Whether it was a lifelong talent, a desire to be your own boss, or a great idea at 2 a.m. that kick-started your business, there’s a Search Story about your journey just waiting to be told. And with just five minutes, a keyboard and a mouse, you can create a video of your own!

They do a handy bit of lobbying in the email announcing the Search Story Creator:

In 2009, Google generated $54B in economic activity in the United States – one business at a time. See how Google helped small businesses in your state at www.google.com/economicimpact.

In looking at the Oregon economic impact, I see that “Google generated $512 million of economic activity for 29,000 Oregon businesses, website publishers and non-profits in 2009.” Even better, the map linked me to this profile, highlighting Clive Coffee in Portland through a Google Doc whitepaper. This is a terrific use of absolutely free tools to get your stories out there into the broader web. From a data-enabled Google Map to a PDF in Google Docs, this company has done more to integrate small business communication tools for the masses for free than any other I can think of. If you’re not taking advantage of all the ways you can tell your story in this space, find someone who can help you do it.

It serves as a funny reminder, if you stand back a bit, that so much of the story of our existence on the web is inextricably linked to Google’s presentation of that story. Yes, it’s a wide open web. But if your place in the wide open web doesn’t exist in the Google sphere, you’re not really taking part in the discussion, are you?

Think about that. In the meantime, here’s my search story. Took me about three minutes.

This is generally terrific news. Google Docs is already great, but the learning curve has been tough for those unaccustomed to working in the cloud. The new interface and collaboration tools will ease that sell, I think.

Besides using a new infrastructure, the document editor and the spreadsheet editor will add many new features. The document editor has real-time editing, sidebar chat, a new commenting system, better formatting and an improved importing feature. The spreadsheet editor brings back auto-complete, adds a formula bar for editing cells and you can now drag and drop columns.

As much as I love Google products, and use them daily, here is a perky brick to the ethical head. The following quote is from Google CEO Eric Schmidt in the current CNBC Google Blockbuster.

If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place, but if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines including Google do retain this information for some time, and it’s important, for example that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act. It is possible that that information could be made available to the authorities.

When Google was founded in 1998, the company hung its proverbial hat on telling the world that they would be successful without mucking things up in the process. Specifically, number six in the company’s own manifesto:

6. You can make money without doing evil.

This is all well and good until, for example, you’re a global titan with $12 billion and change in the bank, competing for telcom spectrum in an industry as messed up as wireless. What’s that they say about laying down with dogs?

I have lots and lots of problems with the quote, but the crux of my issue with Schmidt’s position here is that it would appear the company’s position operates on the assumption that there is no need for privacy in a world in which you are not actually doing evil. I don’t so much care how Eric treats his own private life, but that he would deem to umbrella my own personal feelings on the matter with his is more than a touch unnerving.

That Google, and others, complies with the current state of the law by invading ones privacy is one thing. It’s generally unpalatable, but not surprising. But that this same distaste for individual privacy advocacy has apparently taken hold at the highest levels of a company we historically have trusted with so much of our collective should be enough to trigger a second or third look at just what we’re storing in the Google cloud.

For that information, head over to your Google Dashboard. This is a new tool from the company designed to give you a snapshot of just how much information you’ve volunteered to share; from Gmail to Voice to Docs to Analytics and more, you’ll see everything that Google sees as belonging to inescapable you.

But that’s only half the story. There appear to be some open questions about just what Google knows about you that doesn’t pop up on the dashboard. And those are the questions we must continue to push, in the tide of the changing face of Google.

But this month, you have showered me with useful things. So man, in fact, that I have to shout it from the rooftops.

For Google Apps Users

I’ve been a raving lunatic for Google Apps since they launched. For those not familiar with the service, Google Apps allows you to take your domain name (like fifthandmain.com) and map all your familiar Google services to it. Use the nearly bulletproof Gmail service for your business’s email using your own domain, and have calendars, documents, internal websites, and more all hosted and shared across team members. There are three tiers of Google Apps: Education, Standard, and Premiere. At this time, only the premiere level of service has a fee associated with it — $50/user per year.

That’s all backstory nonsense, though. The big news is here.

Presentations get Collaboration

Google Docs

For some time now, when working on a document in Google Docs (the company’s Microsoft Office challenger) you’ve been able to collaborate with other users in real time; working on a spreadsheet, you’d be able to see the cells your collaborator is working on as they’re editing them — same in word processing documents. This month, you can now collaborate as you build presentation decks, too. From Google: “Now, when editing a presentation with a co-editor, you can see which slides he is editing, and if he is editing the same slide, then you can see which element — text box, shape, image, video, etc — he is editing.”

This is great news for those of us who collaborate with others while writing online. For those who don’t collaborate online, the message here: you should start. That is all.

Shared Folders in Google Docs

Google Docs

If you’ve used Google Docs for any length of time inside an organization, you’ve likely run into the number one frustration in keeping your work in order with others: you can’t share folders of documents.

