Thursday, January 28, 2010

Googland

Googland

[G] New Thumbnail "Flipbook" in Upload Shows Video Processing Progress

Posted: 27 Jan 2010 10:07 PM PST

YouTube Blog: New Thumbnail "Flipbook" in Upload Shows Video Processing Progress

Starting today, when you upload a video to YouTube, you'll see a rapid-fire assortment of thumbnails from the video after it begins uploading to the site. Aside from being fun to watch (it's kind of like a flipbook of your video!), this visual representation of the process gives you further peace of mind that the video is indeed processing and will soon be live on the site.

Shortly after the last thumbnail arrives, your video is ready for viewing and sharing.* If you see the flipbook soon after you begin uploading, this means your video will be processed faster and you won't have to wait long for your video link. Read on for recommendations on how to optimize your video file to do this.






If you're uploading in the .mov or .mp4 (aka Quicktime) format, and you produced your video using Final Cut Pro, iMovie or QuicktimePro, click here to learn how to optimize your files. By ensuring the "index" of your file is in front, we can process your video faster. This is referred to by some as "flattening" a file or creating a "fast start" video file. If you're using FLV, ASF or WMV formats, you're fine. If you're using AVI, we'd want that index in front of the file as well. Most digital cameras producing AVI or MVI formats are fine.

How can you tell if your file is a "fast start file" or not? If you start getting the thumbnails before the upload has completed, then this is a fast start video file. If you get the thumbnails after the upload has completed, then your video file is not a fast start video file.

Dima Broyde, Software Engineer, recently watched "Арефьева Ольга "Театр," and Slave Jovanovski, Software Engineer, recently watched "Pomplamoose Covers Makin Out by Mark Owen."

*Remember, you can always check the processing status of your videos by mousing over your username in the top right and then clicking "My Videos" in the dropdown menu.


URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/youtube/PKJx/~3/ffT651fPFQc/new-thumbnail-flipbook-in-upload-shows.html

[G] Updated Books Home Page and My Library

Posted: 27 Jan 2010 10:07 PM PST

Inside Google Books: Updated Books Home Page and My Library

Posted by Brandon Badger, Product Manager, Google Books

I'm happy to announce a few fresh features for Google Books. We've updated the home page by adding the ability to scroll through categories of books and magazines.




We also integrated the My Library feature into the home page to enable you to create and then share collections of books by adding them to "bookshelves." This new version of My Library gives you control over your collections by enabling you to keep some bookshelves private--if, say, you want to organize your own personal reading lists--while sharing others.




Previously, all books in your My Library were part of a single collection, and you could tag books with labels to organize. Now, instead of tagging a book with a label, you can add it to one or more bookshelves. As part of this transition to bookshelves, we're migrating all the previously created labels to the new bookshelf system. For example, if you had tagged a book with a label called "favorite travel books," then you'll now see a custom bookshelf called "favorite travel books" that contains the same book.


As always, you have full control over your book collection data. We continue to offer the Book Search API as a way for you to extract and edit your data. Ultimately, we also hope that these open APIs will make it easier to build product integrations that synchronize reading lists across devices and applications.


You can search and discover millions of books on Google Books. Our hope is that these new tools will make it easier for you to find, organize and keep track of the books that you're interested in reading.
URL: http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2010/01/updated-books-home-page-and-my-library.html

[G] Google's Privacy Principles

Posted: 27 Jan 2010 07:38 PM PST

Official Google Blog: Google's Privacy Principles

Thursday, January 28th marks International Data Privacy Day. We're recognizing this day by publicly publishing our guiding Privacy Principles.
  • Use information to provide our users with valuable products and services.
  • Develop products that reflect strong privacy standards and practices.
  • Make the collection of personal information transparent.
  • Give users meaningful choices to protect their privacy.
  • Be a responsible steward of the information we hold.


We've always operated with these principles in mind. Now, we're just putting them in writing so you have a better understanding of how we think about these issues from a product perspective. Like our design and software guidelines, these privacy principles are designed to guide the decisions we make when we create new technologies. They are one of the key reasons our engineers have worked on new privacy-enhancing initiatives and features like the Google Dashboard, the Ads Preferences Manager and the Data Liberation Front. And there is more in store for 2010.

You can find out more about our efforts at the Google Privacy Center and on our YouTube channel.

