Saturday, December 19, 2009

Googland

Googland

[G] Reflections on our Africa Adventures

Posted: 18 Dec 2009 06:48 PM PST

Google LatLong: Reflections on our Africa Adventures

[Cross-posted from the Official Google Africa Blog]

From late October to early November, the Google Earth Outreach team, along with Googlers from our Africa and Geo teams, participated in several events in East Africa.

During the AfricaGIS 2009 conference in Kampala, Uganda, plenary sessions by Google Earth Outreach Manager Rebecca Moore and Geo Evangelist Ed Parsons spoke to the importance of access and and development of geographic data in Africa, and encouraged people to attend some of our 14 workshops on various Google Geo tools. Our colleagues from Save the Elephants, Mapping Africa's Protected Areas (MAPA) and the UN Environment Programme presented on a panel and answered questions from the audience about their Google Earth Layers. What struck us about these workshops was the high level of interest and excitement from the huge number of attendees we had at every workshop, and their desire for greater access to geospatial information and adoption of cutting-edge technologies developed weeks earlier, like the Google Fusion Tables map visualization tools.


Google Earth Outreach launched our program to most countries in Africa, also releasing an Africa microsite specially for African users. The Google Earth & Maps for Non-profits grants program is now available in most African countries, and NGOs are encouraged to apply for software grants. If you're an African NGO, apply now!

Posted by Tanya Keen, Google Earth Outreach
URL: http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2009/12/reflections-on-our-africa-adventures.html

[G] London Open Source Jam 15

Posted: 18 Dec 2009 04:12 PM PST

Google Open Source Blog: London Open Source Jam 15

On the 3rd of December we held the latest (and greatest) Google London Open Source Jam at our offices near Victoria. The Jam is a way to get like-minded Open Source contributors and users together and give them a chance to give a 5 minute talk on something dear to their hearts, all the while availing themselves of free beer and pizza!

This time's topic was the somewhat catchall: "the Web." Like always, the topic is more of a guide than a rule, so we had some pretty diverse talks.

Our very own Jon Skeet set the evening off to a good start by telling us all about Noda Time — a new Open Source library for handling dates and times in .NET, based on the Joda Time library for Java.

Simon Phillips on Google Wave

Simon Phillips is a consultant to the film business and gave a great presentation on how he uses Google Wave to help him work closely with directors, script writers, set designers and the like. He showed some great ideas for using Wave in this way and was canvassing for help in developing Open Source Wave robots to help this process.

Simon Stewart gave a rallying cry for making the web more accessible to the blind and deaf, especially in this modern era of HTML canvas and video tags. By ensuring your sites are accessible, you open them up to more users, and as a useful side effect you also make them more testable.

HTTP has started to show its age, and maybe it's time for a leaner, meaner protocol to come along. I took a brief break from my hosting duties to present a summary of SPDY, a chromium.org project to develop a replacement protocol which will deliver data to our browsers faster.

Glyn Wintle Gets Comfortable

If you run a web site, you may have come to fear the "Slashdot effect" where you are linked from a popular website and get a spike of traffic. Glyn Wintle from the Open Rights Group (ORG) informed us that this is nothing compared to having a bunch of knitting forums link to you! His was a tale of Open Sourcing of knitting patterns and DMCA take-down notices. He also brought us up to speed on the latest from the ORG.

Sam Mbale gave us an update on his work bringing open source to Africa and told us all about BarCamp Lusaka which he'll be attending. We look forward to hearing how it went at another Jam.

Robert Rees gave us an experience report on using Velocity templates to divide responsibilities between engineers and web designers. It seems to work pretty well; contracts are enforced by unit tests, and designers know exactly what primitives they can use when laying out web pages.

Matt Savage on RESTful Acceptance Tests

Finally, Matt Savage talked about his ideas for RESTful acceptance tests, and Steven Goodwin gave us an update on his project to build a "Wallace and Gromit" house.

You can find more pictures of the event on Picasa Web Albums. To find out more about the Google London Open Source Jam, visit http://osjam.appspot.com/. If you'd like to receive regular updates about future jams, sign up for our mailing list. We hope to see you at future jams!

