Sunday, March 20, 2011

Googland

Googland

Googland

[G] Site maintenance on Sunday, March 20

Posted: 19 Mar 2011 11:50 PM PDT

Inside AdSense: Site maintenance on Sunday, March 20

This Sunday, our engineers will be performing routine site maintenance from 3am to 7am PDT. You may be unable to log in to your AdSense account during this time and some features may be temporarily unavailable during the maintenance. We'll continue serving ads to your pages and tracking your clicks, impressions, and earnings as usual. Your ad targeting won't be affected.



We've converted the maintenance start time for a few cities around the world:



London - 10am GMT Sunday

Alexandria - 12pm EET Sunday

Hyderabad - 3:30pm IST Sunday

Jakarta - 5pm WIT Sunday

Perth - 6pm WST Sunday



To learn more about what goes on during these maintenance periods, check out this Inside AdSense post.



Posted by Katrina Kurnit - Inside AdSenseTeam
URL: http://adsense.blogspot.com/2011/03/site-maintenance-on-sunday-march-20.html

[G] Happy St. Patrick's Day

Posted: 19 Mar 2011 11:50 PM PDT

Inside AdSense: Happy St. Patrick's Day

A big St Patty's cheers from everyone on the Dublin AdSense team!



Posted by Nathaniel Kolenberg - Inside AdSense Team
URL: http://adsense.blogspot.com/2011/03/happy-st-patricks-day.html

[G] Making the web faster for all AdSense for content publishers

Posted: 19 Mar 2011 11:50 PM PDT

Inside AdSense: Making the web faster for all AdSense for content publishers

At Google, we spend a lot of time working to make the web faster. Your site is no exception. And today, as part of this vision, we're pleased to announce a major boost in speed for AdSense publishers worldwide.

AdSense ads, like any element on a webpage, usually contribute to the time the page takes to load. Last year, we ran tests that showed AdSense adding 12% on average to the time it took to load various pages from top web sites, so we set out to make this better. We've now developed a new ads delivery technique to improve the speed of websites that display AdSense ads, so that it doesn't slow down your page content. We're very happy to announce that we've eliminated this slowdown for the majority of websites and for a number of browsers, and are seeing pages load as much as a second faster than before.

The best part is, you don't need to make any changes to your code or account — the faster load time has kicked into gear for everyone automatically, so your visitors will experience a noticeable improvement in the speed of your webpages!

At this time, we're deploying globally for users of Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 and will be expanding the list of browsers that benefit from this speed-up soon.

And it doesn't stop here, as we'll keep working to make things even faster. Continue to grow your site and AdSense inventory. We'll be sure to keep up.

Posted by Richard Rabbat - Product Manager
URL: http://adsense.blogspot.com/2011/03/making-web-faster-for-all-adsense-for.html

[G] UpTake.com Raises its revenue to new heights with AdSense

Posted: 19 Mar 2011 11:50 PM PDT

Inside AdSense: UpTake.com Raises its revenue to new heights with AdSense

UpTake uses the new AdSense interface to perform 10 times more analysis in the same amount of time.

UpTake.com is a search engine designed to take the time and guesswork out of the travel decision process by organizing, filtering, and tailoring recommendations on destinations, hotels, restaurants, and attractions from thousands of travel websites to individual consumer needs. UpTake's Director of Online Marketing, Brian Piepgrass, recently shared the site's story and gave us some tips on how using the new interface has helped the UpTake team save time managing their AdSense performance.

Inside AdSense: How did your site come about?
UpTake: We wanted to create a new kind of website for helping travelers find information they need, and take a lot less time doing it. We've become one of the web's largest independent travel research sites, averaging 3 million unique users each month. Today, our vision is rapidly expanding to include family travel, international travel as well as pre-trip planning.

IA: What role does AdSense play in your business?
UpTake: UpTake started using AdSense about two years ago, and the revenue generated from AdSense plays a key role in helping us grow. AdSense has the ability to deliver relevant ads in many more destinations for us, including in dozens of small- and medium-sized markets such as Modesto and Fresno. AdSense also picks up on the semantics of individual travel pages. On romance-specific pages, for instance, AdSense might include ads for hotels with Jacuzzi suites or honeymoon packages. Without AdSense, a lot of pages wouldn't have ads and the pages would not be as relevant. We'd have to have our own sales force go out and sell all these ads."

IA: I understand you've recently started using the new AdSense interface. What do you like about it?
UpTake: The new AdSense interface has been a key time-saver. It used to take a half-hour to pull the kind of report that now we can pull in a matter of 30 seconds. We feel way more in touch with how things are trending. If revenue goes down we can much more easily figure out why and where and then go fix it. One of our favorite features is the ability to take out-of-the-box reports and tailor them specifically to our customers. We can just click on the name of a report and update to today. The system is also smart enough to know we want to see what happened last month, and we can save 20-30 reports.