Posted by Alan Eustace, Senior Vice President, Engineering & Research
URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/googles-privacy-principles.html

[G] Supporting students from under-represented backgrounds in the pursuit of a technical education

Posted: 27 Jan 2010 02:55 PM PST

Official Google Blog: Supporting students from under-represented backgrounds in the pursuit of a technical education

We know firsthand how vital a good science or math education is to building products that change the world and enrich peoples' lives. We're committed to supporting students in their pursuit of the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields — particularly those from traditionally under-represented backgrounds.

Over time, we've dedicated time, people, and financial resources to organizations, events and schools to help advance this mission — and we're excited to share that we rounded out 2009 with a donation of $8 million to a variety of organizations who share our dedication to this cause. Our efforts were focused in four key areas:

Starting in high school
STEM education at an elementary and high school level builds technical skills early and encourages interest in technology. To support the ongoing education of these subjects, we identified more than 600 high schools with significant populations of students from under-represented and economically disadvantaged backgrounds and are providing laptops to their computer science and math departments. We are also offering laptops to some of the most promising students in these schools. In a time when many of these schools are experiencing decreased funding, we wanted to support their continued commitment to learning and teaching these subjects, and recognize the exceptional work done by teachers in these communities. If you're interested in learning more about our efforts in this field, check out Google Code University (CS tutorials for students and teachers) as well as our tools, tips and lesson plans for K-12 educators.

Growing promising talent
We've worked with over 200 outstanding students as part of our FUSE, CSSI, BOLD and BOLD Practicum summer programs. To help the alumni of our 2009 summer programs pursue their studies, we awarded former program participants with school-based scholarships. We hope that this support for tuition will lessen the financial burden on these students and their families, reduce work-study commitments and free them up to explore other educational opportunities, like studying abroad.

Advancing technical knowledge through universities
We have close relationships with universities around the world — not only do we employ their alumni, but they are also a source of groundbreaking research and innovation. We awarded grants ranging in size from $20k to $100k to 50 U.S.-based universities with whom we already have relationships and directed these funds toward departments that are closely aligned with promoting under-represented minorities in technology. We hope to expand this effort both to more U.S.-based universities and to universities around the world in the future.

Partnerships with the organizations that make it happen
Our commitment to promote women and under-represented minorities in technology is shared by dozens of local and national organizations around the country. We awarded grants to 22 partner organizations, almost all of which we have worked with in the past. These organizations are on the front lines, making sure that under-represented groups have the support, resources and contacts they need. You'll find a list of these organizations with a quick overview of the work they focus on here.

This was a terrific way to close out 2009 and we look forward to attracting and encouraging more students from traditionally under-represented backgrounds to pursue studies and careers in science, technology, engineering and math.

Posted by Shannon Deegan, Director, People Operations
URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/supporting-students-from-under.html

[G] Google D.C. Talk Feb. 8 - Democracy Online: Can the Internet Bring Change?

Posted: 27 Jan 2010 02:55 PM PST

Google Public Policy Blog: Google D.C. Talk Feb. 8 - Democracy Online: Can the Internet Bring Change?

Posted by Mistique Cano, Manager, Public Policy Manager

Last summer a chilling 40-second video clip, recorded on a cell phone, went viral and caught the attention of the world. It captured the haunting image of a 26-year old music student, Neda Soltan, who was shot and killed in the streets of Tehran while protesting the Iranian presidential election.

Some experts look at this incident and others where new technology is being used by opponents of repressive regimes and have come to the conclusion that online free expression has the potential to bring about great democratic changes. Others are less optimistic, noting that governments are manipulating Internet activists and that, in any case, all the activity amounts to little more than taking offline techniques and moving them online.

So is the Internet stoking democratic change or is its impact hyped? Are repressive regimes conditioning people not to expect free expression on the Internet? Is online organizing little more than a game of Whac-a-Mole with one form of repression being replaced by another? What are the implications for political organizing of the recent discovery that the email accounts of dozens of Chinese human rights advocates appear to have been hacked? Join Google and Freedom House to answer this question and many more. Please submit and vote on these and other questions for the panel at Google Moderator.

The panel will be moderated by Google's Managing Policy Counsel Pablo Chavez with participation by: Larry Diamond, Professor & Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University; Daniel Calingaert, Deputy Director of Programs, Freedom House; Omid Memarian, Iranian Dissident Blogger.

