Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Googland

Googland

[G] YouTube, Drew Barrymore Select 2010 "HungerBytes" Winners

Posted: 02 Mar 2010 05:34 PM PST

YouTube Blog: YouTube, Drew Barrymore Select 2010 "HungerBytes" Winners

For the second year in a row, the United Nations World Food Program (WFP) asked activists on YouTube to make videos raising awareness about world hunger as part of their "Hungerbytes" competition. And once again, many creative entries came in. Nonprofits looking to run their own YouTube video campaign may want to take note of this effort as it effectively harnessed the imaginative minds of the community to raise awareness of an issue.


A judging panel including Drew Barrymore, actress and WFP Ambassador Against Hunger; Lance Vollard Senior Vice President of Publicity at Warner Brothers Pictures, and Nancy Roman from the WFP selected the finalists. One video used a food fight to show how citizens take meals for granted in the United States; another showed that in the time it takes to cook a microwavable meal (60 seconds) 10 children die of hunger; and this clip used a variety of voices and original music to walk us through our daily food consumption in the U.S. and how it compares to those who starve each day.

But it was filmmakers Carlos Antonio and Michel Sandoval of Mexico who took home the top prize for their film "Dreams," which demonstrates that people in different parts of the world have very different perspectives on hunger. One person's diet is another person's dinner:



Antonio and Sandoval will now travel to Guatemala with WFP to raise awareness for hunger in that country. In addition, 14-year-old John Beck from Rome won the "Under-18" category for his "Dinner Is Served" video, in which a white-gloved waiter dishes up a meal consisting of a compact emergency food ration. The juxtaposition of gourmet restaurant service and an emergency ration is striking:



You can learn more about the United Nations World Food Program, and how you can help, on the WFP's YouTube channel.


Steve Grove, Head of YouTube News & Politics, recently watched "Jerusalem: War in My Land."


URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/youtube/PKJx/~3/ekC1S95cqIY/youtube-drew-barrymore-select-2010.html

[G] No-tags Google Analytics Integration: Pion Lite from Atomic Labs

Posted: 02 Mar 2010 12:54 PM PST

Google Analytics Blog: No-tags Google Analytics Integration: Pion Lite from Atomic Labs

We occasionally see a particularly inspiring integration with Google Analytics. Our latest source of inspiration comes from a product called Pion Lite by Atomic Labs. Pion Lite collects your traffic data and populates your Google Analytics reports -- without using Google Analytics page tags. Atomic Labs offers Pion Lite free to Google Analytics users.


Pion Lite passively "listens" to all of the network traffic between web servers and visitors. This approach reduces the overhead traditionally required to capture visitor data with page tags, and also provides complete data about site visitors including those using mobile devices and RSS readers.

Pion collects analytics information within a website's data center and removes all personally identifiable information (such as visitor cookies and IP addresses) before sending the data to Google Analytics. This new, privacy-friendly approach to web analytics data capture gives marketers the information they need without the risk of privacy violations.


Pion 3.0 includes a new setup wizard that makes it easy for new users to get up and running with Google Analytics by just answering a few questions. Pion talks directly with Google Analytics to populate your reports, offers customizable data capture, real-time data processing and integration, and supports advanced Google Analytics features such as custom variables and events, ecommerce and campaign tracking.

If you're attending SMX on Wednesday, you'll have a chance to learn about Pion Lite in person. Atomic Labs CEO Mike Dickey and Phil Mui, Google Analytics Senior Product Manager, will be giving back-to-back presentations at the SMX Expo starting at 1:20pm on Wednesday, March 3rd.


