| [G] Athens, Greece in 3D Posted: 26 Feb 2010 09:32 PM PST No knowledge is ever wasted. In college I took three semesters of Greek civilization because I thought it was nifty (and apparently I also had some plan involving never graduating, but that eventually fell through). Although this makes me more fun at parties than I'd otherwise be, I have had no practical use for the information. Until now! We're pleased to announce the addition of Athens, Greece to the 3D Buildings layer in Google Earth. No trip to virtual Athens would be complete without a visit to the Parthenon. The architecture of the Parthenon is fascinating; all of its lines exhibit subtle curvature (the columns, for example, are slightly convex) in order to avoid the optical illusion of concavity resulting from parallel lines viewed at a distance. While you're on the Acropolis, duck over to the Herodeion Theater, where for almost two thousand years music and theater performances have been held -- check out its schedule during the Athens Festival. With the 2010 Winter Olympics in progress, naturally the site of the revival of the modern Olympics comes to mind. The 1896 Summer Olympics were held here; also, check out the Athens Olympic Stadium and sports complex constructed for the 2004 Summer Olympics. If your tastes run more towards archaeology, there's the Archaeological Museum, where you can see the Antikythera Mechanism among many other artifacts. Count on a geek to be interested in ancient mechanical computers... Enjoy! Posted by Allison Floyd, Software Engineer |
| [G] Using Google Docs as a data mashup platform Posted: 26 Feb 2010 05:43 PM PST Guest post: Tony Hirst is a lecturer in the Department of Communication and Systems at the UK's Open University, co-founder of document discussion platform WriteToReply.org and member of the JISC's DevCSI Developer Focus Group. An aspiring "mashup artist", he blogs regularly at OUseful.info.
For several years, I have been exploring various ways of using online applications to grab and display data from around the web and represent it in a visual form. One fertile source of near-live data, particularly for sports results, is Wikipedia; but how can you get data out of Wikipedia and then display it in a chart, or on a map?  For the 2008 Olympics, I looked at how to create a map-based view of the overall medal tables using Google spreadsheets. With the Olympics coming round again - this time the 2010 Winter Olympics - I thought I'd take the opportunity to update that original mashup with a few tricks I've learned since then. In part as a teaching example, I came up with a recipe that illustrates a lot of functionality many people are unaware of, in a self-contained and hopefully coherent way - how to import data into a spreadsheet, how to write an application script, and how to use a spreadsheet as a database. The aim is to create a heat map of the current state of the medals table for the 2010 Winter Olympics that I can add to iGoogle. The recipe runs as follows: - Take one Winter Olympics Medal table on Wikipedia - Use the importHTML function to import the table into a Google spreadsheet - Filter out the name of each country from the imported table using either a Google Apps script function containing a regular expression or a SPLIT() formula; return the country name to the medal table spreadsheet - Take one ISO country code table, found via a web search, and copy and paste it into a second spreadsheet worksheet. You will use this sheet as a database - Using a =QUERY() formula applied to the ISO country code sheet, find the ISO country code for each country in the medal table. (Note that some extraneous space characters in the SPLIT country name require the trailing space to be recognized) - Arrange the columns, by copying cells if necessary, so that you have a column of ISO country codes followed by number of medals. For example, ISO country code, number of gold medals, ISO country code, number of silver medals, and so on. - Highlight a country code column and a medal tally column that are side by side, select a heatmap widget from the tools menu and configure it as required - Embed your Winter Olympics 2010 Live Medals Table Heatmap in your blog or iGoogle from the Gadget menu.  As the Wikipedia medals table is updated, your medals table heatmap should be too. To preview the spreadsheet, please visit here. A complete recipe is given in the OUseful.info blog post " Creating a Winter Olympics 2010 Medal Map In Google Spreadsheets." Posted by: Tony Hirst, Dept of Communication and Systems, The Open University, UK & OUseful.info |
| [G] Google joins the Cloud Security Alliance Posted: 26 Feb 2010 03:15 PM PST Today we're happy to announce that Google has joined the Cloud Security Alliance, a non-profit organization of experts focused on best practices and education efforts around the security of cloud computing. Cloud computing continues to gain momentum, and organizations such as the CSA are an important part of an ecosystem that works to increase transparency, lower risks, and promote independent research. The CSA's focus on security best practices offers valuable information to organizations looking to move to the cloud, and as a member of the CSA, we look forward to providing ongoing education about cloud computing and its value to the organizations that use it. Google's activities with the CSA include sponsoring the Cloud Security Alliance Summit at RSA Conference 2010 on March 1, 2010 in San Francisco, California, and participating in a CSA panel discussion at SecureCloud 2010, held on March 16 and 17 in Barcelona, Spain. Learn more about Google's cloud computing solutions for organizations. Posted by Adam Swidler, Google Enterprise Marketing team  |