To join us Monday, February 8, 2010 from 4:30 p.m. - 6:00 p.m, RSVP here.
URL: http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2010/01/google-dc-talk-feb-8-democracy-online.html

[G] Search is getting more social

Posted: 27 Jan 2010 01:40 PM PST

Official Google Blog: Search is getting more social

Late last year we released the Social Search experiment to make search more personal with relevant web content from your friends and online contacts. We were excited by the number of people who chose to try it out, and today Social Search is available to everyone in beta on google.com.

We've been having a lot of fun with Social Search. It's baby season here on our team — two of us just had little ones, and a third is on the way. We're all getting ready to be parents for the first time and we have lots of questions. So, what do we do? We search Google, of course! With Social Search, when we search for [baby sleep patterns], [swaddling] or [best cribs], not only do we get the usual websites with expert opinions, we also find relevant pages from our friends and contacts. For example, if one of my friends has written a blog where he talks about a great baby shop he found in Mountain View, this might appear in my social results. I could probably find other reviews, but my friend's blog is more relevant because I know and trust the author.

While we've been enjoying Social Search (and having babies), we've been hard at work on new features. For example, we've added social to Google Images. Now when you're doing a search on Images, you may start seeing pictures from people in your social circle. These are pictures that your friends and other contacts have published publicly to the web on photo-sharing sites like Picasa Web Albums and Flickr. Just like the other social results, social image results appear under a special heading called "Results from your social circle." Here's what it looks like:
Looking at the screenshot, you may notice two new links for "My social circle" and "My social content." These links will take you to a new interface we've added where you can see the connections and content behind your social results. Clicking on "My social circle" shows your extended network of online contacts and how you're connected.


Clicking on "My social content" lists your public pages that might appear in other people's social results. This new interface should give you a peek under the hood of how Social Search builds your social circle and connects you with web content from your friends and extended network. You can check out your social circle directly by visiting this link. (Note that it may take some time for the connections and content to update.)

We think there's tremendous potential for social information to improve search, and we're just beginning to scratch the surface. We're leaving a "beta" label on social results because we know there's a lot more we can do. If you want to get the most out of Social Search right away, get started by creating a Google profile, where you can add links to your other public online social services. Check out this short video to learn more:



The new features are rolling out now on google.com in English for all signed-in users, and you should start seeing them in the next few days. Time to socialize!

Posted by Maureen Heymans, Technical Lead for Social Search, and Terran Melconian, Technical Lead for Social Image Search
URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/search-is-getting-more-social.html

[G] Tip: Managing tabs

Posted: 27 Jan 2010 12:24 PM PST

Google Chrome Blog: Tip: Managing tabs

When you're using the same browser window to check your email and calendar, write a report, do some research, and watch a few YouTube videos, the tabstrip can become pretty crowded. With Google Chrome, we tried to make it easy to keep your tabs organized.

You can use the mouse to grab a tab and drag it around in the tabstrip, to keep related tabs close to each other.


If you need even better delineation between tasks, just drag a tab out of the strip entirely and drop it somewhere on your desktop. You'll get a whole new window to keep stuff in, and you can then drag more tabs from your old window to your new one.


Didn't mean to create that window? Just drag the tab you dropped back up to the original tabstrip to put it back.

Of course, sometimes you don't want to move tabs, you just want to get rid of them. If you find that highlighting the little "x" that closes a tab is too tricky, you can just point at any part of the tab in the tabstrip and press your mouse's middle button. This makes it just a little easier to go close a tab.


And after you close one tab, the next tab will slide right under your mouse, so if you want to close a bunch, you can just keep clicking.

Posted by Peter Kasting, Software Engineer
URL: http://chrome.blogspot.com/2010/01/tip-managing-tabs.html

[G] The Digital Playbook: Top 5 strategies for political campaigns

Posted: 27 Jan 2010 11:06 AM PST

Google Public Policy Blog: The Digital Playbook: Top 5 strategies for political campaigns

Posted by Chris Talbot, Elections and Issue Advocacy Team

Editor's note: We're excited to welcome Google's Elections and Issue Advocacy Team to the Public Policy Blog. Since 2007, they've worked with political candidates, consultants and advocates to build online advertising campaigns and fully integrate digital media into political strategy. This post marks the beginning of what we hope will be a regular series from the team. Follow the Digital Playbook label for future posts.