Posted by Nick Mihailovski, Google Analytics Team
URL: http://analytics.blogspot.com/2010/03/no-tags-google-analytics-integration.html

[G] Searching for gold during the Games

Posted: 02 Mar 2010 11:52 AM PST

Official Google Blog: Searching for gold during the Games

During the past two weeks, athletes from around the world competed at the Games in Vancouver. While these thousands strove for gold, millions around the world searched for 2010 Winter Olympics, 밴쿠버 동계올림픽 (Korean for "Vancouver Winter Olympics"), and Juegos Olimpicos de Invierno 2010 (Spanish for "2010 Olympic Winter Games") using Google search. Now that the medals have been handed out, we thought we'd take a moment to share how some people from around the world searched for information about the Games.

Norway
Norway won 23 medals, including nine gold, and became the first region to win 300 medals at winter events and to win 100 golds. The timeline shows approximate Olympics-related queries from Norway. Although interest was slow to start, it built and repeatedly peaked as Norwegians won in cross-country skiing events: individual (February 17), team (February 22), and men's 50km (February 28); and biathlon events: individual (February 18) and men's team (February 26).

(Click on any image to enlarge)

Japan
Japanese athletes won silver and bronze medals in speed skating and figure skating — correspondingly, interest peaked on the days when those competitions took place. And although they ended the Games ranked eighth in the world, チーム青森 ("Team Aomori") generated a lot of queries for カーリング ("curling"), カーリング チーム青森 ("Curling Team Aomori"), and team member 本橋麻里 (Mari Motohashi). Queries also peaked when snowboarder Kazuhiro Kokubo, who had previously caused controversy by wearing sloppy attire, competed in the men's halfpipe event. The timeline also clearly shows the effect of television, with each day's first peak representing the actual time of the event and the second, larger peak occurring in the evening.


Korea
Korean athletes won medals in speed skating, short-track speed skating — and one gold medal in Ladies' Figure Skating by Kim Yu-Na. Queries such as 김연아 세계신기록 ("Yu world record"), 김연아 007 ("Yu 007"), and just plain 김연아 ("Kim Yu-Na") increased an order of magnitude as Kim won the Ladies' Short Program on February 23 and ended the Ladies' Free Skating on February 25 with a new world record score of 228.56.


United States
Americans were interested in both the opening ceremonies and the unfortunate death of Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili. The men's free skating program on February 18, when Evan Lysacek won gold, drew many more searchers than the women's skating program on February 25, in which there was no American medalist. Interest in the unexpectedly good performance of the USA men's hockey team versus Canada (February 21) and against Switzerland (February 24) was exceeded by the exciting Canada v. USA final (February 28), which ended with a Canadian win in overtime. (Incidentally, the success of the men's hockey team also led searchers to look for information about a historic USA win. Searches for Miracle on Ice peaked the day after the USA team beat the Canadian team in the preliminary rounds.) Much of the television coverage in the U.S. was tape-delayed; queries arrived during the events but typically peaked during the evening TV broadcasts.


Canada
Canada was not only the host — it also won the most gold medals of any region during any such games. Like the U.S., interest began with the opening ceremonies, and was dominated by men's hockey queries, causing a huge spike during the gold-medal game on February 28 as well as smaller spikes for games against USA (February 21) and Russia (February 24). The final women's hockey game against the U.S. on February 25 also caused a small bump in searches.



Canada took home the most gold medals, while the U.S. won the most medals overall. But where did Games-related searches dominate? To find out, we looked at the regions which had the highest percentage of Games-related searches out of all queries. Perhaps not surprisingly, Canadians were more than twice as likely to search for "Vancouver 2010", "medal count," or their favorite athletes as their southern neighbors, which were the second most likely to make Games-related queries. And although the Netherlands was not a leader in the medals count, its citizens' Games-related query proportion was the third highest in the world.

And finally, the Games wouldn't be the same without the stars — the athletes. The most searched-for individual gold medal-winning athletes were:
1. Shaun White (U.S. men's halfpipe)
2. 김연아 (Kim Yu-Na; Korea ladies' figure skating)
3. Lindsey Vonn (U.S. ladies' downhill Alpine skiing)
4. Sven Kramer (Netherlands men's 5000m speed skating)
5. Evan Lysacek (U.S. men's figure skating)

We hope you had a great time watching — and searching for info about — the Games. We'll see you again in a few years!

