Thursday, February 11, 2010

Googland

Googland

[G] Curator of the Month: Boing Boing Video

Posted: 10 Feb 2010 10:26 PM PST

YouTube Blog: Curator of the Month: Boing Boing Video

We're pleased to have Xeni Jardin of Boing Boing curate our homepage today. She goes deep into the Boing Boing archives to give you her personal take on the interesting, funny and sometimes out-there videos that thrive on Boing Boing and YouTube. Below is a video she made just for the occasion, as well as some insightful notes about her selections. To view the full playlist, click here.


















"Boing Boing started 20 years ago as a photocopied paper 'zine for "happy mutants," who explore the world with curiosity and wonder. In 2000, Boing Boing morphed into a website, then a blog, and just a few years ago we started producing original video. We've released hundreds of episodes about everything from floating in zero gravity to deep-frying cellphones, featuring personalities from Buzz Aldrin to John Hodgman to David Byrne. Just as Boing Boing's leap from paper to web opened up new possibilities, so did the shift from text-based blogging to video. Some stories and sensations you just can't share in any other medium than video. I cruise YouTube every day for inspiration, light bursts of entertainment, or to follow up on "Oh my God, you have to see this" messages from friends. Here are a few of my favorite-d things.



1) Mardi Gras 1956: Through My Father's Lens (2010)

This episode of Boing Boing Video is a special one, featuring rare and historic film from Mardi Gras in New Orleans, Louisiana, from 1956. Artist Mar Dore stumbled on a box of slides in her family's home in Texas and inside, discovered photographs that her father took of the parades in the era of Mad Men -- that box, like a time capsule she says, opened a door into history. We worked with her to retell that story in video.



2) Peter Serafinowicz: The Boing Boing interview (2010) 

My interview with actor and comedian Peter Serafinowicz. He's starring as Paul McCartney in the Robert Zemeckis remake of the Beatles' Yellow Submarine, his Mac parody ads are the stuff of viral legend, his #PSQA tweets delight mutants throughout the globe, and fans of his BBC show find much to LOL in the likes of Brian Butterfield and the robot talk show host Michael-6.



3) Swell Season (2009)

This Swell Season feature is one of the most visually beautiful episodes we've ever produced of Boing Boing Video. Irish musician Glen Hansard and Czech singer and pianist Markéta Irglová speak with us, and perform an unreleased song for us during their current U.S. tour.



4) Flaming Bacon Lance of Death (2008)

This Boing Boing Video episode documents an experiment from PopSci columnist Theo Gray's book MAD SCIENCE. Using prosciutto and an air hose, Mr. Gray constructs a high performance thermic lance that can slice sheet metal. In this video, you'll also see a purely vegan thermic lance built from one cucumber and several dozen thin vegetable-oil coated breadsticks. If you like this, you may also enjoy "Sculpting in Solid Mercury, with Liquid Nitrogen."



5) Spamasterpiece Theater, with John Hodgman (2007-2009) 

Back in 2008, we did a series of episodes in which John Hodgman did dramatic readings of actual spam emails received by Boing Boing editors. This one's my favorite. These were so much fun to put together. Related: this sneak-attack on Hodgman in his hotel, while he was writing "Areas of My Expertise." And these fake ads for his book which were also a total blast to film with him "Part 1" and "Part 2."



6) DAVID BYRNE, playing the building (2008)

Music legend David Byrne transformed an entire NYC building into a giant musical instrument. We explored that building with him in this Boing Boing TV episode, and discovered some crazy gems of urban archeology together.




7) Elephant-blogging in Benin with Xeni (2008)

It's not every day that we get to travel to remote stretches of African wilderness to tweet about baboons and videoblog elephants. But this episode documents one such day: it's an ambient exploration of the creatures rustling around in a West African wildlife preserve at dawn.