"So many people are living their lives through technology—how can we expect their interaction with politics to be the one exception?" This question, posed by Obama campaign manager David Plouffe, is more relevant now than ever. Hundreds of elections will be conducted this year in Congress, and no campaign should be caught asleep at the wheel.

On Google's Elections and Issue Advocacy team, we work with political campaigns of all stripes to help them use Google's online advertising platforms to build momentum, capture voter interest, steer debate and mobilize supporters. We've worked alongside candidates and issue groups on some of the top issues of the day—from health care reform and the Republican victories in November, to Scott Brown's upset in Massachusetts.

Today's electorate is hungry for political news and is eager to voice opinions online. This requires campaigns to adopt thoughtful and integrated strategies. And so as campaigns gear up for the November midterm elections over the coming months, we'll be sharing our thoughts on how they can take advantage of opportunities to do so. Today we are highlighting our top five strategies for using digital media to win:

1. Use search advertising to build your email list and raise money.
Everyone has seen the "Sponsored Links" on Google search results. These simple text ads, called AdWords, have been compared to direct mail because of their precise targeting and cost-effectiveness—you only pay when someone clicks on your ad. At the start of the campaign and throughout, running ads in your district on the names of your candidate and opponents, and on some of the key issues, can be a great way to capture voter interest. But rather than seeking a donation right away, put the email signup form front and center. It can help you build a bigger list, with greater potential for donations and engagement in the long run.

2. "Blast" the Google Network when you need to make a big splash.
The Google Content Network is made up of over a million websites that run Google ads as a way to make money, through a program we call AdSense. These ads can be simple text links, or video and image ads ("display" ads in industry lingo), tailored to your campaign's personal brand. When you want to dramatically raise the buzz level or increase momentum for your campaign—such as when you announce, or before Election Day—you can use a technique called the Google Network blast to blanket the Internet in your district or state with ads. Just about every election since 2008 has seen one or more Google Network blasts, including in Virginia and Massachusetts, and it's a great way to grab attention at crucial moments.

3. Join social networks to further amass and interact with your list of supporters.
Social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube represent massive gatherings of audiences, so they can't be ignored. Social networks allow supporters to "subscribe" or "follow" your campaign, and they're great for sharing information about your candidate and seeing that information passed on. Keep your free YouTube politician channel fresh with short videos that call out your supporters and show your candidate's human side. And don't hesitate to ask your followers to take action when needed.

4. Use data to inform your campaign decisions.
One of the most exciting aspects of campaigning online is access to real-time feedback, and many of the necessary tools are free. Google Insights for Search tracks searches for your candidate and the competition within your state. Google Analytics highlights what content on your website is catching fire—and what's not. Metrics like click-through rates in Google AdWords tell you which of your campaign messages is working best right now. For an even more data-driven campaign, use Google Website Optimizer to run controlled experiments on aspects of your site to see which variations help you, for example, gather the most donations.

5. Remember: Rapid response happens online, with or without you.
Americans go online when political news breaks (see: Joe Wilson). The chance to be a part of the conversation, shift perceptions, enlist support, and raise funds begins within minutes, and the window usually lasts less than three days. Bob McDonnell's campaign deftly used search advertising to answer questions raised by his controversial thesis. Within hours of the story breaking, Virginians searching for "mcdonnell thesis" saw ads directing them to the campaign's official response.

We'll be posting further insights and best practices throughout the 2010 cycle, so keep an eye on this blog and on the Digital Playbook label. And let us know what you think—we'll be using your comments to help determine what we write about next.
URL: http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2010/01/digital-playbook-top-5-strategies-for.html

[G] Live Tonight on YouTube: The State of the Union

Posted: 27 Jan 2010 11:06 AM PST

Google Public Policy Blog: Live Tonight on YouTube: The State of the Union

Posted by Steve Grove, Head of News and Politics, YouTube

(Cross-posted from the Official YouTube Blog.)

Tonight at 9 p.m. ET we'll be livestreaming the President's State of the Union address on YouTube. As we announced yesterday, not only will you have the opportunity to watch the speech live online, you'll also be able to submit your questions for the President during and after the speech, and the President himself will respond to a collection of your top-voted questions in a live interview at the White House next week.

