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Googland

Googland

[G] YouTube Blogging in 2009

Posted: 31 Dec 2009 04:04 PM PST

YouTube Blog: YouTube Blogging in 2009

Following the tradition of our Google brethren,we'd like to share our blog highlights and thank you, our loyal blogreaders, for making this the most successful year ever for the YouTubeblog.

This is our 284th post of the year, which is 13% morethan in 2008. In addition to more posts, we have more readers now --79% more, to be exact. The number of unique visitors jumped from 7.7million last year to 13.7 million in 2009.

We posted about new products, the evolution of our social features, a slew of live streamed events and much more, but what generated the most buzz was What You Watched and Searched for on YouTube in 2009, a listing of the year's Most Watched videos and fastest-rising search terms, and announcements regarding the launches of 1080p and Shows & Movies. New Channels Coming Soon, another much-read item, topped our record for number of comments on any YouTube blog post -- over 50K.

We introduced several new series this year, including Release Notes, a periodic rundown of changes to the site; Curator showcases, highlighting people with a knack for finding great videos; and Video Volunteers,which is about mobilizing the talents of the YouTube community to helpthose in need. We used the blog to showcase your impressiveachievements -- things like raising money to build wells in Africa, launching a label for YouTube musicians, and the historical milestone of the first user hitting 1 million subscribers -- as well as shed light on how YouTube is being used as a tool for free expression in Iran. We took you behind the scenes to offer insight into the thought that goes into product development here, and we shared some stats that were hard even for us to wrap our heads around. Maybe we did a little trash talking, too.

We also launched three new blogs this year: the Biz Blog for partners and advertisers, a Spanish-language blog, and the Creator's Corner blog for anyone who makes videos. And we finally moved onto to the Blogger platform, bringing us into the 21st century when it comes to blog technology.

Whew. It was a busy year but we wouldn't have it any other way. Have avery happy New Year, thanks for reading, and see you in 2010!

Mia Quagliarello, Community Manager, recently watched "Bacon Candy Party Sticks."


URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/youtube/PKJx/~3/IhZZWAohX8A/youtube-blogging-in-2009.html

[G] Five years of Google blogging

Posted: 31 Dec 2009 11:45 AM PST

Official Google Blog: Five years of Google blogging

It's time again for our annual wrap-up of blogging at Google. You may have noticed 2009 marked our fifth year here on the Official Google Blog — our first post was in April 2004 — and it was our busiest year yet. This is our 423rd post of 2009 — a 15 percent increase over last year. We're also pleased to note that a total of 14,493,472 readers stopped by this year, a 21 percent increase. You hail from all over: more than half of visitors are outside of the U.S. The other top countries are (in order) U.K., India, Canada, Germany and France.

What captured your attention this year? Here are the top 10 posts of 2009, by unique pageviews:
  1. Introducing the Google Chrome OS - 2,591,794 unique pageviews (more than 12 percent of the year's total). The announcement of our open source operating system received more than 4x the views of any other post.
  2. Went Walkabout. Brought back Google Wave - 639,225. Wave-mania struck after we introduced a new product for collaboration and communication at our Google I/O conference.
  3. Here comes Google Voice - 357,084. We released a preview of this application to help you better manage your voice communications.
  4. "This site may harm your computer" on every search result?!?! - 320,435. A short-lived error affecting Google search results led to confusion and concern; this post cleared it up.
  5. Email in Indian languages - 224,052. A transliteration feature in Gmail that makes it easier to type in Indian languages was a hit. More than one million readers of the blog in 2009 were from India — a 53 percent increase over 2008.
  6. Releasing the Chromium OS open source project - 217,424. A few months after announcing our operating system project, we open-sourced it as Chromium OS.
  7. Now you see it, now you don't - 165,329. We introduced a new, clean version of our classic homepage.
  8. Google Apps is out of beta (yes, really) - 164,319. Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Talk all lost their beta tags (in Gmail's case, after five years!).
  9. Now S-U-P-E-R-sized! - 155,196. A "small" change increasing the size of the Google search box got a lot of attention.
  10. Introducing Google Public DNS - 143,122. We launched our public DNS resolver, which converts domain names into unique Internet Protocol (IP) numbers.
We also developed a few different series of posts this year: one on the power of measurement, for people who want to improve the performance of their websites; a weekly series focused on search; and another on the latest in the world of Google Apps.

