Sunday, December 5, 2010

Googland

Googland

[G] Call credits for military families this holiday season

Posted: 04 Dec 2010 10:32 AM PST

Google Public Policy Blog: Call credits for military families this holiday season

Posted by Michael Bolognino, Product Marketing Manager
(Cross-posted from the Google Voice Blog)

Keeping in touch with family during the holiday season can be challenging for anyone, but it's especially difficult for military families with loved ones serving around the country or overseas.

Gmail's built in video chat and free calls to the U.S. and Canada can help keep friends and family in contact regardless of how far apart they may be. To make staying in touch this holiday season even easier for military families, we're offering a $10 calling credit to help them reach their loved ones serving abroad.

These international call credits can be used to make calls with Google Voice or from right inside Gmail, and will provide families with roughly 30 minutes of call time to Afghanistan, 60 minutes to Iraq, or hundreds of minutes to many countries in Europe and around the world.

To make this possible, we've partnered with Blue Star Families and Sesame Street, two organizations dedicated to supporting service members and their families.


Photo by Sesame Workshop, 2010

To be eligible for $10 calling credits, military family members must:
  1. Be a member of either Blue Star Families or Sesame Street Family Connections — registration is free for all military families
  2. Provide their Gmail address
  3. Enable calling in Gmail and accept the terms of service OR have an existing Google Voice account
  4. Complete this registration form by December 22, 2010

We recognize the sacrifices military family members make when loved ones serve abroad, and we're proud to help make it a little bit easier for families to stay connected over the holidays.

At this time, Google Voice and calling in Gmail are available in the U.S. only.
URL: http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2010/12/call-credits-for-military-families-this.html

[G] Making Copyright Work Better Online

Posted: 04 Dec 2010 10:32 AM PST

Google Public Policy Blog: Making Copyright Work Better Online

Posted by Kent Walker, General Counsel

There are more than 1 trillion unique URLs on the web and more than 35 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute. It's some pretty fantastic stuff - content that makes us think, laugh, and learn new things. Services we couldn't have imagined ten years ago - iTunes, Netflix, YouTube, and many others - help us access this content and let traditional and emerging creators profit from and share their work with the world.

But along with this new wave of creators come some bad apples who use the Internet to infringe copyright. As the web has grown, we have seen a growing number of issues relating to infringing content. We respond expeditiously to requests to remove such content from our services, and have been improving our procedures over time. But as the web grows, and the number of requests grows with it, we are working to develop new ways to better address the underlying problem.

That's why today we're announcing four changes that we'll be implementing over the next several months:
  • We'll act on reliable copyright takedown requests within 24 hours. We will build tools to improve the submission process to make it easier for rightsholders to submit DMCA takedown requests for Google products (starting with Blogger and web Search). And for copyright owners who use the tools responsibly, we'll reduce our average response time to 24 hours or less. At the same time, we'll improve our "counter-notice" tools for those who believe their content was wrongly removed and enable public searching of takedown requests.
  • We will prevent terms that are closely associated with piracy from appearing in Autocomplete. While it's hard to know for sure when search terms are being used to find infringing content, we'll do our best to prevent Autocomplete from displaying the terms most frequently used for that purpose.
  • We will improve our AdSense anti-piracy review. We have always prohibited the use of our AdSense program on web pages that provide infringing materials. Building on our existing DMCA takedown procedures, we will be working with rightsholders to identify, and, when appropriate, expel violators from the AdSense program.
  • We will experiment to make authorised preview content more readily accessible in search results. Not surprisingly, we're big fans of making authorised content more accessible on the Internet. Most users want to access legitimate content and are interested in sites that make that content available to them (even if only on a preview basis). We'll be looking at ways to make this content easier to index and find.
These changes build on our continuing efforts, such as Content ID, to give rightsholders choice and control over the use of their content, and we look forward to further refining and improving our processes in ways that help both rightsholders and users.
URL: http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2010/12/making-copyright-work-better-online.html

[G] Choose the next community member to go on the homepage

Posted: 04 Dec 2010 08:00 AM PST

YouTube Blog: Choose the next community member to go on the homepage

On the Rise is a program where you determine which YouTube upstart appears on the homepage. emilynoel83, a morning news anchor who creates makeup tutorials, won the inaugural edition and was featured in November, promoted socially, and covered in the blogosphere. Emily doubled the number of subscribers she acquired in the month (compared to the month before), and her catalog also saw a boost in views.

It was so much fun that we want to do it again, taking four more channels that've recently seen good subscriber growth but still have less than 100,000 subscribers and putting them up to your discerning tastes. Please vote for your favorite channel in the poll in the top right corner of this blog by Tuesday, December 7, and we'll put the lucky winner on the homepage on Saturday, December 11. Here are the nominees, in alphabetical order:

corycotton is home to a group of trick-shot basketball entertainers whose swooshes and dunks will leave you floored:



JustJesse197 is a showcase for the amazing tricks and utter cuteness of a five-year-old shortie Jack Russell Terrier named Jesse:



ShowMeTheCurry is Hetal Jannu and Anuja Balasubramanian, who offer easy-to-follow lessons in Indian cooking:



tjw1963 features Teresa teaching the world to crochet one stitch at a time:











Now go vote!

Mia Quagliarello, Community Manager, recently watched "Candlelight - The Maccabeats."


URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/youtube/PKJx/~3/OhgRz7BK7fI/choose-next-community-member-to-go-on.html
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