Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Googland

Googland


[G] PM POV: AdWords Reports Launch

Posted: 26 Oct 2010 05:02 AM PDT

Google Analytics Blog: PM POV: AdWords Reports Launch

This is the first of a new series of intermittent posts by Google Analytics Product Managers - the people leading the prioritization and production of features and improvements to GA. We wanted to add a little color to what you're seeing and let you know the how and why behind the process we take. In this first post, Jayanth Mysore tells what happened behind the scenes during the prioritization and development of the AdWords reports. Enjoy.

In June, we launched the new AdWords reports in Google Analytics. Today, I thought I'd share some of what goes on behind the scenes -- how we went from an idea to the actual reports that you see in Google Analytics today.

How did it begin? Many of you use Google Analytics expertly, and in innovative ways. You told us all the ways in which the product was lacking...in emails, blog posts, tweets, and in Q&A sessions and face-to-face meetings at conferences like SES and eMetrics. We've found that expert and innovative users are often the best at articulating what's going to be most valuable to all users. So, we listen carefully to feedback, and one area we heard -- and learned -- a lot about was AdWords reporting.

For example, many of you told us that you were writing intelligent filters that would allow you to see actual search queries. Some of you were looking for ways to understand the effectiveness of campaigns on the content network. And many of you were struggling with how to make day parting decisions. We heard all this and said "We need to help here, here, here and there. Let's go build!"

Next, we built a version of the reports and asked a few hundred of you to try it. This version did even more than what you see in the reports today because we wanted to test some promising, but challenging ideas. We can't always put all the features we'd like into a product update. Sometimes we have to leave something out because it runs too slowly and making it run faster requires extensive design work. Other features simply won't work for all Analytics users. Still, we wanted to test everything and determine which aspects of this we could offer everyone and how soon.

Our test users are terrific -- very innovative, highly trustworthy and they never hesitate to point out things that are too slow or too hard to use. We worked closely with these users and studied the usage data to figure out what we could and couldn't do. It became amply clear that providing a list of AdWords dimensions to segment the reports was very very valuable. We wanted our users to have this right away. Other features were also valuable, but would require time to fully develop. In the end, we decided that we'd rather give users something significantly better immediately, and keep working to offer more down the road.

Finally, we rolled out the new reports gradually over weeks. We take user experience very seriously, no matter where in the world you are. During these initial weeks, we monitored usage, latency, bugs filed, tweets, e-mail feedback. The other thing we did was to translate the product so that all of you, across the world, could use the new reports.

Finally, when we were ready, we hit the go button, flipped a bit to expose the feature, blogged about it....and you all saw the new AdWords reports in the Traffic Sources section.

Work doesn't stop after the release. We immediately started working on some of those hard problems I talked about and we've already made some progress. In August, we made the new AdWords dimensions available in Analytics Intelligence.

We continue to work on these reports, so stay tuned. And, thanks for your active usage of the product. You all make our day!


Posted by Jayanth Mysore, Product Manager, Google Analytics Team
URL: http://analytics.blogspot.com/2010/10/pm-pov-adwords-reports-launch.html

[G] ‘Tis the season for placement targeting: Display advertising

Posted: 25 Oct 2010 11:23 PM PDT

Inside AdSense: 'Tis the season for placement targeting: Display advertising


Over the past several weeks, we've given you tips about how to take advantage of placement targeting as advertiser spend increases during the holiday season. In this final post of our "'Tis the season for placement targeting" series, we'll take a step back to talk about a popular topic that's generated buzz around Google and the online advertising industry: display advertising. This is especially relevant to this series, as the goal of placement targeting is to offer premium space to advertisers so they can effectively reach their audiences. And these days, when you're talking about premium space, you're usually talking about space that's devoted to display ads.

Advertising on Google started out with four lines of text. In addition to the original text ads, you're probably familiar with the image, video, and rich media ads we now offer. Did you know that, other than ads shown with search results, more than 40 percent of the ads that we show are now non-text ads? More and more advertisers are creating display ad campaigns as an interactive and engaging means to reach users. To take full advantage of these ads, refer to our last post on enabling ad units to show text and image ads.

