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- [G] And the Nonprofit Video Awards go to...
- [G] This week in search 4/9/10
- [G] YouTube @ The Streamy Awards in Los Angeles
- [G] Interesting times for Video on the Web
- [G] A veritable boatload of read items
- [G] Information about AdSense ads and site speed
- [G] Making the Web Faster
- [G] Take three steps to keyword success
| [G] And the Nonprofit Video Awards go to... Posted: 10 Apr 2010 12:44 AM PDT YouTube Blog: And the Nonprofit Video Awards go to...Today, we are joining with See3 Communications to announce the winners of the Nonprofit Video Awards, a celebration of the best videos from organizations in the YouTube Nonprofit Program over the past year. The four victorious videos are spotlighted on the YouTube homepage today. Over 750 videos were submitted to this year's awards, ranging from quirky narratives about how life on another planet relates to equal rights on Earth to honest testimonials from young dancers. A judging panel of nonprofit and video experts narrowed the field down to sixteen finalists, of which four were selected by YouTube community voting. Over 17,000 votes were cast to determine the winners. Here's a look at all of the finalist videos: The four winners will receive a $2500 grant from the Case Foundation to continue their work, as well as be recognized by their peers at the Nonprofit Technology Conference, the largest gathering of its kind, in Atlanta today. Ramya Raghavan, Nonprofits & Activism, recently watched "Greenwash of the Week"    URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/youtube/PKJx/~3/xefauzeUPcA/and-nonprofit-video-awards-go-to.html      |
| [G] This week in search 4/9/10 Posted: 09 Apr 2010 05:48 PM PDT Official Google Blog: This week in search 4/9/10This is one of a regular series of posts on search experience updates. Look for the label This week in search and subscribe to the series. - Ed.Here's what's happening this week in search: Site speed in web search ranking We made an announcement today about site speed and how it effects our search ranking algorithms. Check out the Webmaster Central blog for more information, including a number of free tools that you can use to increase the speed of your website. Stars in mobile search In early March, we announced stars in search, a feature that helps you mark and rediscover great content on the web. Recently, we extended this functionality to your mobile phone, so that you're able to view that same favorite content on the go. So, if you'd previously starred sites for [cheesecake recipe] when planning a meal at home, searching for [cheesecake recipe] on your phone in the supermarket will help you rediscover the recipe search results that looked enticing — no need to make a grocery list. Stars work both ways, so if you mark a search result while on your phone, you'll be able to see it later when you get to your desktop. This feature is currently supported on Android phones, iPhones/iPods and Palm WebOS devices in the U.S., and you need to be logged into your Google account for it to work. Updates to Google Quick Scroll In December we launched Google Quick Scroll, an extension for Chrome which uses Google's search capabilities to help you jump directly to the portion of the page that's relevant to your search query. Since December, we've brought Quick Scroll to all the languages and domains where Chrome extensions are available. We've also continued to make constant improvements to the tool, and recently we debuted a new version with a few useful updates. Since Quick Scroll is all about getting you to information fast, it's important that it appear quickly. So we've reduced the time it takes for the tool to pop up so you don't have to wait as long. Also, if you've been using Quick Scroll for a while, you know that it doesn't appear for every result — just when Google detects that only a portion of the page is relevant to your query. Now, even if Quick Scroll doesn't appear after you click on a search result, an icon will show up in the address bar. Clicking on the icon will pop up the Quick Scroll box with an explanation of why it didn't trigger on that page. Here's what it looks like:  Help for those who need it A few months ago, we introduced a search feature that displays the toll-free U.S. poison control number when you search for related information. This got us thinking about other ways we can help people get clear information from Google search in times of crisis or distress. So we recently launched a feature that displays the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at the top of the results page for certain search queries in the U.S. We hope this quick access to information helps people in emotional distress who may benefit from calling a suicide prevention hotline. Stay tuned for more updates next week. Posted by Amit Singhal, Google Fellow  URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/04/this-week-in-search-4910.html   |