| [G] Navigate your way through user photos in Street View Posted: 26 Feb 2010 03:15 PM PST With Street View in Google Maps, you can explore millions of images taken in places across the world. But the photographs you see are based on what the cameras on top of our cars, driving on public roads, can capture (or, in a few cases, what the cameras on our trike or even perched on a snowmobile can capture). That's one reason why we began integrating user photos into Street View last year. User photos allow you to view locations from entirely new perspectives, whether through the eyes of a talented photographer with a knack for capturing architectural detail, or simply taken from locations we couldn't get to. Today, we're making it easier to navigate through these images in a way that should feel similar to how you're used to exploring within Street View. Let's say you are planning a vacation to Prague and want to get a sense of the area before you go there. You go to Street View and start looking around, finally ending up at the historic plaza where the road ends:  Even though you can't go inside the pedestrian-only plaza with Street View, you can click on the User Photo thumbnail in the upper right corner to enter our photo navigator. That allows you to view a variety of user-submitted photos from Picasa, Panoramio, and Flickr that present a look at some buildings in the plaza:  While navigating through user photos, you'll now notice "orbs" - small silver circles - that hover on and around many user photos. These new click-and-drag controls appear when there are neighboring photos for a location. By clicking or dragging these orbs, you can move to a new nearby photo. Polygons surrounding the zoom orbs show the approximate location of the next image when zooming in:  Clicking the highlighted orb in the middle of the polygon will take you to this picture, which is a closer shot of the buildings covered by the polygon:  Clicking again on the highlighted orb in the user photo above will show you a close-up photo of the details on the building's facade:  You'll find that there are two kinds of orbs: ones that allow you to zoom, and ones along the border of the image that allow you to pan around the location. We wanted to make the experience of navigating user photos more consistent with the smooth Street View experience you know and love, so you can now also drag anywhere in an image to pan. As you click and drag the photo, you'll see the next picture transition into view:  Besides coming from Street View, you can also get to user photos using the Photo Layer in Google Maps (under the 'More' button). For instance, following this this link you can get to a cool view of the plaza from a tower, and then you can easily browse to other photographs also taken from the tower. You should try it out for yourself to really get the feel for this seamless new navigation experience, but here's a short video that will also give you a walk-through of this feature:
Our personal suggestion is that you start at the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. We hope you enjoy this new way to explore through the impressive array of user photos in Street View!  |
| [G] Sharing Our Favorite Custom Segments Posted: 26 Feb 2010 11:32 AM PST Analysts often consider an aggregated view of their visitors when assessing reports in Google Analytics. Every visitor is assumed to be of the same type. But, looking at the information in an aggregated form is not nearly as useful as assessing the data for individual audience segments. Different types of visitors - whether new, returning, organic, paid, and so on - behave very differently and have vastly different expectations. The ability to understand what each of them wants, and how to cater to them, is important towards building a successful online presence.
Google Analytics makes it easy to segment your audience with advanced segments. Google Analytics includes a number of predefined advanced segments (e.g. new visitors, paid search visitors, iphone users) that you can take advantage of immediately. More importantly, however, you can create custom advanced segments tailored to your own specific needs.
* Bounced visits * Visits that dropped out of the funnel * Brand keyword visits * Brand keyword (organic) visits * Brand keyword (paid) visits * Non-brand keyword visits * Non-brand (organic) visits * Non-brand (paid) visits * Visits from Country X * First-time buy visits * Return visit buys
Posted by Vinoaj Vijeyakumaar, Customer Solutions Engineer |
| [G] Refine your searches by location Posted: 26 Feb 2010 09:47 AM PST Location has become an important part of the way we search. If you're a foodie looking for restaurant details, food blogs or the closest farmer's market, location can be vital to helping you find the right information. Starting today, we've added the ability to refine your searches with the "Nearby" tool in the Search Options panel. One of the really helpful things about this tool is that it works geographically — not just with keywords — so you don't have to worry about adding "Minneapolis" to your query and missing webpages that only say "St. Paul" or "Twin Cities." Check it out by doing a search, clicking on "show options" and selecting "Nearby."  You can choose to see results nearby either your default location or a custom location, and you can narrow down to results at the city, region or state level. Try these examples: [ things to do on st. patrick's day] - In the Minneapolis region [ food blogs] - Near you [ farmers market] - Near the city of Ithaca [ dmv] - In the same state as Tucson The new "Nearby" search option is available now on the google.com domain in English. Posted by Jackie Bavaro, Product Manager |