Display advertising is a big area of focus for Google. We believe that the new technology we're developing to make display advertising work better will help to grow the display advertising pie for all publishers, by orders of magnitude. We shouldn't be asking how publishers can make another 5 or 10 percent out of display advertising in the next few years. We should be looking at how the industry can double or triple in size.

To learn more about Google's position on display advertising and the steps we're taking to push the thinking to the next level, read our recent blog post on the Official Google Blog.

This wraps up our "'Tis the Season for placement targeting" series. We hope you learned a bit more about the impact of placement targeting and how you can take advantage of this feature to earn more from your online content

Posted by Meredith Blackwell - Inside AdSense team
URL: http://adsense.blogspot.com/2010/10/tis-season-for-placement-targeting_25.html

[G] Multnomah County Goes Google

Posted: 25 Oct 2010 07:32 PM PDT

Official Google Enterprise Blog: Multnomah County Goes Google

Editor's note: Today's guest blogger is Sherry Swackhamer, CIO of Multnomah County, Oregon. Multnomah County is located in northwest Oregon; it's county seat is the city of Portland. More than 4,500 Multnomah County employees provide over 715,000 residents a wide range of health and human services, public safety services and other government services.

This morning, Multnomah County completed the transition of most county employees to Google Apps for Government. In Oregon, local governments like Multnomah County have faced difficult budget circumstances and diminishing resources for many years, while experiencing growing demand for services. In order to effectively continue providing needed services in our community, it's critical that we seek ways to become ever more innovative and efficient.

Switching to Google Apps plays an important role in achieving these goals. This new environment increases government transparency by allowing employees complete access to email and information on demand, vastly improving employee efficiency and collaboration while saving taxpayers approximately $100,000 each year in licensing and related costs and up to $500,000 in staff time and staff costs.

This transition was informed by a careful analysis to evaluate our technology needs and options. Multnomah County considered two cloud-based options for replacing our old system for email, calendar and contacts. We selected Google Apps due to its low cost, ease of use, and innovative capabilities that will allow county employees to be more collaborative and productive in their jobs.

With 250 times the email storage of our prior email system, Google Apps will save employees considerable time previously spent deleting or archiving old emails, while allowing each department to follow specified email retention policies. The web based technology means employees can access their information from any internet-connected device.

New collaborative tools like searchable instant messaging and real-time collaboration in word processing and spreadsheets provide Multnomah employees with useful and innovative tools to help them do their jobs. In fact, the independent analysis found that the document sharing capabilities of Google Docs meet the needs of the vast majority of county employees.

Currently, every county employee is licensed to use the complete suite of Microsoft Office applications, but many staff members only use a small portion of those features. Google Apps provides Multnomah County with equivalent capabilities for no additional cost. Many employees will be able able to do their jobs without those costly software packages in the future.

As an added benefit, all county employees now have a shorter email address. That makes our email addresses easier to remember and much simpler to share with members of the public and those with whom we conduct business.

We began testing Google Apps with a small group of IT users and expanded that to a pilot of 150 and later 500 county employees. These employees came from a variety of county agencies and allowed us to identify and work through any issues with the migration. Our workforce has shown a high degree of interest and engagement in the project and have demonstrated that we're ready to learn, explore and collaborate. We've gone Google.

by Sherry Swackhamer, CIO, Multnomah County

Posted by Dan Israel, Google Apps for Government Team
URL: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/10/multnomah-county-goes-google.html

[G] Live Webcast: How Imagination is Changing the Workplace and Saving Money with Google Apps

Posted: 25 Oct 2010 07:32 PM PDT

Official Google Enterprise Blog: Live Webcast: How Imagination is Changing the Workplace and Saving Money with Google Apps

Back in July we invited Matt Ballantine, CIO of Imagination to tell us about his experiences of switching to Google Apps. At that time, the Imagination team had just moved 600 employees and 2TB of legacy email data to Google Apps, a major milestone in Matt's broader vision to transform the role of IT within Imagination.