By Matt Godbolt, Software Engineering Team
URL: http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2009/12/london-open-source-jam-15.html

[G] Facebook Feeds Begin Showing Up on YouTube's Homepage

Posted: 18 Dec 2009 03:06 PM PST

YouTube Blog: Facebook Feeds Begin Showing Up on YouTube's Homepage

You might have noticed that YouTube's been getting a lot more social lately. We've launched several features in the last few months that let you better connect with the platforms that matter most to you (and discover new videos you're likely to love in the process). In addition to linking your YouTube account to social networks like Twitter and Facebook via AutoShare, friend suggestions and easier private sharing options, you can easily find the YouTube accounts belonging to your friends on Facebook, Yahoo! and Gmail. Then, once you've subscribed to someone, you might start seeing their public actions (things like favorites, ratings and comments) in your Recent Activity module on your homepage (assuming they've set these preferences).

This week we've added another launch to the "social feature" list: a feed that pushes the YouTube videos your friends are embedding on Facebook back to your YouTube homepage. This feature is in test mode right now, but there is a way for you to experiment with it while it's being worked on: visit this page and connect to Facebook in the area that says "Where do I share my activities?" (If you've already hooked this up, you may need to disconnect and reconnect accounts to enable.) You can choose to "Disable AutoShare" right afterwards if you don't want your YouTube actions to be syndicated out to Facebook. But if you do want your YouTube-related Facebook activity to be syndicated back to YouTube, the key is that you just stay connected to Facebook. Alternatively, you can search for your friends using the friend finding module on the homepage, and that will also connect you to Facebook. Once hooked up, it might take a little while for videos to start appearing on your homepage during this experimental phase.

We see the YouTube homepage as only the start of your video journey. It's where you should be able to get a snapshot of the "YouTube Zeitgeist" at any moment -- that is, those videos that are most relevant to you and to the times. Sometimes those videos are served up by algorithms that offer recommendations based on your viewing history or the channels you're subscribed to. By adding the videos your friends are embedding on Facebook into the mix, we're hoping to close a loop with regards to how videos are shared and consumed these days. Take a look at these stats to see just how much YouTube content is viewed off the site:
  • Facebook: 46.2 years of videos watched a day
  • Orkut: 12.7 years of videos watched a day
  • MySpace: 5.6 years of videos watched a day
  • Hi5: 1.2 of years of videos watched a day
Pretty amazing, right? These kinds of numbers underscore the need for us to more tightly integrate social platforms with YouTube, because at the end of the day, we hope YouTube becomes your portal to video on the Web, particularly the social Web that has become so integral to our lives.

Chris Testa, Software Engineer, recently watched "I'm Yours(ukulele)," which his friend Jason posted into his Recent Activity via Facebook.


URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/youtube/PKJx/~3/oPUyeHV8nBk/facebook-feeds-begin-showing-up-on.html

[G] Search Based Keyword Tool: 1 Minute Guide

Posted: 18 Dec 2009 03:06 PM PST

Inside AdWords: Search Based Keyword Tool: 1 Minute Guide

As the end of the year approaches, you may be thinking about how to drive more traffic to your AdWords campaigns and in turn, to your website.

Millions of people use Google each day to find products and services by searching on various keywords. This means that by including all keywords that are relevant to your product or service in your campaigns, you can ensure you can ensure that you will reach a greater set of potential customers. To help you do this, you can use the Search-based Keyword Tool to quickly identify relevant keywords which aren't yet included in your AdWords campaigns.



Our 1 minute guide will show you how the tool works, as well as how it's already helped one AdWords advertiser to increase sales.

Watch the video today, and you'll be ready to start using the Search-based Keyword Tool right away.

Posted by Dan Friedman, Inside AdWords crew
URL: http://adwords.blogspot.com/2009/12/as-end-of-year-approaches-you-may-be.html

[G] This week in search 12/18/09

Posted: 18 Dec 2009 01:51 PM PST

Official Google Blog: This week in search 12/18/09

This is part of a regular series of posts on search experience updates that runs on Fridays. Look for the label This week in search and subscribe to the series. - Ed.

For Google, the quality of search has always been about getting you the exact, most relevant answer you were looking for in the shortest amount of time -- what we call "time-to-result." These notions of relevance and speed have been baked into our product development and are always a top priority for us. Every day we work through design, observations, and analytics to make sure that the Google you use today is better than the Google you used yesterday. In fact, at any given time we're conducting between 50 and 200 search experiments, all of which are focused on getting you the exact result you're looking for -- faster. And, given that 20% of Google search queries are ones we haven't seen in the past 90 days, and there are well over 300 billion web pages to crawl, you can imagine the extent of that challenge!

With 2009 coming to a close (not to mention the first decade of the millennium), now is a good time to look back over the evolution of time-to-result with a nod towards what's to come in 2010 and beyond.

