for an analyst day presentation were posted, but the slides contained comments about internal Google projects such as “Teragoogle.” I would say that 2006 incident certainly made Google more cautious about sharing raw PowerPoint files as well. Any time that I’m making a presentation that might be public eventually, I now tend to start from scratch with a blank file to ensure that I don’t leak any information.
@matt I can appreciate that but as society we’ve become stuck in a quagmire created politicians, bureaucrats, and lawyers, what we need is leadership that does the right thing, not look for loopholes to plant a flag in and rally around.
I’m sure there are plenty of people who tell the TED conference they should sell DVD’s of the presentations but they rise above the pettiness, and give them all away for free.
So I challenge google to do the the right thing, if they aren’t company confidential information, give away the presentations to the conference and on the google websites. This should apply to everyone at google not just the people with moxy.
An example of something I would appreciate being recreated as a presentation on the Google webmaster blog.
At SMX advance, there was discussion regarding affiliate links passing juice, or that could potentially pass juice depending on circumstances. There was a little blog coverage, but nothing specific that you could class as guidelines.
It is possible the videos are now available behind a paywall on SELand (I haven’t joined yet) but that isn’t suitable for 3rd party reference.
Agreed!!! Whats up with having “unavailable” stamped next to all of their presentations from SMX West? What if everyone followed in their footsteps?
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