8) Through the eyes of the pueblo (Guatemala) (2008) 

This episode in our BBtv WORLD series was comprised of video shot by K'iche people in a Maya village in the highlands of Guatemala. The world they see around them, through their own eyes and in their own language. Some of what the children shot really surprised me. They caught on right away, faster even than the adults, and quickly taught each other how to record and play back video. Some of them seemed to transform into instant YouTube stars -- new alter-egos showed up out of nowhere. One boy we'd come to know as quiet and well-mannered over the course of many previous visits here shot himself throwing gang signs against the sunlight, like shadow puppets, while he walked a path that leads to a Mayan altar. Another girl who was very shy with us in person recorded video of herself making outrageous silly faces, and speaking in a boisterous, confident voice to her new handheld lens. Two related episodes you might enjoy, also shot in the pueblo in Guatemala: "How to Take a Mayan Sweat Bath" and an episode about a corn grinder the children use.



9) American Furry Part 1 & Part 2 (2008) 

This was one of our first Boing Boing TV episodes, and it's still one of my favorites. So: Furries get no respect. Usually, when you hear about people who dress up like life-sized stuffed animals, it's in the context of an unfriendly internet joke. Brooklyn-based filmmaker Marianne Shaneen spent more than two years following these people around, capturing their lives in and out of their "fursonas." She's working on a documentary film called "AMERICAN FURRY: Life, Liberty and the Fursuit of Happiness," and shared some of their stories with us here. 




10) Floating in Zero Gravity is Fun, Earthlings! (2008)

This was one the most fun I've ever had shooting a Boing Boing Video episode. With me on this Zero-G weightless flight are Intel Chairman Craig Barrett; my friend Sean Bonner from metblogs; and a bunch of science teachers from grade schools and high schools throughout the United States who were on board to conduct microgravity experiments for the kids back home. As you watch, keep an eye out for the floating lego robot, a flying pig, and the barfing guy who is totally barfing for real. What you see in this episode is what it feels like, guys, and it feels awesome.



11) Challenge Accepted, Boing Boing! "For Tax Reasons" (2007)  

Animators Matt Burnett and Ben Levin, aka For Tax Reasons, produced this animated short for Boing Boing with all the elements that make Boing Boing great: Steampunk, LARP armor, papercraft, Commodore 64s, MMORPGs, Final Fantasy, suicide cults, and meditations on bad websites.



12, 13) Man's Game & SHOES  

Liam Kyle Sullivan is a video genius. I have so many favorites, and I subscribe to his video podcast. This is one of his more recent uploads, about the manly manly game of football. Also, a classic: Ohmigod, shoes. Betch.



14) British comic genius Harry Enfield  

I think this is my favorite clip of all time: Women, Know Your Limits.



15) Eric Wareheim's channel  

Tim Heidecker is best known to many as half of the duo behind "Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job," but he's an amazing music video director. Some of his recent work is here, on his YouTube channel -- the Major Lazer stuff is insane. 




16) We love cute baby videos on Boing Boing  

I think this is one of the cutest we've seen yet, in which an award-winning British actor attempts to teach Shakespeare to a toddler.


URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/youtube/PKJx/~3/d4HaXu1ijhM/curator-of-month-boing-boing-video.html

[G] TYPO3's first Google Summer of Code

Posted: 10 Feb 2010 06:39 PM PST

Google Open Source Blog: TYPO3's first Google Summer of Code

TYPO3 mentor Ingo Renner and Google Summer of Code Program Manager Leslie Hawthorn
Photo by Olivier Dobberkau

TYPO3 is an enterprise class Content Management System with a 10 year history, originating in Denmark and enjoying popularity in Europe and gaining ground in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. In March 2009, the TYPO3 community was amazed when our project was accepted into Google Summer of Code™ – TYPO3's first time ever participating in the program. For our first Google Summer of Code, TYPO3 got four student slots assigned. On the one hand this number was very good for a first time mentoring organization but on the other hand it was hard to pick only four students from a lot of promising applications. So as to not show bias between the two major branches, two students were assigned to each development team. We wanted to treat the TYPO3 community and newcomers equally as well so two students were chosen from within the community and two students were newcomers to the project.