We are really excited to welcome Matt back for this interactive webinar, where he will provide a detailed insight into the project, describe how it has evolved over time and highlight some key learnings for IT leaders who are considering switching to cloud services.

Matt says "This has been far and away the most successful IT project I have been involved in, mainly because I did not have to think about the IT. Google takes care of that, freeing up my team to develop a real understanding of how these technologies allow Imagination to become more collaborative, more global and more creative. This is where my IT team is now adding huge value."

To hear more about Imagination's switch to Google Apps attend this live webcast, 27 Oct 2010, 15.00 BST (GMT +1). Register today.



Posted by Matt Charman, Google Apps team
URL: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/10/live-webcast-how-imagination-is.html

[G] Your stats, right away

Posted: 25 Oct 2010 06:50 PM PDT

AdSense for Feeds and FeedBurner Blog: Your stats, right away

Do you hate delays? Do you think being told to "Please wait…" by websites, cash machines, call centers, and the doughnut stand drive-thru guy in the year 2010 is a sure sign modern living isn't quite meeting our collective expectations as a planet?

Good news! Today, we will be rolling out a new, experimental interface for Google FeedBurner. The real story is what's new under the hood, however: the new interface provides real time stats for clicks, views, and podcast downloads, which means you can start seeing what content is drawing traffic from feed readers, Twitter, and other syndicated sources as it happens.


Additionally, if you use the FeedBurner Socialize service, and your platform uses PubSubHubbub or you ping us when you post, you can for the first time get stats on how much traffic your feed items are receiving from Twitter, as well as feed reading platforms like Google Reader in one place. Again, all within seconds of posting your content. Ping? Pong! Yep. That fast.

Your subscriber and reach numbers are still calculated based on a whole day's worth of requests, and are based on the traffic you received yesterday and before; but your item stats reflect the traffic you are receiving right now.

You can access the new interface by visiting http://feedburner.google.com/gfb/ or logging into feedburner.google.com and then clicking on the "Try out the NEW (beta) version!" link at the top.

The best way to see these real time features is to publish a new post and then switch to the "Last two hours" view to begin seeing updates.


To access feed management or previous analytics functionality, you can continue using the original interface at feedburner.google.com.

In the new interface, we are focusing on two things: our new real-time stats presentation and getting messages about and issues with your feed posted to the top-level dashboard, so that you can better diagnose any issues that may prevent your feed from being delivered in real time. If you have any comments or questions, look for the "Send Feedback" link at the top of the page to tell us what you think.

Posted by Dan Rodney, FeedBurner Team
URL: http://adsenseforfeeds.blogspot.com/2010/10/your-stats-right-away.html

[G] Exploring Computational Thinking

Posted: 25 Oct 2010 02:10 PM PDT

Official Google Research Blog: Exploring Computational Thinking

Posted by Elaine Kao, Education Program Manager

Over the past year, a group of California-credentialed teachers along with our own Google engineers came together to discuss and explore ideas about how to incorporate computational thinking into the K-12 curriculum to enhance student learning and build this critical 21st century skill in everyone.

What exactly is computational thinking? Well, that would depend on who you ask as there are several existing resources on the web that may define this term slightly differently. We define computational thinking (CT) as a set of skills that software engineers use to write the programs that underlay all of the computer applications you use every day. Specific CT techniques include:
  • Problem decomposition: the ability to break down a problem into sub-problems
  • Pattern recognition: the ability to notice similarities, differences, properties, or trends in data
  • Pattern generalization: the ability to extract out unnecessary details and generalize those that are necessary in order to define a concept or idea in general terms
  • Algorithm design: the ability to build a repeatable, step-by-step process to solve a particular problem
Given the increasing prevalence of technology in our day-to-day lives and in most careers outside of computer science, we believe that it is important to raise this base level of understanding in everyone.