| [G] YouTube @ The Streamy Awards in Los Angeles Posted: 09 Apr 2010 03:44 PM PDT YouTube Blog: YouTube @ The Streamy Awards in Los AngelesThis Sunday, April 11th, a handful of us here at YouTube will head to Los Angeles for this year's second annual Streamy Awards. The Streamy Awards are presented by the International Academy of Web Television to honor great original Web programming and visionaries in online entertainment.As part of the ceremony, our CEO and co-founder, Chad Hurley, will be presented with the Streamy Visionary Award that recognizes "leaders and innovators who have made a significant contribution to the digital entertainment community." On behalf of the whole team at YouTube, we are honored to be part of this event and have you to thank for it. The greatest honors, however, belong to the creators of content, many of whom we are privileged to have as partners nominated for their own Streamy Awards. NextNewNetworks, Rocketboom, Phil DeFranco, and so many others: YouTube applauds you, your boundless creativity, and your independent drive to move the digital entertainment industry forward. You are all already much more than winners -- you are reinventing the game itself. The costs for filming and sharing original content are lower than ever. Today, anyone can record a video, add complex and sophisticated special effects and share it in 1080p Full HD with translatable subtitles to the world -- all at the fraction of the cost incurred 10 years ago. And as this market matures, the rewards for these original content creators and distributors will increase. In the future, our community will play an even bigger role in inspiring and shaping the world through video. Viewership of original Web content grows larger and stronger every day, and the producers of the content ever more successful, as they continually hone and elevate their digital craft. Never before has talent possessed so much creative power and freedom. And never before has there been such an eager audience awaiting your vision. Thank you and keep creating, uploading and playing. Kevin Yen, Director of Strategic Partnerships, YouTube, recently watched "2010 Streamy Awards Official Nominees Announcement"   URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/youtube/PKJx/~3/KPGA5nam14I/youtube-streamy-awards-in-los-angeles.html   |
| [G] Interesting times for Video on the Web Posted: 09 Apr 2010 02:54 PM PDT Google Open Source Blog: Interesting times for Video on the WebIf I told you that Google had helped fund an ARM code optimised version of the Theora video codec, most people's reaction would be immediately to skip forward to the next blog entry. Audio and video codecs are the classic example of things that no one cares about, until they don't work.Ask most computer users what their preferred video codec is and they'll look at you as if you asked what sort of motor they'd prefer in their washing machine. "We just want it to work!" they say. In this regard, it's exactly the same for content creators and publishers. Every visitor to a website that can't view a video is one set of eyeballs less for a message to get through to. It doesn't matter how clever the advertising is, how much time is spent honing the message or how many clever viral tricks are deployed to attract surfers to the site, the moment the page opens up with a big blank box where the content should be, all that has been in vain. So, publish video so it plays back on everything Nice idea - but far from simple to achieve. At the moment there is no standard way to deploy video on the web. Some sites use Flash, but this restricts them to a viewing audience that have Flash players, instantly excluding most phones. Some use embedded Java players, but this restricts you to a viewing audience running on powerful enough devices to be able to decode video and audio in a virtual machine, excluding anything slower than a laptop. Still others rely on embedded native players (such as Windows Media Player), excluding every platform other than the intended one. Finally some sites just offer videos as links and farm the job out to whatever video playing software the user has (hopefully!) installed on his machine. None of these meets the seamless "it just works" goal - and none of them looks like it will ever do so in future. Like it or not, the profusion of different web access devices out there means that this is only going to get harder and harder. Once it was enough to make sure your video was viewable on both PCs and Macs. Now you have Android, ChromeOS, iPhoneOS, Linux, Maemo, Symbian and umpteen others. Not only that, you have to cope with a range of processing powers, from desktops to laptops, to netbooks, PDAs and phones. The