Here is an overview of our students' Google Summer of Code projects:

Translation Server

Student: Andriy Kushnarov, Mentor: Ingo Renner

The first project was centered around providing a better infrastructure for translators. TYPO3's backend interface is available in 49 languages but the existing translation server had some limitations which this project aimed to resolve. First up, the most severe limitation was that people wanting to contribute to the translation of the user interface strings would need to obtain a backend login to the translation server, and information on how to do that and the fact that a translation server exists was quite hidden. Other limitations affected the translation process itself by not allowing multiple suggestions for translations or targeting different versions of the CMS where labels might have changed.

Andriy was given the task of revamping the translation server to be open to everyone without needing any additional user account besides the existing typo3.org account. The new translation server should allow everyone to make suggestions for translations and vote for existing suggestions so that chief translators would simply have to accept a well voted suggestion. Technically the translation server was supposed to be based on Extbase to be future proof. This however also resulted in being a challenge because Extbase itself was constantly changing because it was still in development itself. In the end the new translation server is not ready yet but the TYPO3 community learned a lot in terms of what we need to look for when finishing this project. It's a great start but there's still some way to go before the existing translation server can be replaced. Andriy and other TYPO3 community members have already signaled that they're going to keep contributing towards that goal.

Extbase Kickstarter

Student: Ingmar Schlecht, Mentor: Jochen Rau

The second TYPO3 4.x project was about creating a new kickstarter. As with the translation server, a predecessor already existed but something new was needed. In this case it was not because the existing solution was bad, but because the new kickstarter needed to complement the new Extbase MVC framework instead of the aging plugin base classes.

As with the old kickstarter, the aim was to create an extension that itself would allow to create new extensions by selecting and configuring extension components through a graphical user interface in TYPO3 itself. In the end the kickstarter will allow generation of Extbase extensions with frontend plugins, backend modules, database tables with their according models, and services.

The user interface is based on the Yahoo UI WireIt library, which enables domain modeling in a nice interface with boxes representing models and their properties and wires representing the relations between those model objects. The code generating part is completely based on Extbase itself, which means that the code generated actually comes out of Fluid templates, which can easily be adopted for future Extbase versions for example.

Generally, the project is about 70% done towards a first fully working version (yet with a reduced feature set compared to the old kickstarter). In the mean time, a number of people have shown interest in helping to further develop the Extbase kickstarter, and have already joined the project, with some of them even having done first commits already.

Improved FLOW3 Security Framework

Student: Andreas Förthner, Mentor: Robert Lemke

This is the first of two TYPO3 5.0 / FLOW3 projects. Andreas had already worked on FLOW3's security framework before as the main developer which was why he was chosen to carry on this task during the summer. Meanwhile he also got elected as co-leader of the TYPO3 security team.

To make the security framework usable in real life applications various functionalities are required. For example many authentication mechanisms need to be provided to integrate FLOW3 applications flawlessly with existing infrastructures. A general goal is to provide a transparent security framework, which supports the developer as much as possible in writing secure web applications without needing to be security specialist.

At the beginning of the project it was not possible to have information that would survive a page request, so that the first task was to create a mechanism to allow information being persisted for the time of a session, which is essential for user authentication.

After the session persistence scope for information was in place the next task was to create an user account infrastructure so that actual users could be created and use the previously created authentication mechanism to log in to some kind of management backend.

Other than that general improvements to the authentication framework have been made and a lot of unit tests have been created for all new code. All the code created is already merged into the FLOW3 framework.

Versioning for the TYPO3 Content Repository

Student: Tamas Ilsinszki, Mentor: Karsten Dambekalns

The second FLOW3 project also had the second TYPO3 newcomer assigned as student. The project had a challenging and complex goal in that Tom needed to dig into the JSR-283 specification first, then walk through the existing code to produce a plan. The optimistic goal of having versioning working by the end of the summer was not hit, but given the circumstances (e.g. the fact the content repository as a whole is still in rather heavy development) the result was fine.

When the work started in a separate SVN branch there were some small quality issues, but Tom was quick at picking up our coding guidelines and test requirements. He produced code that enables some features crucial to implementing versioning in the content repository, and while they have not yet been merged into the main branch that will be done this spring.



Feel free to download the code if you are interested in learning more about our students' projects.

