Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Googland

Googland

[G] Google Earth Outreach launches in Canada

Posted: 26 Sep 2011 07:44 PM PDT

Google LatLong: Google Earth Outreach launches in Canada



We are excited to announce the launch of the Google Earth Outreach program in Canada. To celebrate the Google Earth Outreach team is directly engaging the Canadian non-profit and aboriginal communities through a week of exciting workshops and activities in Vancouver, BC. The program has been successful in helping non-profits around the world bring their stories to life through the use of Google's mapping tools. To date, the Google Earth Outreach team has facilitated the use of mapping tools to stop mountaintop removal coal mining in Appalachia, documented Darfur with USHMM, highlighted climate change with Al Gore, and most recently took Street View to the Amazon, just to name a few.

Both as a Canadian and Google Earth Outreach team member, I'm thrilled to bring these exciting opportunities home. Canada currently faces a wide variety of environmental and social issues that can benefit from powerful geographic visualizations.

With the launch of the program in Canada, the team aims to support the use of online mapping tools by public benefit groups seeking to address Canada's most pressing concerns, such as the protection of the Boreal forest and Arctic regions, as well as other humanitarian and cultural issues. We are enabling organizations to quickly and easily get the resources they need to use Google Earth and Google Maps to tell visually compelling stories about their causes to millions of users. Watch the video below for a preview highlighting the work the David Suzuki Foundation is doing to protect Canadian oceans.

David Suzuki Foundation's I Am Fish video is a great example of a Canadian organization using Google Earth to communicate their cause to a large global audience.

Eligible members of the Canadian non-profit community are now able to apply for grants of Google's tools and services including Google Earth Pro and SketchUp Pro. The launch of our Canadian website gives our Canadian users access to a plethora of resources to help them better develop their mapping projects through tutorials, a showcase of great non-profit maps, and an online community of other non-profit Google Earth and Google Maps users.

To jumpstart these mapping initiatives in Canada, the Google Earth Outreach team has partnered with Tides Canada to engage with Canadian non-profits face-to-face with two very popular and fully-booked events. Starting today, the Google Earth Outreach team will be teaching a technical, interactive three-day workshop and facilitating mapping projects among the participating non-profits and aboriginal groups. We'll cap off our activities on Wednesday night with an exciting event for the larger Canadian non-profit community, with a keynote talk by our very special guest Dr. David Suzuki. This event will give attending non-profits a sneak peek at how other groups have used Google Earth and Google Maps to make a powerful impact on their communities.

To hear more about what we're up to in Canada this week, check out our homepage for a different Canadian mapping example every day and follow us on Twitter. We hope these early Canadian partners will inspire you to use Google Earth and Google Maps to help tell your own story!

Maryam Ghofraniha, Google Earth Outreach
URL: http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2011/09/google-earth-outreach-launches-in.html

[G] Ten films from ten filmmakers under twenty-one

Posted: 26 Sep 2011 07:44 PM PDT

YouTube Blog: Ten films from ten filmmakers under twenty-one

We love discovering new talent at YouTube, and today we are presenting 10 short films made by this year's Ghetto Film School fellows, together with the Film Society of Lincoln Center. The culmination of the GFS students' work is debuting on YouTube to coincide with a public screening at the Lincoln Center in New York City.



Over the last 15 months, the group of GFS teenage filmmakers worked with guest instructors like Spike Jonze, David O. Russell, Amy Adams, Jason Reitman, Lee Daniels, and Ed Burns to hone their storytelling skills. Three of these talented filmmakers are leaving Lincoln Center tonight with $1,000 scholarships from Google to continue advancing their artistic pursuits, and here are their works:



"Former Self" from Remery Camacho







"Mama's Boy" from Ralston Ramsey







"Upstaged" from Antonello Velez







You can also watch all 10 of this year's Ghetto Film School shorts on the GSF YouTube channel. Congratulations to all of the GSF fellows for their hard work!



Minjae Ormes, Movies & TV Marketing Manager, recently watched "15 Years of Film Distribution."


URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/youtube/PKJx/~3/qe2ZZEOjtic/ten-films-from-ten-filmmakers-under.html

[G] Recognizing publishers’ standout content in Google News

Posted: 26 Sep 2011 07:44 PM PDT

Google News Blog: Recognizing publishers' standout content in Google News

Posted by David Smydra, Product Specialist and Justin Kosslyn, Product Manager

Every day, news organizations and journalists around the world dedicate significant time and resources toward some of the most critical types of coverage: exceptional original reporting, deep investigative work, scoops and exclusives, and various special projects that quite clearly stand out. Today, during a Google News workshop at the Online News Association conference in Boston, we introduced a new content tag for the US edition that will help us better feature this "standout" content and give even more credit where credit is due.

If you put the tag in the HTML header of one of your articles, Google News may show the article with a 'Featured' label on the Google News homepage and News Search results. The syntax for this new tag is as follows:

<link rel="standout" href="http://www.example.com/scoop_article_2.html" />

You can use the tag to point to your own content or to point to other sources with standout stories. Because the Standout tag belongs in the HTML header of your articles, it will only be seen by automated systems like Google News, not by direct readers of your articles themselves. 

Standout Content tags work best when news publishers recognize not just their own quality content, but also the original journalistic contributions of others when your stories draw from the standout efforts of other publications. Linking out to other sites is well recognized as a best practice on the web, and we believe that citing others' standout content is important for earning trust as you also promote your own standout work. 