When the State of the Union address begins at 9 p.m. ET, we'll open a Google Moderator series on CitizenTube (youtube.com/citizentube) that will allow you to submit and vote on questions (in text or on video) for the President. Be ready to submit your questions right after the speech as we'll only keep the platform open for a few days.

How will we know which questions to bring to the President in the interview? You'll tell us by how you voted. After the votes have been cast, we'll assemble a shortlist of the top questions, ensuring that we cover a range of issues, minimize duplicate questions, and include a mix of both video and text submissions. This is your opportunity for an exclusive interview with the President, so be sure to submit great questions and vote for the ones you think should be asked.

If you're submitting your question on video (which we prefer), please be sure to keep it short (20 seconds or less) and use the highest video and audio quality possible so that we can hear you loud and clear.

After the speech, we'll highlight the video of the entire State of the Union address, so those of you who aren't able to see it live can still watch and participate afterwards. We'll also feature Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell's official GOP response to the President's State of the Union, in what promises to be a lively and important discussion of our nation's future in 2010.

See you tonight at 9 p.m. ET on CitizenTube.
URL: http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2010/01/live-tonight-on-youtube-state-of-union.html

[G] Find your favorite locations faster with personalized suggestions

Posted: 27 Jan 2010 11:06 AM PST

Google LatLong: Find your favorite locations faster with personalized suggestions


You probably often search for the same places and categories many times. Sometimes it's the name of your city or your local airport; other times it might your go-to neighborhood restaurant or your favorite cuisine.

Now, if you're signed in with your Google account and have Web History enabled, personalized suggestions can make searching easier and faster by showing you suggestions based on past searches. Just start typing into the search box as you normally would, and relevant suggestions may appear below, letting you quickly complete your search.

For example, if you've looked at cafes on Google Maps with past searches, you might see them as suggestions when typing the word "coffee":

Often it only takes one or two characters to get useful suggestions:

Like personalized suggestions on Google.com, personalized suggestions on Google Maps are based on past searches from your Web History. If you see a personalized suggestion that you don't like, you can get rid of that suggestion and any others by clicking the "Edit" link at the bottom of the suggestions box, which takes you directly to the Web History removals page. You can also sign out of your Google account to stop seeing personalized suggestions.

We hope this new feature saves you time by making it easier to find your favorite locations faster. Sign into Google Maps to try it for yourself!

Posted by Masanori Goto, Takahito Hirano and Ryo Takahashi, Google Maps team
URL: http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2010/01/find-your-favorite-locations-faster.html

[G] Research Areas of Interest: Building scalable, robust cluster applications

Posted: 27 Jan 2010 09:27 AM PST

Official Google Research Blog: Research Areas of Interest: Building scalable, robust cluster applications

Posted by Brad Chen, Technical Lead/Manager

As part of our series on research areas of interest to Google, we discuss some important areas relating to cluster applications in distributed systems. In the last two decades distributed systems have undergone a metamorphosis from academic curiosities to the foundation of an entire industry. Despite these successes, at Google we see distributed systems as a technology in its infancy, with huge gaps in the supporting research (some examples here and here) that represent some of the most important problems in the space. Here are some examples:
  • Resource sharing: Stranded resources like idle memory, CPU, and disk bandwidth represent huge capital and operating expenses that deliver no business value. A cluster system based upon the best published research would be likely to leave 50% or more of hardware resources idle. We encourage researchers to explore hardware/software architectures that facilitate more supple sharing to avoid stranded and underutilized computational resources.
  • Balancing cost, performance, and reliability: Current cluster applications tend to be excessively rigid and brittle, offering only coarse controls to tune the balance between reliability, performance and cost. We envision systems that allow cost to be optimized based on an input specification of performance and reliability requirements. An effective solution might allow service level settings to propagate downward through the layered structure of the system.
  • Self-maintaining systems: The level of expertise required to troubleshoot today's large systems is one of the biggest barriers to more and larger deployments. The published research in this area has at best marginally improved the need for such rare expertise. We envision systems that can adapt automatically to changing conditions, in which redundancy and multiple geographically distributed data centers simplify rather than complicate manageability. This will require breakthroughs in monitoring and data analysis to address the diversity of failure modes and simplify the task of keeping systems healthy.
Research in these areas will improve the current state of cluster applications enabling systems that are less expensive, easier to monitor, and can scale more efficiently.

Previous posts in the series: Mulitmedia
URL: http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2010/01/research-areas-of-interest-building.html
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