As always, we had some fun in 2009, with grass-mowing goats and a panda-obsessed Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity (CADIE) on April Fools' Day. Our curiosity was piqued by Atlantis (or not) under the sea, constellations in Google Sky Map and a fresnel lens somewhere in between.

Finally, the Google Blog network continues to grow. This year, we welcomed blogs dedicated to Google Wave, Google New Zealand, Data Liberation, Google Voice, Google Arabia, Google Thailand, European Public Policy and Google Chrome — among others — to our blogging family.

Beyond the blogs, in February we jumped head-first into the Twitterverse, starting our @google account with a geeky tweet. Since then, we've tweeted more than 1,000 times, and are grateful to have gathered two million or so followers. That puts us in the company of @algore and @ashsimpsonwentz, and (today, at least) just 65,000 or so followers behind a certain @ladygaga (although we're pretty sure that gap is only going to grow — no way we can compete with her outfits). Around 75 other Google entities and teams have gotten into the Twitter act this year as well, so we built a directory to help you keep up with all the action. Twitter also was our biggest non-Google referrer to the blog in 2009, a clear sign of its rapid growth in popularity.

Thanks for sticking with us through all of our goings-on over the past 12 months. We look forward to having you back for more in 2010. In the meantime, happy New Year!

Posted by Emily Wood and Jordan Newman, Editors, Google Blog Team
URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/five-years-of-google-blogging.html

[G] YouTube's Top 10 Launches of 2009

Posted: 31 Dec 2009 10:36 AM PST

YouTube Blog: YouTube's Top 10 Launches of 2009


Did
you know that we released more features in 2009 than in 2007 and 2008
combined? This made it the busiest year on record for the YouTube
product and engineering teams. Some of these launches, like support for
1080p, made sizable splashes, while others, like "trending topics" appearing at the bottom of the browse page,
went out with less fanfare. With so much going on, we wanted to pause
before the new year begins to review the things that hopefully made the
biggest impact on your overall YouTube experience:




  • Auto-Share - As part of our wider effort to integrate YouTube into the social and communication platforms you use every day, AutoShare automatically syndicates your YouTube activity to Facebook, Twitter and Google Reader.




  • 1080p - In November, we unveiled support for videos in 1080p (aka "full HD"). Want to test it out? Check out this video.



  • Auto-Speech Recognition - Google's automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology, coupled with YouTube's captioning system, makes videos more accessible to the deaf and hearing impaired. This same speech recognition technology can create machine-generated captions, which can then be translated into 51 languages.



  • Mobile Website for Smartphones - Watching videos on -- and uploading videos from -- cell phones is more popular than ever. To meet this demand, we launched a new mobile website designed to make using YouTube on smartphones like the iPhone, G1 and Palm Pre a lot easier.



  • YouTube XL - YouTube XL
    optimizes YouTube for large screens. In addition to offering larger
    text and simplified navigation, XL has a continuous play feature,
    allowing you to search for a topic, hit "play" and then kick back for
    an uninterrupted viewing experience.




  • VEVO - VEVO.com
    is a partnership that blends Google and YouTube's technology with music
    videos from a broad catalog of artists from Universal Music Group, Sony
    Music and EMI. The site hopes to redefine the way people watch and
    engage with music online, as well as change the way the digital and
    music industries do business with each other.




  • Feather - Feather
    is a stripped-down version of the page on which any video plays.
    Without all but the basic features, the page loads more quickly and
    videos play back faster. Give it a whirl in TestTube or click here.



  • 3D - In July, one of our engineers used his free time to implement easier viewing options for 3D videos on YouTube. Here's a brief overview video.



  • Real-Time Comment Search - In October, we released the ability to search YouTube comments in real-time.
    The comment appears on a continuously updated results page, and
    "trending topics" indicates the hottest topics of conversation on
    YouTube at that particular moment.



  • Shows & Movies - In April, we rolled out a destination sporting hundreds of movies and thousands of full-length TV episodes. Offerings have included film classics like Taxi Driver, Ghostbusters and the Spaghetti Western Trilogy, as well as current TV shows from broadcasters like C4 and Channel 5 in the UK.


Which
of these features is your favorite? Please use the poll in the top
right corner of this blog to let us know what you've found to be most
useful in '09, or leave a comment below if there's another feature that
had an important impact on your YouTube life.


Hunter Walk, Director, Product Management, and John Harding, Engineering Manager


URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/youtube/PKJx/~3/E5vihTXY-qc/youtubes-top-10-launches-of-2009.html
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