It seems like a small thing. “Just share one document at a time, Pete,” you’re saying. Sure, punk, I’ll do that. Until I get a list of 30-40 documents for a project and have to organize sharing with 6 team members … one doc at a time. After … ahem … not very long, you start looking for alternatives.

Not anymore! Huzzah from the mountain high! Google has released Shared Folders for Google Docs. This means, share a folder with those same 6 team members and all the documents, spreadsheets and presentations you dump into it get shared as well. I kid you not: this is one of those little features that will change the way you look at Google Docs as a serious collaboration tool. If you aren’t spending much time in Docs now, you owe it to yourselves and your teams to try it out.

Google Groups goes Apps Premiere

Google Apps Premiere

This is a big one. Big like the first iced cake, or the first round tire. Google Apps finally gets Google Groups built in. If you haven’t experienced the Groups platform, head over to groups.google.com for a taste. Then remove the spam and the porn, and imagine a nice, clean discussion forum just for your company. Your branding, your conversations, your colorful vernacular. Adding a rich forum to your internal communication infrastructure can be a real boon to team collaboration and productivity. Microsoft has the same feature set built into their enterprise tool, Sharepoint, which is as fantastic as it is complex. That Google has reduced the barriers to entry to such pittance should go to underscore the game-changing-ness that this represents.

The only downside: it’s only for the big spenders in the Apps Premiere and Education floors. Those of us at the standard level — the freeloaders — don’t get the glitz of Groups. Not now, likely not ever.

Browser Size tool in Google Labs

Google Browser Size

Finally, a tool for all you people who are stuck on how big your web pages are in the browser. The kind folks in the Google usability group have analyzed a sample of the search hits they get and drilled down to the size of each user’s browser.

Google Browser Size is a visualization of browser window sizes for people who visit Google. For example, the “90%” contour means that 90% of people visiting Google have their browser window open to at least this size or larger.

This is useful for ensuring that important parts of a page’s user interface are visible by a wide audience. On the example page that you see when you first visit this site, there is a “donate now” button which falls within the 80% contour, meaning that 20% of users cannot see this button when they first visit the page. 20% is a significant number; knowing this fact would encourage the designer to move the button much higher in the page so it can be seen without scrolling.

I tend to design for the larger browsers, if I can hit 90% (in the light blue area), I’m happy. Here’s a recent design in the tool:

It’s beautiful. Very quick, easy, and free visualization of design and efficacy on the web. Check it out!

This is sort of big news. See, currently, in the United States, if you want a cell phone, you start at a wireless provider, like AT&T or Verizon Wireless or T-Mobile, and you pick out a phone that works for you. That phone will be locked to that provider, meaning that the wireless company will be subsidizing the cost of the phone to you, making it a cheaper purchase, in exchange for your 1 or 2-year commitment to wireless service.

This model was shaken with the release of Apple’s iPhone two years ago, which was offered in partnership with AT&T, but was initially sold unsubsidized — meaning that early adopters paid the full price for the phone, $599 for the high end model back then — and then paid for service with AT&T on top of it. Today, the iPhone is like most other phones, subsidized through AT&T to bring the price down for end users in exchange for the 2-year commitment on service.

When Google launched their Android operating system for handhelds, they did it with the promise that they were not in the hardware business, that they were in the OS business to make phones better across the board. From Android chief Andy Rubin, “‘We’re not making hardware,’ Rubin said. ‘We’re enabling other people to build hardware.’”

Technically, that may still be true. What came out of Mountain View this weekend is a report that Google has handed out a new handset dubbed the “Nexus One” to employees at the Google holiday party. It runs the latest unreleased version of the Android operating system and is manufactured by HTC, long-time manufacturing partner to big wireless. Note, it’s not manufactured by Google.

Subtle. Very subtle.

What Google said publicly is this:

We recently came up with the concept of a mobile lab, which is a device that combines innovative hardware from a partner with software that runs on Android to experiment with new mobile features and capabilities, and we shared this device with Google employees across the globe. This means they get to test out a new technology and help improve it.

But reporters being who they are, we now know the news seems to be somewhat different. We’re hearing that this new phone will hit the market in January of 2010, on the heels of Verizon’s foray into the Android smartphone market with the Droid, and that the phone would be unlocked for a GSM network. That means customers would be able to choose their wireless provider, compatible with AT&T and T-Mobile in the US. Unfortunately for Verizon, early pics of the new Google phone seem to indicate that it is much better looking, and there appears to be no battery door to fall off. Tumultuous times indeed.

Buying advice? January 2010 is right around the corner. If you’re hot for a smartphone and can’t switch to AT&T for an iPhone, wait. What Google is hopefully doing with their Google phone is fixing what’s wrong with the iPhone ecosystem. The Google phone will allow customers to buy closer to the center of the ecosystem, with access to an application store not mired by the hotly debated approval process employed by Apple. As long as you’re diving into the Googleverse, you might as well dive into the deep end.