In the beginning of the decade, many of us were like student drivers: we used search to navigate the web feeling apprehensive and deliberate with navigation (the excruciating wait times with dial-up modems didn't make it easy either!) Since then, we've all learned how to search better and faster, especially as the web has developed and diversified over time. As more and different types of information came online, we searched for it -- news, video, books, and maps became part of our daily search diet. Today, the majority of Internet users have become experienced web warriors, armed with broadband access, faster computers, and blazing fast browsers, and the time it takes to get the perfect search result has increasingly become more and more important. As a result, Internet usage behavior across the web has shifted -- and not just on Google. Recently, for example, Akamai published a study which found that Internet users in 2009 expect web pages to load twice as fast as they did in 2006. This expectation of latency is not limited to web page load time. Research firm Tubemogul found that more than 81 percent of all online video viewers click away if they encounter a video that's rebuffering. Speed matters now more than ever -- we don't have the time or tolerance to wait.

Our own years of testing have conclusively shown that when speed of a feature or product improves, usage, quite simply, goes up. During the early development of Google Maps for mobile, we went with compressed tiles over uncompressed map tiles, a difference barely perceptible to the human eye. The compression resulted in two to three times the increase in speed, and ultimately doubled usage of maps. But it's not just about actual latency -- it's also about perceived latency. During the development of Google News, which is quite a dynamic and complicated page, we broke the results page into smaller blocks of HTML, appearing above and below the fold. This smart tabling dramatically improves the way you perceive the page's load time. Although Google News takes about 8 seconds to fully load due to the richness of the page, the results you first see above the fold are there nearly instantly, thus altering that perception of latency.

So, it's clear speed and latency enhancements are an important focus for us, especially since they make the experience you have with our products much more useful and enjoyable. Above all else, we care about getting you an answer as fast as possible, and we do this through not only improving our search results but also by working with the web community to speed up the entire web. 2009 brought some incredible advancements that are worth noting.

In 2009, our "under the hood" infrastructure focus became more pronounced, as we kicked off our Make the Web Faster campaign. Our goal has been simple, to make the web browsing experience as fast as turning the pages of a magazine. To help increase browsing speeds, we released projects such as Page Speed to help webmasters optimize their sites, and Google Public DNS, to help people obtain faster, safer, and more valid DNS results.​ Finally, we started work on SPDY, pronounced "SPeeDY" -- a new protocol designed to minimize latency. The notion of these "under the hood" improvements are vital to building a faster web. But what about the relevance and comprehensiveness of the actual "result" aspect of time-to-result?

Early this year, we saw a lot of evidence that people are getting much more sophisticated in their searching, asking Google to solve harder problems (for example, by making longer and more complex queries). For this reason, in 2009 alone we have released many improvements: nearly 500 ranking changes; well over 100 UI changes; tripled how much you see in local universal results; brought personalized search to all users; and tripled the frequency with which you see images when you enter a query. To better help you choose from the results we improved the way that we summarize the results by dynamically varying the length of the description, creating jump-to shortcuts that take you straight to the relevant section of a page, and displaying the site hierarchy to inform you of the context of the page within the website. To save time and keystrokes, we now show you universal search features in Suggest; try searching for for weather, currency conversions, or flight status. This dramatically improves your ability to benefit from previous queries, getting you answers more quickly and easily than ever before. And just last week, we brought speed to a whole new level with realtime search -- so that you can find information that is literally just seconds old.

As these "time-to-result" efforts continue to emerge in 2010, we'll keep pushing the envelope on indexing speed, accuracy, and comprehensiveness. And that means you can expect the search experience to get more social, more personal, more interactive, and more ubiquitous -- getting you the information you're exactly looking for when and where you need it. Ultimately, the faster you get what you're looking for, the more enriched your life will be, and that makes us very happy. So what's the ultimate goal in the future? Allowing only a single barrier to instantly getting you the search result you're looking for -- the speed of light.

Here's to a great 2009, and an even greater 2010 in search!

Posted by Jack Menzel, Group Product Manager, Search
URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/this-week-in-search-121809.html

[G] Tips and tricks on deploying Google Apps

Posted: 18 Dec 2009 11:17 AM PST

Official Google Enterprise Blog: Tips and tricks on deploying Google Apps

The process of going Google doesn't end with making the decision to migrate to Google Apps. That's why our Google Apps Deployment team is here to ensure that the millions of Google Apps users – from large businesses and schools to small community organizations – have the resources they need to help get Google Apps up and running.