To this end, we'd like to introduce you to a new resource: Exploring Computational Thinking. Similar to some of our other initiatives in education, including CS4HS and Google Code University, this program is committed to providing educators with access to our curriculum models, resources, and communities to help them learn more about CT, discuss it as a strategy for teaching and understanding core curriculum, as well as easily incorporate CT into their own curriculum, whether it be in math, science, language, history or beyond. The materials developed by the team reflect both the teachers' expertise in pedagogy and K-12 curriculum as well as our engineers' problem-solving techniques that are critical to our industry.

Prior to launching this program, we reached out to several educators and classrooms and had them try our materials. Here's some of the feedback we received:
  • CT as a strategy for teaching and student learning works well with many subjects, and can easily be incorporated to support the existing K-12 curriculum
  • Our models help to call out the specific CT techniques and provide more structure around the topics taught by educators, many of who were already unknowingly applying CT in their classrooms
  • Including programming exercises in the classroom can significantly enrich a lesson by both challenging the advanced students and motivating the students who have fallen behind
  • Our examples provide educators with a means of re-teaching topics that students have struggled with in the past, without simply going through the same lesson that frustrated them before
To learn more about our program or access CT curriculum materials and other resources, visit us at www.google.com/edu/ect.
URL: http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2010/10/exploring-computational-thinking.html

[G] Your stats, right away

Posted: 25 Oct 2010 01:00 PM PDT

AdSense for Feeds and FeedBurner Blog: Your stats, right away

Do you hate delays? Do you think being told to "Please wait…" by websites, cash machines, call centers, and the doughnut stand drive-thru guy in the year 2010 is a sure sign modern living isn't quite meeting our collective expectations as a planet?



Good news! Today, we will be rolling out a new, experimental interface for Google FeedBurner. The real story is what's new under the hood, however: the new interface provides real time stats for clicks, views, and podcast downloads, which means you can start seeing what content is drawing traffic from feed readers, Twitter, and other syndicated sources as it happens.





Additionally, if you use the FeedBurner Socialize service, and your platform uses PubSubHubbub or you ping us when you post, you can for the first time get stats on how much traffic your feed items are receiving from Twitter, as well as feed reading platforms like Google Reader in one place. Again, all within seconds of posting your content. Ping? Pong! Yep. That fast.



Your subscriber and reach numbers are still calculated based on a whole day's worth of requests, and are based on the traffic you received yesterday and before; but your item stats reflect the traffic you are receiving right now.



You can access the new interface by visiting http://feedburner.google.com/gfb/ or logging into feedburner.google.com and then clicking on the "Try out the NEW (beta) version!" link at the top.



The best way to see these real time features is to publish a new post and then switch to the "Last two hours" view to begin seeing updates.





To access feed management or previous analytics functionality, you can continue using the original interface at feedburner.google.com.



In the new interface, we are focusing on two things: our new real-time stats presentation and getting messages about and issues with your feed posted to the top-level dashboard, so that you can better diagnose any issues that may prevent your feed from being delivered in real time. If you have any comments or questions, look for the "Send Feedback" link at the top of the page to tell us what you think.



Posted by Dan Rodney, FeedBurner Team


URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/BurnThisRSS2/~3/wNoamtTREZ4/your-stats-right-away.html

[G] Tricking and treating with Disney this Halloween

Posted: 25 Oct 2010 10:34 AM PDT

YouTube Blog: Tricking and treating with Disney this Halloween

We'd like to welcome today's guest blogger, Annjanette Isorda, Senior Manager of New Media Business Development at the Walt Disney Company. Annjanette works with Disney Consumer Products, a division that extends the Disney brand to merchandise ranging from apparel and toys to books, magazines and even food. Today, she shares her experiences on how they use their Disney Living YouTube Channel to engage fans and communicate about holiday promotions.

The Disney Living channel was born in March 2009 when we realized that YouTube could provide a great way to answer the growing demand for entertainment and information on Disney products – everything from bridal fashion shows featuring gowns inspired by our Disney Princesses to sneak peeks of our latest toys and tech gadgets. We've found that YouTube has broad appeal and, unlike virtually any other channel, YouTube videos allow us to tell stories that we couldn't convey in print or other online media. We create original content that you can't see anywhere else for YouTube fans and the active blogger community.