Widely praised by reviewers as well as users who can already buy it in Europe, the Hero could give Sprint a much-needed boost. This will mark the second recent attempt—following the sale of the Palm Pre—by Sprint to use an exclusive deal for an anticipated phone in hopes of stemming a long stretch of losses.

via Sprint to sell Android phone in October.

I just finished recording a great discussion for the soon-to-be-launched, if not long-awaited, OutsourcedCMO show in which we not so much dissect, as gloss over, Amazon.com’s retail reign in spite of economic turmoil. It’s an interesting discussion that spans the history of online direct selling, including the online cambrian era in which the first macroscopic retailers emerged from the boom/crash sludge, to the phanerozoic era, in which abundant online retail life exists and many such life forms are trying to figure out whether or not they should actually kill one another.

I, for one, don’t think that they should. Kill one another, that is.

Whatever does this have to do with Amazon and the Kindle?

The Kindle is a brilliant platform — right, I said it, it’s a platform — because it greases the skids on a whole category of products that Amazon already owns outright: books. They have boatloads of them. They are known for books. They’ve been doing books forever. And other than Google, there is no other company making such hay about making books available electronically. You can’t underestimate this point: There is no cognitive leap required to go from thinking about Amazon the book seller, to Amazon the ebook seller.

But, platform? According to NYTimes, Amazon is working on making the Kindle format open to mobiles.

“We are excited to make Kindle books available on a range of mobile phones,” said Drew Herdener, a spokesman for Amazon. “We are working on that now.”

If the Kindle initiative was about channel and platform development more than just unit sales, they succeeded on many fronts. First, the device ain’t bad to hold and look at. Second, they throw in absolutely sexy always-on wireless from Sprint bundled in the cost of the device. Third, they give you access to a massive library of content, including the web, with no real strings attached. It’s hard not to be sucked into the Kindle movement, even if you don’t actually own a Kindle.

And there’s the rub. Opening up the platform to iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, and so on, suddenly has greased the skids yet again, providing content to devices Amazon no longer has to support. Will Kindle on iPhone kill the Kindle device? Probably not, but who cares? Amazon has already won on the platform.

And after the list of headlines came the list of mentions in the blogosphere; post after post of opinionated bloggers and students, some slamming the organization for one reason or another, largely for things we could do little to rectify (I lost my financial aid money, I can’t drive, the school hates me, my lemonade monkey peed in my hair, etc.). But most of the blog commentary came from conscientious, diligent writers, passionate about their cause, and eager to share that passion with the world.

What always struck me about those wonderful Google News pieces is this: I was one of only two people on the fourth floor who did not stop reading when the “News” bits ended. The clipping services, the executives, the communications team on the PR side of the house, they all poured over the headlines rigorously, and dutifully ignored the blogs.

[The other gent who read the blogs is Joe Cockrell, who is one of the most competent blokes I know in the PR biz, and a true gentleman, who smartly took a job as director of PR at Jobing.com, loves his pets, and twitters here.]

The other side of this lesson was brought into focus this morning when my new PR bff dropped me an email bright and early. Her message was about this very site, and included to a Google Blog email displaying a link to a post I’d written about Burgerville, for which she serves as account manager. See, I’d only just mentioned the name of the company, complimentarily, but when she came into my site, the database had blown a gasket and she couldn’t see the post. I got the database fixed and the post back online, then promptly called her back to talk about the company, and the progress I’m making on the video highlighting the team there.

What she knows, and what so many others have yet to learn even in this progressive industry, is that the power of connectivity reaches far beyond A-list press. A quick scan of relevant blogs can give you a snapshot of your market landscape, and indeed, the so-called “populist” media will give you a more accurate picture of your company than much of the mainstream press.

How To

To set up your own Google News Alerts, just visit http://www.google.com/news, and click on “Create a News Alert” in the right column. A simple box on the next screen will allow you to enter the terms you’d like to search, your company name, for example, and the type of search you’d like to perform. In the associated drop-down, you can choose from a number of options from News, Blogs, the Web, Google Groups… I typically choose “Comprehensive” to ensure I capture everything about the brands I’m researching. In some cases, where there is too much traffic, I set up separate alerts for blogs, and news, for the same alert search term.

The result rivals many paid clipping services, but it’s absolutely free. I swear by it. Stop reading and go sign up now.

Good. Now, final lesson then I’ll stop on this: Take a point from the lesson my new best PR friend already knows. It’s perfectly reasonable to reach out to the people that are writing about you. It’s OK to email them. It’s OK to call them. It’s OK to write about them on your own site. It’s always been OK to do this with reporters, but if you’re not equipped with an agency to handle your PR, you will likely get far more response from your bloggers than reporters when you pick up the phone yourself. Use the opportunity to cultivate a relationship with them. Correct them kindly when they’re in error, and praise them reasonably when they give kudos. Share the love and build your populist media empire around you. Feed them, keep them shod, and they will serve you well for years to come.