Posted by Jeffrey D. Oldham, Software Engineer
URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/searching-for-gold-during-games.html

[G] Click-to-Call Phone Numbers in Mobile Ads for National Advertisers

Posted: 02 Mar 2010 10:39 AM PST

Official Google Mobile Blog: Click-to-Call Phone Numbers in Mobile Ads for National Advertisers

Recently we announced a new feature that allows advertisers to add a clickable phone number to their mobile ads, making it easy for customers to connect with the local business they're looking for directly by phone. This week, we're expanding click-to-call phone numbers for national advertisers. Now advertisers can add a national phone number to the last line of ad text for any existing or new campaigns, making it easy for customers to connect with the business by phone directly from the ad, regardless of their location.

This can be especially helpful when you're trying to connect with the business call center rather than a specific business location. After searching for a travel services, for example, you might want to call to discuss trip planning with an agent. Or after searching for car insurance, you might want to call for a quote. Now, if you're using an iPhone, Android device, or Palm Pre, you can just click the phone number to call the business without needing to navigate to a new page.
If you're an advertiser and would like to learn more about how to add a clickable phone number to your mobile ads, check out this post on the Inside AdWords blog for more details.

Posted by Surojit Chatterjee, Product Manager, Mobile Ads
URL: http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/2010/03/click-to-call-phone-numbers-in-mobile.html

[G] Go Mobile! Series: Enhanced click-to-call phone numbers

Posted: 02 Mar 2010 09:54 AM PST

Inside AdWords: Go Mobile! Series: Enhanced click-to-call phone numbers

Recently, we announced new click-to-call phone numbers for local ads that appear on mobile devices with full internet browsers, like iPhone, Android or Palm Pre. This week, we're bringing the same click-to-call benefits to national advertisers through phone extensions. Phone extensions allow you to add a phone number that will be displayed whenever your ad is triggered, regardless of the user's location. Your number will appear as the last line of any ad text within existing or new campaigns. This enables customers to connect with your business by phone directly from the ad and can be especially useful if you have a call center to handle customer inquiries.


To display your national business phone number on mobile devices with full browsers, follow these two steps:

1. Set up phone extensions and add your business phone number. Customers will be able to click to call your business directly from your ad.


2. Ensure that you've chosen to show your ads on iPhones and other mobile devices with full Internet browsers in your campaign settings.


You can review how many calls you've received for each keyword, ad group, or campaign from the Campaigns page within AdWords.

On the Campaigns, Ad groups or Keywords tabs on the Campaigns page, click the 'Segment' button above the statistics table.

Select 'Click Type' to see which clicks resulted in visits to your website or phone calls.

To learn more, check out the AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Katrina Kurnit, Inside AdWords crew
URL: http://adwords.blogspot.com/2010/03/go-mobile-series-enhanced-click-to-call.html

[G] Senate hearing on global Internet freedom

Posted: 02 Mar 2010 09:24 AM PST

Google Public Policy Blog: Senate hearing on global Internet freedom

Posted by Bob Boorstin, Director, Public Policy

This morning, senators will take up an issue of critical importance to Google and Internet users all around the world: how best to fight censorship and advance global online free expression. More than 40 countries now censor online content in one way or another, forcing Google to confront challenges every day on an issue that is very important to us and our users.

At a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Human Rights and the Law, led by Senator Dick Durbin, our Deputy General Counsel Nicole Wong will outline the challenges Google faces and make recommendations for government action. She will also address the role that the Global Network Initiative, which Google helped found, is playing in giving a voice to those that are silenced.

The hearing will be live cast at 10 am ET and Nicole's testimony is available here.
URL: http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2010/03/senate-hearing-on-global-internet.html
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