As we go into the holidays, YouTube has emerged as one of the best ways for us to engage directly with a wide audience. For example, Halloween is an especially fun holiday for us at Disney. To make this year's festivities unique, we created fun activities for the family on YouTube. We produced a "Disney Store 30 Costumes in 30 Seconds" YouTube Halloween Sweepstakes and have also set up a Halloween Dress Rehearsal Party for families to show off outfits in person (and receive free prizes!). The Disney Living channel helps us easily bridge the online and offline worlds.

Additionally, Disney Living is tricking and treating YouTubers to three scary movie spoofs, inspired by the flicks The Shining, The Ring, & The Sixth Sense. These Ghoulish Greetings are short e-greetings made to delight and surprise our audience. We hope fans will have a laugh and be inspired to share them with family and friends and participate in our Halloween contest with a video response of your own. We'll choose five lucky winners after Halloween to win a $100 gift card to the Disney Store. We will continue to produce content like this for our YouTube channel because it is a powerful platform that allows us to create value for our subscribers and audience.



Finally, our last advice to anyone else considering building a presence on YouTube: connect it to your other social marketing efforts. We always connect our content to our Facebook fan page and share it in our tweets from Twitter. We've promoted the videos to the YouTube community as well to help connect more people to some of our most popular content. We have found using a mix of social media and paid advertising helps us reach both core Disney fans and newcomers.

We're genuinely excited about engaging with our fans on YouTube and carrying on the Disney tradition of inspirational storytelling. Stay tuned — there will be more YouTube fun as we move into this year's holiday season!

Jacques Hebert, Google AdWords Account Manager, recently watched "Disney Halloween Spoof: Ghoulish Greeting #3."


URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/youtube/PKJx/~3/yrEMILkwZho/tricking-and-treating-with-disney-this.html

[G] AFI Fest 2010

Posted: 25 Oct 2010 10:04 AM PDT

YouTube Blog: AFI Fest 2010

The American Film Institute's AFI Fest, featuring a world class selection of short and feature films, is only a week away. In this guest blog post, AFI's Bob Jennings and Lane Kneedler discuss the festival and the treasure trove of short films they find online.

Any festival can tell you programming short films is very hard. At AFI Fest, we only have space for about 30 shorts and over 3,000 submissions to choose from. However, this year we didn't limit ourselves to just submissions. We also travelled to other festivals and looked increasingly to the web as a source for content to curate and showcase.

It's an incredible experience to find short films and show them in a theater with an audience. Hearing a group of strangers laughing and crying together in the dark is an almost spiritual experience. We are also delighted to showcase as many films from our Official Selections on YouTube as possible. We want to help short filmmakers find audiences in any way we can. YouTube has proven that there are huge audiences out there for this content and it's our pleasure to help highlight as much as we can, which is why we're happy to be the guest editors of today's homepage.


AFI is also proud to be a YouTube Partner. Our channel has nearly 700 videos that include never-before-seen interviews with Master Filmmakers like Alfred Hitchcock and Martin Scorsese, clips from our annual AFI Life Achievement Award and more. Recently, we started posting a new video every Monday through Friday and the response has been astounding as we're approaching nearly 2 million views a month.

While AFI is proud to host a prestigious film festival and continues to build a robust YouTube Channel, we are a non-profit organization that relies on a national membership program to help us preserve the history of film, educate the next generation of filmmakers and honor the artists. If you're interested in joining, check out AFI.com/members.

AFI FEST 2010 presented by Audi takes place November 4-11 in Hollywood, California. For more info visit www.afi.com/afifest.

Bob Jennings, Manager, AFI Social Media & Lane Kneedler, Associate Director, AFI Fest just watched Marcel the Shell With Shoes On


URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/youtube/PKJx/~3/NNE6k7hP4EE/afi-fest-2010.html

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