By Ingo Renner, TYPO3 Core Developer and TYPO3 4.2 Release Manager
URL: http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2010/02/typo3s-first-google-summer-of-code.html

[G] New blog for Google Apps Developers

Posted: 10 Feb 2010 05:33 PM PST

Official Google Enterprise Blog: New blog for Google Apps Developers

Editor's note: Don Dodge is a Google Developer Advocate helping developers build new applications on Google platforms and technologies. Don has been a startup evangelist at Microsoft and is also a veteran of five start-ups including Forte Software, AltaVista, Napster, Bowstreet, and Groove Networks.

You can follow the Developer team's updates on Twitter, too – @googleappsdev – and, while you're at it, stay tuned to updates from the Google enterprise team at @googleatwork.

We've just launched have a new blog, Google Apps Developer Blog, for developers interested in building applications that leverage Google Apps. This blog will cover topics of interest to Google Apps developers building applications on top of Google Apps, integrating with them or utilizing the APIs.

Some of our topics and resources will include:

• code snippets and samples
• reviews of customer integration and deployment cases
• interviews with developers on best practices for developing in Apps
• voting on most-requested developer extensions in Apps
• discussion of OAuth roadmap
• references to OpenID
• smart ways to do logging (and analysis/reporting) in AppEngine, etc.
• storing JSON in AppEngine

Watch this blog for announcements of developer events, DevFests, Google I/O updates, product announcements, links to other Google developer related content and case studies on actual integration, implementation and deployments.

Also, don't forget to register for Google I/O, which is May 19-20, 2010 in San Francisco. Google I/O will feature 80 sessions, more than 3,000 developers, and over 100 demonstrations from developers showcasing their technologies. You'll be able to talk shop with engineers building the next generation of web, mobile, and enterprise applications. Last year's I/O sold out before the start of the conference, so we encourage you to sign up soon.

We want your feedback! Ask questions, suggest topics, and even submit your own stories for possible inclusion in the Google Apps Developer Blog. ContactGADBeditor @ google if you have a story for submission, or story suggestion. Comments will be enabled on this blog, and we hope you'll join the discussion.

Thanks,

Don Dodge
Developer Advocate
Developer Relations Team

Posted by Scott McMullan, Google Apps Partner Lead
URL: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/02/new-blog-for-google-apps-developers.html

[G] A quick note about music blog removals

Posted: 10 Feb 2010 03:39 PM PST

Blogger Buzz: A quick note about music blog removals

Earlier today, word spread about some popular music blogs that were recently removed from Blogger. While we make it a policy to not publicly discuss individual users or their accounts, we wanted to clarify a few things about how and when Blogger enforces its Terms of Service as they relate to our DMCA policy.

Last summer, we updated our enforcement of the DMCA. Our current policy is that when we receive a DMCA complaint, we:
  • Notify the blogger about the complaint by e-mail and on the Blogger dashboard.
  • Reset the offending post to 'draft' status, allowing the blogger to remove the offending content.
  • Send a copy of the complaint to ChillingEffects.org.
When we receive multiple DMCA complaints about the same blog, and have no indication that the offending content is being used in an authorized manner, we will remove the blog.

Inevitably, we occasionally receive DMCA complaints even though the blogger does have the legal right to link to the music in question. Whether this is the result of miscommunication by staff at the record label, or confusion over which MP3s are "official," it happens. If this happens to you, it is imperative that you file a DMCA counter-claim so we know you have the right to the music in question. Otherwise, if we receive multiple DMCA complaints for your blog, this could very well constitute repeat offenses, compelling us to take action.
URL: http://buzz.blogger.com/2010/02/quick-note-about-music-blog-removals.html

[G] Sharing Latin American works from the University of Texas

Posted: 10 Feb 2010 03:39 PM PST

Inside Google Books: Sharing Latin American works from the University of Texas

Posted by Ramsey Allington & Jodi Healy Pritchett, Partner Managers

Since we launched our partnership with the University of Texas at Austin in 2007, we have been working hard to make their unique Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection accessible to readers online. The collection is one of the largest Latin American collections in the world, and is renowned for the scope and breadth of its materials covering Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean island nations, South America, and the Latino presence in the United States.