problem is exploding, not shrinking. Fortunately, there is some good news in the form of HTML 5. This new version of HTML (the basic language used to write webpages) introduces a video element. This will allow people to write their websites specifying the appearance of videos in a standard way. How the individual browsers choose to implement the playback is then up to them - whether they handle movies themselves or farm them out to embedded/external players is a decision made by the viewer, not forced back onto the content creator. The even better news is that support for this is already arriving - Firefox, Opera, Chrome, and Safari have already rolled out HTML 5 support and other browsers won't be far behind. So, problem solved? Well, sadly, no. Having a consistent way of publishing video is a great start, but there is still the issue of what format to use. There is no "one size fits all". Are we surfing the site on a phone with a small screen? Or with a netbook? A desktop? Or on our new 150 inch QuadHD 3D LCD TV? Screen size, connection size and processing power all affect the decision here. In the same way that we've seen home video quality improve from VHS to DVD to BluRay, video on the web is going to get better and better. And that's fine: existing web server technologies can tailor the video tags used to the browser/devices in use. What is clear though, is that we need a baseline to work from - one standard format that (if all else fails) everything can fall back to. This doesn't need to be the most complex format, or the most advertised format, or even the format with the most companies involved in its creation. All it needs to do is to be available, everywhere. The codec in the frame for this is Ogg Theora, a spin off of the VP3 codec released into the wild by On2 a couple of years ago. It scores quite well on both the quality and compression fronts, standing up respectably against it's more popular rivals such as MPEG4, while actually being much simpler to decode. The overwhelming feature that makes it stand out from its rivals is the fact it's free. Really free. Not just "free to use in decoders," or "free to use if you agree to this complicated license agreement," but really, honestly, genuinely, 100% free. The specification for the stream and encoder/decoder source is available for public download and can be freely used/modified by anyone. Theora was designed and is maintained with the overriding goal of avoiding patents. No other codec can come even close to claiming to be as patent or royalty free as Theora can, whilst still holding a candle to the alternatives. So, what's missing? Video decode is a pretty CPU intensive task. In order to fulfill the dream of being able to work on every device some painstaking effort is required. The complexity of Theora is considerably less than that of many of its peers; other codecs often require dedicated hardware in devices to help achieve performance targets, but with careful coding Theora can be made to run without this. In fact, on desktop/laptops realtime decode can be managed by an embedded Java player (such as the excellent free Cortado), enabling video playback on browsers still waiting to have video tag support added. For the increasing range of PDAs, phones, netbooks, web tablets and media players out there though, this isn't an option. Rather than having typical power hungry desktop processors in, these devices tend to be built using the much more frugal ARM processors. While these have increased in power in leaps and bounds in recent years, they still can't compare with their larger cousins for raw computational grunt. These ARM based devices represent the single biggest class of devices still needing work for decent Theora playback. Any efficiency savings we can make feed back directly into being able to cope with larger screen sizes or giving longer battery life. This is where Google's grant comes in - by helping fund the development of TheorARM (a free optimised ARM version of Theora), they are helping to hasten the day when video works everywhere on the web, for everyone. That's got to be something to be pleased about. And now you can flick forward to the next blog post. By Robin Watts, Pinknoise Productions Ltd  URL: http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2010/04/interesting-times-for-video-on-web.html   |
| [G] A veritable boatload of read items Posted: 09 Apr 2010 01:22 PM PDT Official Google Reader Blog: A veritable boatload of read itemsWow. Who knew your hunger for points and badges was so insatiable? While ReaderAdvantage™ was a joke, we actually ordered and are distributing Reader badges as part of the joke. Unfortunately, so many people ordered them that we ran through our stockpile a mere 27 minutes after we announced the program. Which got us to thinking... just how much do our users read?