At this point, we ask news organizations to use the Standout tag to cite their own content at most seven times in each calendar week. If a site exceeds that limit, it may find that its tags are less recognized, or ignored altogether. A news organization may cite standout stories from other news sources any number of times each week.

To be clear, Standout tags are just one signal among the many signals that algorithmically determine prominence on Google News. We recognize the importance of giving credit where credit is due, and believe this tag can be a step in the right direction -- but it will only succeed if the publisher community helps it succeed. We have experimented in the past with other metatags, and have applied feedback from those efforts to this initiative. As we monitor how the Standout tag is applied, we'll look forward to sharing further observations or updates.

To learn more about how the Standout tag works and how you can implement it on your site, visit our Help Center article.
URL: http://googlenewsblog.blogspot.com/2011/09/recognizing-publishers-standout-content.html

[G] Enhancing the new AdSense interface and retiring the older version

Posted: 26 Sep 2011 09:58 AM PDT

Inside AdSense: Enhancing the new AdSense interface and retiring the older version


Over the past months, we've been working to improve the new AdSense interface and develop features that provide you with additional insights, control, and efficiency. Beyond the visual redesign, some of the new features only available in the new interface include multi-dimension reporting, reporting by country and platform, and search functionality in the Ad review center.



We've also heard your feedback on features from the older interface that you wanted to see in the newer version. In response, we've recently rolled out top-requested features like the ability to create scheduled reports and view channels on the Home tab.



While we've been investing in new features within the new interface, we've also been discussing our plans to move away from the older version. With that in mind, we'll be retiring the old interface in mid-November. We're continuing to focus on building new functionality into the new interface, and are excited about the additional improvements we plan to deliver.



If you haven't already, we recommend switching to the new interface as soon as possible to familiarize yourself with the updated layout and new features. To do so, sign in and click the 'Try the new AdSense interface' link in the upper corner of your account. We understand that this adjustment may take some time, so you'll still be able to toggle back and forth between the two interfaces during the coming weeks. To address a common question we've heard, switching to the new interface won't affect your ad targeting or earnings in any way.







In the meantime, we encourage you to watch our video tutorials, which will guide you through completing common tasks in the new interface. You can also find detailed information in our Help Center for the new interface.



Thanks for all the feedback you've provided about the new interface -- please do keep the suggestions coming. We appreciate your patience during this transition, and look forward to continuing to improve the new AdSense interface to meet your needs.



Posted by Allan Livingston - AdSense Product Manager



URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/tuAm/~3/twgpXlhlD0s/enhancing-new-adsense-interface-and.html

[G] From the desert to the web: bringing the Dead Sea Scrolls online

Posted: 26 Sep 2011 09:58 AM PDT

Official Google Blog: From the desert to the web: bringing the Dead Sea Scrolls online

(Cross-posted on the Nonprofits Blog, the Google.org Blog and the European Public Policy Blog)

It's taken 24 centuries, the work of archaeologists, scholars and historians, and the advent of the Internet to make the Dead Sea Scrolls accessible to anyone in the world. Today, as the new year approaches on the Hebrew calendar, we're celebrating the launch of the Dead Sea Scrolls online; a project of The Israel Museum, Jerusalem powered by Google technology.



Written between the third and first centuries BCE, the Dead Sea Scrolls include the oldest known biblical manuscripts in existence. In 68 BCE, they were hidden in 11 caves in the Judean desert on the shores of the Dead Sea to protect them from the approaching Roman armies. They weren't discovered again until 1947, when a Bedouin shepherd threw a rock in a cave and realized something was inside. Since 1965, the scrolls have been on exhibit at the Shrine of the Book at The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Among other topics, the scrolls offer critical insights into life and religion in ancient Jerusalem, including the birth of Christianity.

Now, anyone around the world can view, read and interact with five digitized Dead Sea Scrolls. The high resolution photographs, taken by Ardon Bar-Hama, are up to 1,200 megapixels, almost 200 times more than the average consumer camera, so viewers can see even the most minute details in the parchment. For example, zoom in on the Temple Scroll to get a feel for the animal skin it's written on—only one-tenth of a millimeter thick.


You can browse the Great Isaiah Scroll, the most well known scroll and the one that can be found in most home bibles, by chapter and verse. You can also click directly on the Hebrew text and get an English translation. While you're there, leave a comment for others to see.


The scroll text is also discoverable via web search. If you search for phrases from the scrolls, a link to that text within the scroll viewers on the Dead Sea Scrolls collections site may surface in your search results. For example, search for [Dead Sea Scrolls "In the day of thy planting thou didst make it to grow"], and you may see a link to Chapter 17:Verse 11 within the Great Isaiah Scroll.

This partnership with The Israel Museum, Jerusalem is part of our larger effort to bring important cultural and historical collections online. We are thrilled to have been able to help this project through hosting on Google Storage and App Engine, helping design the web experience and making it searchable and accessible to the world. We've been involved in similar projects in the past, including building the Yad Vashem Holocaust photo collection and collections at the Prado Museum in Madrid. We encourage organizations interested in partnering with us in our archiving efforts to enter their information in this form. We hope you enjoy visiting the Dead Sea Scrolls collection online, or any of these other projects, and interacting with history at your fingertips.

Posted by Eyal Miller, New Business Development and Eyal Fink, Software Engineer, Israel Research and Development Center
URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/09/from-desert-to-web-bringing-dead-sea.html
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