Today, we are proud to announce the completion of our digitization project with the University of Texas Libraries and the inclusion of over 500,000 unique volumes into the Google Books index.

Books from this collection range from the 18th century to newly-published materials, and represent over 50 languages. While the highest concentration of these texts are in Spanish and Portuguese, there are also books written in many indigenous languages of Central and South America. Whether you're interested in the political journal mentioned in Jorge Luis Borges's Funes el memorioso (Funes the Memorious), a memoir from an American veteran of the Mexican-American war, or even details on the archaeological remains from Lake Chapala, Mexico, you and other readers around the world now have access to a wealth of information from this exceptional collection.

"We've long wanted to share these treasures of Latin America with the world, and Google has helped us to do just that." -- Dennis Dillon, University of Texas

We invite you to explore this collection along with millions of other books on books.google.com.
URL: http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2010/02/sharing-latin-american-works-from.html

[G] Building Maker in the land down under

Posted: 10 Feb 2010 12:13 PM PST

Google LatLong: Building Maker in the land down under

[Cross-posted with the Google SketchUp blog]

We're excited to announce the appearance of a fourth continent in Google Building Maker: Australia. This doesn't mean you have to eat Vegemite, know what a boomerang is or sing a Men a Work song to get started -- just visit Building Maker and select the city where you wish to start modeling.

In addition to Melbourne, Australia, we've also added four others:

  • Amsterdam, The Netherlands
  • Stuttgart, Germany
  • Lisbon, Portugal
  • Cincinnati, USA
The addition of these five locations brings the total number of Building Maker cities to 71.

Posted by Matt Simpson, UX Designer (and Vegemite eater)
URL: http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2010/02/building-maker-in-land-down-under.html

[G] Better contextual matching

Posted: 10 Feb 2010 12:13 PM PST

Inside AdSense: Better contextual matching

As an AdSense partner, you know that Google is continually making improvements to the way we match ads to your content so that users see even more relevant ads, which should help you make more money over time.

A "referral URL" is one of many signals we use to deliver contextually relevant ads on your website. The referral URL contains information about the link a user followed to arrive at your website, whether from a search engine or another site on the Internet. Any webmaster for any site can look at referral URLs to see how users arrive at their site.

Let's see how this works today when a user arrives at your golfing advice website from a search engine results page. Imagine that someone searches on Google for [golf shop atlanta] and clicks on a search result that takes them to your site. The referral URL that is passed to your site may look something like this: http://www.google.com/search?q=golf+shop+atlanta. I'm using Google as an example here, but the same type of information is transmitted if a user arrives at your website from another search engine.

To deliver the most relevant ad, we treat the query words [golf shop atlanta] in the referral URL as if they're part of the content of your webpage. We can then better tailor the ad we deliver on your site. In this example, we could use the additional information from the query words to show an ad for a golf shop in Atlanta rather than for one in Chicago (depending on the other words in the page).

We've recently started to expand the use of the query words in referral URLs to a few hours so we can so we can continue to deliver more relevant ads. The technical way that we're doing this is by associating the relevant query words in the referral URL with the existing advertising cookie on the user's browser. After a short period of time (a few hours) the query words are no longer used for the purposes of matching ads. Of course, users can continue to opt out of our advertising cookie at any time here.

This allows us to deliver more relevant ads on a wider range of AdSense partner sites that a user may browse over the course of a few hours. Let's assume the user in our example leaves your golf website and browses through to a news website that is also an AdSense partner. Since [golf shop atlanta] is in a referral URL that was visited in the past few hours, we may use those query words, along with the content of the news webpage itself, to determine the most relevant ad to show the user on the news website.

Using signals from the referral URL is just one part of our teams' continuing efforts to deliver even better contextually matched ads on your website.

Posted by Rebecca Illowsky - Associate Product Manager
URL: http://adsense.blogspot.com/2010/02/better-contextual-matching.html

[G] Experimenting with new ways to make broadband better, faster, and more available

Posted: 10 Feb 2010 10:47 AM PST

Google Public Policy Blog: Experimenting with new ways to make broadband better, faster, and more available

Posted by Richard Whitt, Washington Telecom and Media Counsel

Given how important broadband capability is to economic growth and job creation, it's no surprise that it's become a major topic of discussion in Washington.

