Google knows heaps about me. How come? Because I use my Google account generously.

Not only have I a Google mail account, I upload photos to Picasa, I monitor news and follow blogs in Google Reader, I use Google’s calendar and I use Google Analytics to track usage of my websites as well as Google Adwords to serve up advertising.

I have a Google blogspot and I’ve told Google about my accounts on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and LinkedIn.

So Google serves me advertising that it thinks I want to see. Simply by monitoring my behaviour, Google is building up a picture of my behaviour and tastes. It’s not personal mind, or is it?

Google has provided a dashboard where you can find out which of its web services it is using to ‘watch’ you.

I recommend watching the third installment of BBC 2′s The Virtual Revolution, in which Dr Aleks Krotowski looks at how Google’s data collection impacts on our notions of privacy and personal space. It airs on BBC 2 on Saturday 13th February 2010 and will be available on iPlayer for the following week.

Enter Google Buzz. This service suddenly appeared as an extra item in my Google mail account yesterday morning and I immediately joined the throng. It strikes me at first glance as a cross between Google Wave and Google Reader. There was a flurry of activity, I followed a few people, and then the hype seemed to die down. It would spell the end of FriendFeed assuming that everyone who used FriendFeed had a Google account.

Imagine my horror when I saw a tweet later in the day saying that Buzz had a huge privacy flaw. By default Buzz lists your followers as the people you email or chat with most on Google Mail and Google Chat.

In my case, that wasn’t too bad because I use my Google Mail account to receive rather than send email, and I never use Chat. But it might impact on you.

Here’s the article that gives the low-down. Be sure to follow this slideshow link to learn how to edit your Google Profile accordingly.

Google Reader has declared that ‘square is the new round.’ That was the message that I spotted in the Google Reader blog a couple of days ago.

As well as introducing its new favicon, the tiny square image that you should spot in the address bar, Google has revamped its online RSS reader to reflect calmer, less intrusive colour schemes, AND, square corners.

In the several workshops that I went to last year on online optimization and marketing and SEO, attendees were told that Web 2.0 was characterized by rounded corners. Since we were all there to learn how to increase our online profiles, we were advised to use Web 2.0 graphical elements.

I decided to use rounded corners for my right hand links. But I never really liked them. They looked clumsy on the page. So I’ve been glad to revert to my normal rectangular style today.

Google has a point. Any element on a web page that distracts the visitor from reading and scanning the content wastes the visitor’s time.

Google’s Online Reader has to present a lot of information. I am only following 35 blogs and news sources in my Reader but that encompasses hundreds of stories a day. Somehow, Google has to get that information to me on one screen, so that I don’t have to scroll unnecessarily.

The re-design of the Reader aims to direct the eye to the main content. Collapsible menus allow you to focus on what you want to read first.

Some people monitor far more blogs than I do. I wonder how much time they actually manage to spend working, because monitoring news sources is a time consuming task.

I’ve adopted another way of accessing RSS feeds with Google. If you have a Google account, you can design your own Google entry page, called iGoogle. I have added tabs which focus on topics of interest to me.

I am pleased to share with you my SEO tab which I use to update myself with posts from writers blogging about Search Engine Optimization. It’s very far from being an exhaustive list, but it’s a start.

And here’s a post from the Google Reader blog to show you how to start using Google Reader to access your RSS feeds.

Any questions, please get in touch.