IA: If you had to sum it up, what would you tell other publishers about the new interface?
Uptake: We can do 10 times more analysis than we ever used to be able to do in the same amount of time.

If you'd like to see how the new AdSense interface can help reduce time spent managing and monitoring your account, sign in to your account and switch to the new interface (you can get there from the link in the upper corner that says "Try the new AdSense interface"). To learn more about the new reporting functionality, visit our Help Center.

Posted by Nate Deoms - Inside AdSense team
URL: http://adsense.blogspot.com/2011/03/uptakecom-raises-its-revenue-to-new.html

[G] More resources for those affected by the Japan earthquake and tsunami

Posted: 19 Mar 2011 10:06 PM PDT

Google Public Policy Blog: More resources for those affected by the Japan earthquake and tsunami

Posted by Nobu Makida, Product Manager, on behalf of the Google Japan and international Crisis Response teams

(Cross-posted from the Official Google.org Blog.)

Like the rest of the world, we've been transfixed by the images and news coming out of the northeastern part of Japan over the past six days. Our hearts go out to those who have been affected by this devastation and we're deeply grateful to those who are working to keep us safe. In the meantime, Googlers in Japan and elsewhere around the world have been working around the clock to try and help improve the flow of information. Here are some of the recent developments we've been working on:

Centralized information
Our Crisis Response page—now in Japanese, English, Chinese and Korean—organizes all of Google's efforts, with links to valuable resources such as emergency hotlines, Person Finder, blackout schedules, maps and links to relief organizations receiving donations. Ninety-three percent of mobile users in Japan don't have top-of-the-line smartphones, so we've recently optimized this Crisis Response page to make it more readable for a wider range of devices. You can also access that version by scanning this QR code:

Person Finder
Within the first two hours of the earthquake, we launched Person Finder so people can enter the names of those they're looking for or have found. You can now also search by entering mobile phone numbers to see if they match any listings. And as with the Crisis Response page, Person Finder has also been optimized for those without smartphones. There are currently more than 250,000 records in the database (including names shared with us by NHK, the national broadcaster in Japan) and we've heard several reports of people who have found their loved ones safe.

To help the many people in shelters get word of their whereabouts to loved ones, we're also asking people in shelters to take photos of the handwritten lists of names of current residents and email them to us. Those photos are automatically uploaded to a public Picasa Web Album. We use scanning technology to help us manually add these names to Person Finder; but it's a big job that can't be done automatically by computers alone, so we welcome volunteers with Japanese language skills who want to help out.

Satellite images
We're also working with our satellite partners GeoEye and DigitalGlobe to provide frequent updates to our imagery of the hardest-hit areas to first responders as well as the general public. You can view this imagery in this Google Earth KML, browse it online through Google Maps or look through our Picasa album of before-and-after images of such places as Minamisanriku and Kesennuma.

Mapping
You can follow developments on the ground by looking at several maps that track changing developments. We've mapped rolling blackouts for areas that are affected by power outages. With data given to us by Honda, you can now see which roads have been recently passable on this map or this user-made Google Earth mashup with new satellite imagery. We're also constantly updating a master map (in Japanese and English) with other data such as epicenter locations and evacuation shelters. And with information from the newspaper Mainichi, we've published a partial list of shelters.

Translation
Use Google Translate for Japanese and 56 other languages. You can paste in any text, or enter the address of any web page for automatic translation. We also just released an early experimental version of Google Translate for Android to help non-Japanese speakers in affected areas.

Donations
Visit our Crisis Response resource page to find opportunities to donate. When you donate to Japan relief efforts through Google Checkout, we absorb processing fees—so 100% of your money goes to the organizations. Google has also donated $250,000 to help the people of Japan recover.

To keep up with the latest developments on our efforts in Japan, follow @googlejapan (tweets are mostly in Japanese) or @earthoutreach (for our mapping and imagery efforts) on Twitter.
URL: http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2011/03/more-resources-for-those-affected-by.html

[G] National Engineers Week 2011: Classroom visits inspire students to pursue CS

Posted: 19 Mar 2011 07:09 PM PDT

Official Google Blog: National Engineers Week 2011: Classroom visits inspire students to pursue CS

We love using our computer science (CS) and engineering skills to solve some of world's most interesting and important problems. We also know that not enough students are pursuing careers in CS and that the U.S. currently has a 3-to-1 gap for computer and mathematical sciences jobs (that's three job openings for every job seeker). So this year, for National Engineers Week, Google engineers across the country visited local middle schools and high schools to talk to more than 5,000 students about their own careers in computer science.

Instead of hosting students at Google for National Engineers Week as we've done in the past, this year we traveled to local communities to talk to the students on their own turf. Engineers Week fell during spring break in many areas, so we spread our school visits throughout the month of March.