 For comparison, the average Reader user reads about 105 items a day, which isn't bad unless you want to get to the Totally Sweet level of over 314,159 lifetime read items - at that rate it's going to take you over 8 years to get there. And if you're aiming to join the (recently founded) One Million Club, we're talking over 26 years. So, uh, time to start reading? While we were at it, we took a look at what users are starring, sharing, and liking the most. While many of the most-starred items are reference posts, collections of tips, or tutorials from our friends over at Lifehacker, the most starred item lately is actually this hilarious video. That same video also shows up near the top of the latest and most liked or shared items, along with a collection of interesting images, designs, and bizarrely useless machines. It's clear that the crowd is onto something here, so if you're not getting these items in your current feeds, maybe it's time to check out Reader Play or the Recommended items section in Reader. P.S. We're shipping the badges soon. Really.  URL: http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2010/04/veritable-boatload-of-read-items.html   |
| [G] Information about AdSense ads and site speed Posted: 09 Apr 2010 12:44 PM PDT Inside AdSense: Information about AdSense ads and site speedEarlier today, our Websearch team announced that we now consider the speed it takes for a website to load when ranking it in Google search results on google.com. As an AdSense publisher and website owner, you may have questions about this change, so we'd like to take a minute to give you more details.This change is part of our efforts to provide the best possible search experience for our users, as we've found that faster sites create happy users. Our internal studies show that visitors tend to spend less time on sites that respond slowly, and additional recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. For these reasons, we're now taking site speed into account in our search rankings. Site speed is just one of over 200 signals we use to determine search ranking, and because it's a new signal, it doesn't carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. In fact, less than 1% of all search queries on google.com are affected by the site speed signal. We launched this change a few weeks back after rigorous testing. If you haven't seen much change to your site rankings, then this site speed change possibly did not impact your site. In general, a website would have to be particularly slow for its ranking to be affected. We look at the time it takes to load all components of a page that contribute to page speed, including images, rich media, and Javascript/HTML/CSS code. AdSense is built to load ads quickly so there's no need to change your AdSense setup. Even so, we are working to speed up our ads products further. In addition, we also want to give you some suggestions of things you can do on your side, like enabling compression for your site, enabling caching of images, JavaScript, and CSS, and minimizing the size of your JavaScript with Closure Tools. If you'd like to learn more about speeding up your website, or evaluate your site's speed, we encourage you to look at Site Performance in Webmaster Tools and try developer tools such as Page Speed, YSlow, and WebPageTest.org. Please note that at this time, the only way to determine whether your site has been affected is if you've seen a recent change in your search ranking. For more information on this change, please visit http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/using-site-speed-in-web-search-ranking.html. Posted by Richard Rabbat, Product Manager  URL: http://adsense.blogspot.com/2010/04/information-about-adsense-ads-and-site.html   |
| Posted: 09 Apr 2010 12:44 PM PDT Google Analytics Blog: Making the Web FasterToday, our web search team announced how Google search now uses site speed as a factor in ranking. All things being equal, a faster loading site is better than a slower site. With this announcement, we wanted to remind you about Google Analytics asynchronous tracking. The asynchronous tracking code has a faster load time and can improve site speed, especially on rich-media or script-heavy pages. We encourage users to update to the asynchronous snippet to help make your site and the web faster. You can read up on how to implement the asynchronous snippet on our Google Code site. We also have a comprehensive list of migration examples to help you make the switch. Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Google Analytics Team  URL: http://analytics.blogspot.com/2010/04/making-web-faster.html   |
| [G] Take three steps to keyword success Posted: 09 Apr 2010 12:44 PM PDT Inside AdWords: Take three steps to keyword successThe keywords you've chosen in your AdWords account are critical to your advertising success. Potential customers won't be able to find your ad unless you've chosen the right keywords, which could lead you to miss out on valuable sales. Did you find this video useful? Let us know. If you would like even more keyword information visit our AdWords Help Center, which will give you all the tips you need to develop and improve your keywords. Posted by Emily Williams, Inside AdWords crew  URL: http://adwords.blogspot.com/2010/04/take-three-steps-to-keyword-success.html   |
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