The FCC is currently finalizing its National Broadband Plan to present to Congress next month. Recently we suggested that as part of its Plan, the Commission should build ultra high-speed broadband networks as testbeds in several communities across the country, to help learn how to bring faster and better broadband access to more people. We thought it was important to back up our policy recommendation with concrete action, so now we've decided to build an experimental network of our own.

Today we announced plans to build and test ultra high-speed broadband networks, delivering Internet speeds more than 100 times faster than what's available today to most Americans, over 1 gigabit per second fiber connections. As a first step, we're asking interested local governments to complete a request for information, which will help us determine where to build. Our goal is to experiment with new ways to help make broadband Internet access better, faster, and more widely available.

We're excited to see how consumers, small businesses, anchor institutions, and local governments will take advantage of ultra high-speed access to the Net. In the same way that the transition from dial-up to broadband made possible the emergence of online VoIP and video and countless other applications, we think that ultra high-speed bandwidth will lead to many new innovations – including streaming high-definition video content, remote data storage, distance learning, real-time multimedia collaboration, and others that we simply can't imagine yet.

This project will build on our ongoing efforts to expand and improve Internet access for consumers – from our free municipal Wi-Fi network in Mountain View, CA, to our advocacy in the 700 MHz spectrum auction, to our work to open the TV "white spaces" to unlicensed uses.

In building our broadband testbed, we plan to incorporate the policies we've been advocating for in areas like network neutrality and privacy protection. Even on a small scale, building an experimental network will also raise other important legal and policy issues, from local environmental law to rights-of-way, so we'll be working closely with communities, public officials, and other stakeholders to make sure we get this right.

By several measures, no matter who you ask, the U.S. in far too many places still lags behind many countries in Europe and Asia in terms of broadband speed, availability, and uptake. While it's unlikely that our experiment will be the silver bullet that delivers ultra high-speed Internet access to the rest of America, our engineers hope to learn some important things from this project. We can't wait to see what developers and consumers alike can accomplish with access to 1 gigabit broadband speeds.
URL: http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2010/02/experimenting-with-new-ways-to-make.html

[G] Safety Mode: giving you more control on YouTube

Posted: 10 Feb 2010 10:47 AM PST

Google Public Policy Blog: Safety Mode: giving you more control on YouTube

Posted by Jamie Davidson, Associate Product Manager

(cross-posted from the Official You-Tube Blog)

Diversity of content is one of the great things about YouTube. But we know that some of you want a more controlled experience. That's why we're announcing Safety Mode, an opt-in setting that helps screen out potentially objectionable content that you may prefer not to see or don't want others in your family to stumble across while enjoying YouTube. An example of this type of content might be a newsworthy video that contains graphic violence such as a political protest or war coverage. While no filter is 100% perfect, Safety Mode is another step in our ongoing desire to give you greater control over the content you see on the site.

It's easy to opt in to Safety Mode: Just click on the link at the bottom of any video page. You can even lock your choice on that browser with your YouTube password. To learn more, check out the video below.

And remember, ALL content must still comply with our Community Guidelines. Safety Mode isn't fool proof, but it provides a greater degree of control over your YouTube experience. Safety Mode is rolling out to all users through out the day, watch for the new link at the bottom of any YouTube page.

URL: http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2010/02/safety-mode-giving-you-more-control-on.html

[G] Save safely with new saving buttons

Posted: 10 Feb 2010 09:38 AM PST

Official Google Docs Blog: Save safely with new saving buttons

Many of you have told us you'd like consistent and intuitive features across all the Google Docs editors, so today, we're happy to launch a couple of improvements to the way saving works in all of Google Docs.

Now it's much easier to tell, at a glance, when documents need to be saved, when documents are busy saving, and when documents have been saved into the cloud:
A clickable save button means your document has edits which haven't been saved yet and the timestamp lets you know when it was last saved. You can either wait for autosave to kick in after a few seconds, or you can manually save at any time using the keyboard (ctrl S on PC, cmd S on Macs), save button, or by going to through the file menu.

