Almost Live from HighEdWebDev 06: Todd Markelz’s Keynote Speech

Brian Phelps covered the keynote speech at HighEdWebDev for collegewebeditor. Brian Phelps is Web Manager at the University of the Pacific, and owns PhelpsTeknowledge. He sees his work as facilitating information delivery, enhancing the process through usability and information architecture.

Brian sent this guest post yesterday

The keynote address for HigherEdWebDev 2006 was delivered by an alumni of higher education, Todd Markelz, now an Assistant Webmaster at Google. While I think many individuals attended hoping to get some inside dope on how Google works and its relevance to higher education, most were disappointed.

After four and one-half years on the web team for the Mario Einaudi Center fo International Studies at Cornell, Todd joined Google in Santa Clara, Calif. He is one of 18 webmasters who manage all static customer-facing web pages along with some internal pages. He contrasted the wide variety of duties he was expected to fulfill at Cornell to the specific and focused responsibilities he has at Google. He said he misses some of the variety of higher education but that Google offers different challenges.

He described the vast international audience that he must design for at Google, where nearly 75% of all search is from outside the U.S. and a similar amount of search is in a foreign language. He places a lot of value on what he learned at Cornell, which he feels gives him a more well-rounded comprehension of what he does at Google. For example, he received content from a marketing staff member that he was charged to add to a Google page. He found the text was much too long. Based on his experience at Cornell, he was able to edit the content down and make it work. The marketing staff member was shocked that a webmaster would edit his writing, but in the end grateful that Todd could make it work.

The presentation was unfortunately mostly personal and too often generic. Perhaps one item of interest is the prism of search through which Google looks at all information. Their mission, “To organize the world’s information and make it universally useful and accessible,” is purposefully broad and ambitious. They do not limit themselves to information that is found online today.

Todd illustrated the paradigm of search as applied to email when he described Google’s Gmail service. Unlike conventional email clients that allow users to sort messages into distinct folders, analogous to the directories a user might create on their hard drive, Google lumps all email into a single folder, while allowing users to apply multiple tags or filters to the content. After one year, Todd said he had over 74,000 emails on his Gmail account, a number he noted that would usually cause Outlook to work very slowly. He knows several colleagues at Google who have many times more emails than he does, all comfortably sorted and stored by Gmail. “And I’ve never lost an email,” he said.