As part of this event, I visited Odle Middle School in Bellevue, Washington with four other engineers from our Kirkland office. We split up into 16 different classrooms during the day, and talked about the importance of basic programming skills for all the sciences (it's not just for CS majors!) before moving on to activities related to programming and algorithmic thinking (searching and sorting). It was a lot of fun to interact with the students—and we all left with a greater appreciation for the work that the teachers perform every day.

One of the engineers in our group is Japanese (his friends and family are fortunately all safe) and he gave a particularly resonant example of how CS can have a big impact. After the recent earthquake, geologists used computer models to predict where and when tsunamis were likely to hit coastal regions. This information was used to send warnings and direct resources where they were needed most. The speed and accuracy of these warnings is a credit to the scientists who combined their knowledge of geology with their programming expertise to produce these life-saving programs.

We really care about encouraging students to pursue careers in all the sciences (including computer science). By introducing students to interesting people who work in computer science, we hope we can inspire them to develop their own skills in this area.

Posted by Gary Kacmarcik, Software Engineer
URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/03/national-engineers-week-2011-classroom.html

[G] YouTube Highlights 3/17/2011

Posted: 19 Mar 2011 07:09 PM PDT

Official Google Blog: YouTube Highlights 3/17/2011

This is the latest in our series of YouTube highlights. Every couple of weeks, we bring you regular updates on new product features, interesting programs to watch and tips you can use to grow your audience on YouTube. Just look for the label "YouTube Highlights" and subscribe to the series. – Ed.

Like many people, we've been struck by the devastation in Japan since last week. So in addition to our regular round-up, we've included some information to help you stay informed about events on the ground in Japan.

Footage from Japan on CitizenTube
In the aftermath of the 8.9 magnitude earthquake and ensuing tsunami that hit Japan, we worked with Storyful to make eyewitness footage accessible on CitizenTube, YouTube's News and Politics channel. We also featured some of the most moving videos, like this footage from inside a grocery store during the quake, in a spotlight on the YouTube homepage. You can find more videos on youtube.jp and the livestream of the Tokyo Broadcasting System's news coverage.

Hollywood comes to YouTube with Girl Walks Into A Bar
We've premiered Hollywood's first feature-length film created specifically for the Internet. Presented by Lexus and now playing in the YouTube Screening Room, Girl Walks Into A Bar is a comedy directed by Sebastian Gutiérrez. The film stars (among others) Carla Gugino, Zachary Quinto, Danny DeVito, Rosario Dawson, Josh Hartnett and Emmanuelle Chriqui. Watch it in its entirety or in installments via this playlist.



Brave bloggers and more—reporting from Afghanistan
Steve Grove of YouTube News and Politics was recently part of a Google/YouTube delegation that went to Afghanistan. There, they interviewed people who have lost their jobs due to blogging and discovered a country that is hungry for information. Ninety percent of people listen to the radio every day, and even though only 30% of Afghans have electricity, 60% say they watch television daily (using generators or community viewing locations). Learn more about their trip and the state of media in Afghanistan in this blog post.

Full version of Kevin Bacon film on YouTube
Ivan Cobenk—the self-proclaimed No. 1 Kevin Bacon fan in the world—has posted the full version of his latest movie on YouTube. You might be familiar with "Ivan" from advertisements for the Logitech Revue with Google TV—turns out, they were only using clips of a documentary about Ivan, which you can now watch in full on YouTube.

YouTube @ SXSW 2011
A vast array of musicians and filmmakers are in Austin this week for the SXSW Music, Film and Interactive Festival, and so is YouTube. We showcased several YouTube artists—including Beardyman, Playing for Change, Oh Land and Das Racist—at a party Tuesday night, and other events include artists like The Antlers, The Joy Formidable, Wild Flag, Khaira Arby, The Sway Machinery, tUnE-yArDs, !!!, Ted Leo, Edwyn Collins, James Blake and Colin Stetson. You can find videos of many of these folks on YouTube, and look out for video from some of the events next week.



Apply to the YouTube Creator Institutes's inaugural class
We know there are people out there who have always wanted to express themselves through video, but may be limited by funding, video-making skills or insufficient tools. That's why YouTube is establishing the YouTube Creator Institute—the first initiative from YouTube Next—to help nurture content creators, existing YouTube partners and the next generation of stellar YouTube talent. For details, visit www.youtube.com/creatorinstitute.



This week's trends: Dr. Seuss, politics and more
Here are a few of the YouTube Trends that have gotten the community talking in the past couple of weeks:



World View interview with John Boehner now online
If you missed the YouTube interview with Speaker of the House John Boehner as part of the YouTube World View program, you can now watch it in full. Stay tuned for upcoming interviews.



We'll update you again in a few weeks. In the meantime, head over to the YouTube Blog.

Posted by Serena Satyasai, Marketing Manager, The YouTube Team
URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/03/youtube-highlights-3172011.html
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)