Thursday, January 27, 2011

Googland

Googland

[G] Desktop notifications for emails and chat messages

Posted: 26 Jan 2011 04:41 PM PST

Official Gmail Blog: Desktop notifications for emails and chat messages

Posted by Andrew Wilson, Software Engineer

Many of us are guilty of constantly switching back to Gmail to check for new messages. And if you're like me, you've probably missed an important chat message because you weren't looking at your Gmail window when it came in. If you use Google Chrome, these days can be over since we just launched HTML5 desktop notifications which display pop-ups whenever a chat message or new email arrives.


To turn them on, click on the Settings link in the top right corner of Gmail and scroll down to the "Desktop Notifications" section. If you just want to get notified about chat messages, or if you use Priority Inbox and only want to get notifications for important messages, you can customize your settings from there too.


This functionality is currently only available for people using Google Chrome, but we're working to make notifications part of the standard Web platform.
URL: http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2011/01/desktop-notifications-for-emails-and.html

[G] Google Apps for Government: a progress report

Posted: 26 Jan 2011 04:00 PM PST

Official Google Enterprise Blog: Google Apps for Government: a progress report

It's been six months since we released Google Apps for Government. In that time, we've seen a steady stream of customers, both large and small, sign up for this new edition of Google Apps. From the U.S. General Services Administration and the State of Wyoming, to the City of Wooster, Ohio and Rockingham County, North Carolina ─ tens of thousands of government employees in 38 states plus the District of Columbia now benefit from our modern, reliable, and secure email and collaboration applications.

These federal, state, and local government organizations are moving to Google Apps for a number of reasons. By choosing what we call 100% web applications ─ meaning applications that are delivered over the Internet and accessed in a web browser ─ agencies get the latest in Google innovation without having to maintain or upgrade the technology themselves. This means government employees are always equipped with the latest tools to help them do their jobs.

Agencies also benefit from the extensive resources Google dedicates to maintaining data security. Protection of our customers' data is our top priority. In fact, Google Apps continues to be the only web-based email and collaboration applications to achieve FISMA security certification from the U.S. government.

What's more, Google Apps' scalable, reliable infrastructure combined with features like powerful search are helping governments promote transparency, like this public records project recently established by New Mexico's Attorney General using Google Sites. In Larimer County, Colorado, they're using Google Groups to maintain the County Commissioners' public record email. Learn more about Larimer County's use of Google Apps in this video:



On top of all these other benefits, these agencies are saving taxpayers tens of millions of dollars by making the switch to Google Apps. We look forward to expanding those numbers in 2011, and welcoming many more government agencies to a 100% web world.

Posted by Dan Israel, Google Apps for Government Team
URL: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2011/01/google-apps-for-government-progress.html

[G] Share and share a like: we’ve acquired Fflick

Posted: 26 Jan 2011 12:37 PM PST

YouTube Blog: Share and share a like: we've acquired Fflick

Many of the YouTube videos you watch and love are also shared on sites beyond YouTube.com. Our site is built, in part, on social tools like comments, video responses and ratings. In recent years we've worked to integrate these social signals across other popular social platforms. For example, we see more than 400 tweets per minute containing a YouTube link, and over 150 years worth of YouTube video is watched on Facebook every day.

We've always believed that there are great conversations happening all the time off of YouTube.com, and that commentary has the potential to enrich your experience when watching and discovering video on YouTube itself. So today we're excited to announce we've acquired Fflick, a talented team that analyzes social media data to surface great content and the discussions around it.

We were impressed by the technical talent, design instincts and entrepreneurial spirit of the Fflick team. As part of YouTube, the Fflick team will help us build features to connect you with the great videos talked about all over the web, and surface the best of those conversations for you to participate in.

We look forward to rolling out more features that help you enjoy and discover new videos to watch, so stay tuned!

Shiva Rajaraman, Group Product Manager, recently discovered "Stjepan Hauser and Luka Sulic - Smooth Criminal" on Twitter.


URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/youtube/PKJx/~3/1Bb_D9aDEWg/share-and-share-like-weve-acquired.html

[G] Explore Yad Vashem’s Holocaust archives online

Posted: 26 Jan 2011 11:29 AM PST

Official Google Blog: Explore Yad Vashem's Holocaust archives online

(Cross-posted on the Google.org Blog)

In honor of the UN International Holocaust Remembrance Day tomorrow, we're partnering with Yad Vashem, the Jerusalem-based center for remembering the Holocaust's victims and survivors, to bring their collections of photographs and documents to the web.

On a trip to Jerusalem three years ago, Jonathan Rosenberg visited Yad Vashem. Struck by the museum's vast historical record housed within the physical building, he hoped Google could do something powerful to showcase this information. Inspired by the challenge, a few of us, in our "20% time," started working with Yad Vashem and eventually grew our effort into a full project, introducing a YouTube channel in 2008 and now this collections site.

Within the archive you will find more than 130,000 images in full resolution. You can search for them via a custom search engine on Yad Vashem's collections site. And by using experimental optical character recognition (OCR), we've transcribed the text on many images, making them even more discoverable on the web. This means that if you search for the name of a family member who was in the Holocaust, you might find a link to an image on the Yad Vashem site.

To experience the new archive features yourself, try searching for the term [rena weiser], the name of a Jewish refugee. You'll find a link to a visa issued to her by the Consulate of Chile in France. OCR technology made this picture discoverable to those searching for her.

Yad Vashem encourages you to add personal stories about images that have meaning for you in the "share your thoughts" section below each item. Doron Avni, a fellow Googler, has already added a story. He found a photograph of his grandfather taken immediately after his release from a Nazi prison. His grandfather had vowed that if he should survive, he would immediately have his picture taken to preserve the memory of his experience in the Holocaust. He stitched the photo into his coat, an act that later saved his life. After hiding in the forest for a year, Russian soldiers mistook him for a German enemy, but released him once they saw this picture.

Doron's grandfather

The Yad Vashem partnership is part of our larger effort to bring important cultural and historical collections online. We've been involved in similar projects in the past including digitizing major libraries in Europe, collections at the Prado Museum in Madrid, and the LIFE photo archive. We encourage organizations interested in partnering with us in our archiving efforts to enter their information in this form.

We're proud to be launching this significant archive that will allow people to discover images that are part of their heritage, and will aid people worldwide researching the Holocaust.

Posted by Eyal Fink, Software Engineer and Yossi Matias, Head of Israel R&D Center
URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/01/explore-yad-vashems-holocaust-archives.html
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