Independent Ad Agency BooneOakley has come into recent blogosphere fame with their bold move to house their company website through a series of interactive YouTube videos. The 2 minutes and 39 second video breaks down the company’s history, ideology and examples of their work. What is great about having your site in a Youtube video is that it can be embedded into countless sites and blogs.

BooneOakley president and strategic director Phil Smith said “we needed to refresh our website but have a lot of work on so this seemed like a quick way… Happily, it also didn’t cost us a penny.”

The site/video is navigate-able through embedded annotations – links within the YouTube clips. The technology has been available for about a year but has not really been explored or executed in this way so successfully before.

Watch it here.

Google Squared was released June 3 and is the latest experiment to come out of Google Labs exploring how to give users more meaningful and structured Searches. Erick Schonfield on Tech Crunch summed it up well: “Puts Web Search into a Spreadsheet”.

The new application gives you the same search results but can break them down by your own topical categories. There are some pre – built squares that Google have put together as examples. The British Poets will give you a list of different poets and certain pieces of info on each one like City of Birth. The Squared engine can pull up images, text excerpts to fit with the categories and saves you the trip to five different Wikipedia pages.

There has been some discussion that Squared was created to try and crush Wolfram Alpha the ‘knowledge engine’ but the two products are quite different. One key difference being that Wolfram Alpha computes answers based on keyword strings where as Squared is more an exploration on how to filter and display data sets.

Still Google Squared, Wolfram Alpha and Bing and other recent forays into the development of the semantic web signal the beginning of the Web 3.0 era which Tom Tague; VP of Solutions and Marketing at Clear Forest, described as “cleaning up the mess we made and harvesting the value of Web 2.0.” (from here)

Build you own square here.

So I Googled the definition of ‘bing’ and turned up a few interesting meanings; ‘Bing is an annoying lizardLizard Lizards are reptiles of the order Squamata, which they share with the snakes”, ” heap eg of coal, debris or colliery waste Blaes – mudstone or shale not containing much bituminous or carbonaceous matter”. But no mention of Microsoft’s brand new Search Engine which launched this week called “Bing“. Named so that it could be turned into a verb, Microsoft are hoping that there new search engine will have us all binging in no time.

The product has been under construction for a long time, initially titled Kumo. You can read reviews of it here on Search Engine Land. The name Bing came into rumors recently and although doesn’t quite have the ring that “Just Google it” does, it’s better than Kumo.

Compared the Microsoft’s other Search tool Window’s Live, Bing is strides ahead with a similar feel to Google but a few key differences. Both share the same clean interface and offer search by image, web, news, video, etc. What’s interesting is the Bing image search tool which lets you sort by image dimensions (i.e if you want it wide, square or tall), style (illustration or photo), color (do you want black and white images or full color) and also whether you want people in the images. This I’m sure will make the job of sourcing images much easier.

Their video section similarly lets you sort by length, screen size, resolution and source. Bing also features it’s own Maps app that is practically exactly the same as Google Maps.

One interesting feature they have is the xRank which they describe as ”a cultural snap shot of who’s hot and who’s not’:

xRank keeps track of notable people and puts them in order for you. We count Live Search web searches for movie stars, musicians, and other famous people. Then, we compile our findings into an insightful ranking formula that tells you who the world is searching for most. (taken from Bing xRank site)

Another nice detail is that Bing throws up a list of related searches on the left hand side of the page that gives you different categories on the key term – try “turkey” for instance.

From a brief play Bing does the job, and a bit better than Google. It’s an interesting market because for so long there was no point even trying to challenge Google due to it’s sheer domination over the market but when you play Google style you may come out on top binging.

So try “binging” today!

Google’s latest endeavor – Google Wave – was announced on Friday at the Google I/O Developer conference in San Fransisco and it’s already had a ripple effect all over the internet. Google describes it as a new tool to change the way people communicate and collaborate on the web. It’s a new take on emailing that looks like instant messaging but lets you integrate rich text formatting, photos, videos, maps, and other widget, etc you please.

But it’s difficult to summarize the complexity of this product in a post so you can ride the full demo wave at the Wave microsite – the full 1 hour and 20 minutes of it!

Wave is also fully open source and developers can use the Wave API to build their on extensions into it. And whilst the demo presentation is frequently punctuated by applause there are mixed reviews about Wave. Fast Company were quick to release their ‘Five Reasons to be Terrified of Google Wave“, asking:

“what is it with platforms? How many of these things can we have before we all join hands across America? Any company with moderately ambitious developers is already trying to handle smartphone apps, Facebook’s API, Twitter, widgets, and who knows how many other endeavors. Do we really need to throw another silo of communication on the pile?”

Tech Crunch are more impressed with the product and you can read their in depth review of wave here.

Launching off the Google platform Wave has a very strong likelihood of success, and there is no doubt it offers impressive real time communication tools. You can sign up to get updated about the release of Wave here.