If your company, school, or organization has decided to "go Google," but isn't yet fully "gone," today's post on the Official Google Blog points to some resources from our deployment team and tells more about the tools and guides available to help along the way.

Posted by Miriam Schneider, Google Apps team
URL: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2009/12/tips-and-tricks-on-deploying-google.html

[G] Tips and tricks for deploying Google Apps

Posted: 18 Dec 2009 11:17 AM PST

Official Google Blog: Tips and tricks for deploying Google Apps

Has your company, school or organization decided to "go Google" — but not yet fully "gone?" Perhaps you'd like more guidance on the technical, marketing or training details? Or maybe you could use some resources to help you deploy? Making the decision to go Google can be the easiest part, but we realize that it sometimes takes a little boost to finish the process, which is where we come in.

Our Google Apps Deployment team has assisted hundreds of organizations — large and small — make the switch to Google Apps. To ensure that your implementation is a success, we've developed step-by-step tools to guide you through the process, and best practices to make your transition as smooth and easy as possible. Here are some of the resources you can explore when going Google:

Sign up for a Deployment Training Webinar. In this live session, a deployment specialist will walk you through the deployment planning steps and use cases.


Take advantage of our deployment guides, which include creative examples and templates, to help with your technical and marketing rollout:
Recently, we also launched two learning sites to jump start your transition to Google Apps: the customizable Google Enterprise Launch Site for large enterprises and the Apps Learning Center for small businesses. You can find out more about these Google site templates in the Enterprise Deployment Site.

To find answers to your technical questions about Google Apps, visit the Administrator Help Center. We also provide overviews and videos for integration and migration tools, including Microsoft Outlook Sync, Google Blackberry Enterprise Server Connector and Lotus Notes Migration.

We hope these resources help with your move to Google Apps, and we can't wait to welcome you to the Google Apps family.

Posted by Cindy Chin, Google Apps Deployment Specialist
URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/tips-and-tricks-for-deploying-google.html

[G] Coradiant/Urchin Analytics In A Box Launched

Posted: 18 Dec 2009 10:12 AM PST

Google Analytics Blog: Coradiant/Urchin Analytics In A Box Launched

Urchin analytics software has a long tradition of integrating with other software/hardware platforms, and today we are pleased to announce the latest such collaboration: Coradiant's new Analytics In A Box (AIB). AIB is an appliance that sits behind your firewall, passively collecting web traffic data via a packet-sniffing technique. This gives you the option of reducing your reliance on page tags, as Coradiant's system collects traffic data in an independent way. Log file headaches are also gone for good, which will be music to the ears of any sysadmin!

AIB uses a modified version of Urchin 6, in conjunction with Coradiant's complementary technologies to give you new ways to look at both your web traffic AND the performance of your site/server.

From Coradiant's press release:
"Analytics In A Box provides a comprehensive view into customer Web site interaction, and insights into online conversion outcomes. Analytics capabilities are substantially enhanced through access to a richer data model and customizable reporting solutions. A complete set of dashboards for executive consumption, as well as access to granular data allows deeper insights into marketing optimization, site performance, content optimization, conversion behavior and navigational analysis."

Please see Coradiant's site for more information.




Posted by SoAndSo, SoAndSo Team
URL: http://analytics.blogspot.com/2009/12/coradianturchin-analytics-in-box_18.html

[G] Google's approach to privacy

Posted: 18 Dec 2009 10:12 AM PST

Google Public Policy Blog: Google's approach to privacy

Posted by Christine Chen, Manager, Global Communications and Public Affairs

Online privacy has been on a lot of people's minds lately, including ours. As Google has grown, it's only natural that people have questions about how we handle information.

We've talked a lot in the past about providing our users with transparency and choice in some of our products, like the "off the record" feature in Google Talk or requesting that images be removed from Google Street View. But we haven't always done a good job of talking about Google's philosophical approach to privacy overall -- or sharing our strong belief in harnessing data to create products and services that are useful for our users.

So over the past several weeks, we've been spending time with policymakers, consumer advocates, think tanks, trade associations, and journalists to chat about Google's approach to privacy. As you can see from this presentation, we've talked about our guiding privacy principles, explained what search logs look like, and discussed how we use data to improve our products and services.

Google Privacy

We've also talked about three major privacy initiatives we've undertaken this past year that underscore our commitment to transparency and choice -- interest-based advertising, the data liberation front, and Google Dashboard. For 2010, we're looking forward to taking even more steps to help users protect their privacy.
URL: http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2009/12/googles-approach-to-privacy.html
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