A disabled button reading "Saving" means your document is currently being saved, and should complete in a second or two.
A disabled button reading "Saved" means all data in this document is now saved, and the timestamp tells you when the last change happened. You can safely exit the application or continue editing the document.

These changes are available today in presentations and documents and will be coming to spreadsheets soon. We'll continue to improve consistency in Google Docs, so if you have suggestions about what we should tackle next, let us know on our forum and ideas page.

Posted by: Garry Boyer, Software Engineer and Joseph Wain, User Experience Designer
URL: http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2010/02/save-safely-with-new-saving-buttons.html

[G] Think big with a gig: Our experimental fiber network

Posted: 10 Feb 2010 09:19 AM PST

Official Google Blog: Think big with a gig: Our experimental fiber network

Imagine sitting in a rural health clinic, streaming three-dimensional medical imaging over the web and discussing a unique condition with a specialist in New York. Or downloading a high-definition, full-length feature film in less than five minutes. Or collaborating with classmates around the world while watching live 3-D video of a university lecture. Universal, ultra high-speed Internet access will make all this and more possible. We've urged the FCC to look at new and creative ways to get there in its National Broadband Plan – and today we're announcing an experiment of our own.

We're planning to build and test ultra high-speed broadband networks in a small number of trial locations across the United States. We'll deliver Internet speeds more than 100 times faster than what most Americans have access to today with 1 gigabit per second, fiber-to-the-home connections. We plan to offer service at a competitive price to at least 50,000 and potentially up to 500,000 people.

Our goal is to experiment with new ways to help make Internet access better and faster for everyone. Here are some specific things that we have in mind:
  • Next generation apps: We want to see what developers and users can do with ultra high-speeds, whether it's creating new bandwidth-intensive "killer apps" and services, or other uses we can't yet imagine.
  • New deployment techniques: We'll test new ways to build fiber networks, and to help inform and support deployments elsewhere, we'll share key lessons learned with the world.
  • Openness and choice: We'll operate an "open access" network, giving users the choice of multiple service providers. And consistent with our past advocacy, we'll manage our network in an open, non-discriminatory and transparent way.
Like our WiFi network in Mountain View, the purpose of this project is to experiment and learn. Network providers are making real progress to expand and improve high-speed Internet access, but there's still more to be done. We don't think we have all the answers – but through our trial, we hope to make a meaningful contribution to the shared goal of delivering faster and better Internet for everyone.

As a first step, today we're putting out a request for information (RFI) to help identify interested communities. We welcome responses from local government, as well as members of the public. If you'd like to respond, visit this page to learn more, or check out our video:



We'll collect responses until March 26, and will announce our target communities later this year. Stay tuned.

Posted by Minnie Ingersoll and James Kelly, Product Managers
URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/think-big-with-gig-our-experimental.html

[G] Safety Mode: giving you more control on YouTube

Posted: 10 Feb 2010 06:31 AM PST

Official Google Blog: Safety Mode: giving you more control on YouTube

(Cross-posted from the YouTube Blog)

Diversity of content is one of the great things about YouTube. But we know that some of you want a more controlled experience. That's why we're announcing Safety Mode, an opt-in setting that helps screen out potentially objectionable content that you may prefer not to see or don't want others in your family to stumble across while enjoying YouTube. An example of this type of content might be a newsworthy video that contains graphic violence such as a political protest or war coverage. While no filter is 100% perfect, Safety Mode is another step in our ongoing desire to give you greater control over the content you see on the site.

It's easy to opt in to Safety Mode: Just click on the link at the bottom of any video page. You can even lock your choice on that browser with your YouTube password. To learn more, check out the video below.

And remember, ALL content must still comply with our Community Guidelines. Safety Mode isn't fool proof, but it provides a greater degree of control over your YouTube experience. Safety Mode is rolling out to all users through out the day, watch for the new link at the bottom of any YouTube page.



Posted by Jamie Davidson, Associate Product Manager
URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/safety-mode-giving-you-more-control-on.html
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