Friday, October 7, 2011

Googland

Googland

[G] Steve Jobs, 1955 - 2011

Posted: 07 Oct 2011 12:40 AM PDT

Official Google Mac Blog: Steve Jobs, 1955 - 2011


We at Google were shocked and saddened yesterday to hear about the death of Steve Jobs. Steve's work has inspired and delighted many of us for decades, and we will miss him.

Please read Larry and Sergey's thoughts about Steve Jobs.

URL: http://googlemac.blogspot.com/2011/10/steve-jobs-1955-2011.html

[G] Telemundo Comes to YouTube

Posted: 06 Oct 2011 08:50 PM PDT

YouTube Blog: Telemundo Comes to YouTube

Are you a fan of La Casa de al Lado (In English: The House Next Door), Flor Salvaje (In English: Wild Flower) and I Love Jenni. Good news: clips from some of your favorite Telemundo shows are coming to YouTube in the U.S. starting today on the new Telemundo YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/telemundo. Weekly novela summaries will be uploaded daily to the channel and will include content with English subtitles. There'll also be a new mun2 channel www.youtube.com/mun2 with original bilingual videos in English and Spanish.



Telemundo's programming will begin appearing this week, so be sure to check-in to their channel www.youtube.com/telemundo twice a week.


Juanjo Duran, Strategic Partner Manager, recently watched, "Killer Tacos with Robert Rodriguez"


URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/youtube/PKJx/~3/AP0g45b7bws/telemundo-comes-to-youtube.html

[G] Map Maker Graduation Part V: from Afghanistan to Antarctica

Posted: 06 Oct 2011 08:50 PM PDT

Google LatLong: Map Maker Graduation Part V: from Afghanistan to Antarctica

(Cross posted to the Official Google Blog)

Google Map Maker enables local experts to create maps and share their local knowledge with the world. These citizen cartographers help keep maps of their areas accurate and up to date. They add missing roads and new businesses—and even map areas that have little to no data yet on Google Maps.

Today, our latest crop of countries, territories and an entire continent are graduating from Map Maker—meaning the user-generated maps of these countries will now appear on Google Maps: Afghanistan, Antarctica, Ecuador, Georgia, Guatemala, Heard Island and McDonald Islands, Honduras, Iraq, Norfolk Island, Saint Pierre & Miquelon and Saudi Arabia.

Here are some before and after pictures that highlight how much detail Map Maker users have added to Google Maps for these regions (as well as some time-lapse videos):


Baghdad, Iraq


Kabul, Afghanistan


Tbilisi, Georgia

Each region has an impressive mapping story—from the Georgian Government's initiative to improve their country's map, to the group led by six students in Herat, Afghanistan who mapped their entire city in a matter of weeks.

Thank you to the Google Map Maker contributors who create better maps for these regions and others; their ongoing efforts can be seen at Map Maker Pulse. We encourage all local mappers to continue improving the maps of these areas and the more than 180 other regions of the world on Google Map Maker.

Posted by Anjali Joshi, Google Maps, Director of Product Management
URL: http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2011/10/map-maker-graduation-part-v-from.html

[G] Afghans Empowering Afghanistan through maps using Google Map Maker

Posted: 06 Oct 2011 08:50 PM PDT

Google LatLong: Afghans Empowering Afghanistan through maps using Google Map Maker

Striking for its charm, bustle and impressive historic architectural treasures, the silk road city of Herat, Afghanistan has until today, been nearly 'invisible' online in digital maps. Luckily, Herat is home to Herat University, which is filled with talented, entrepreneurial students some of whom have worked together to literally put their town "on the (digital) map."

In response to their city's absence on Google Maps and Google Earth, a team of students launched a grassroots volunteer effort, named the Afghan Map Makers, to map their country using Google Map Maker, with the vision of reintroducing Afghanistan to its people and the world through its maps. As a result of their efforts, we are proud to re-launch the map of Afghanistan, with a far more detailed Herat --- along with 11 more regions, on Google Maps.

The Afghan Map Maker Team hard at work, mapping Herat, Afghanistan

Led by recent computer science graduates Hasen and Sadeq, along with other volunteers from their tech start-up, Microcis IT Services CO, the Afghan Map Makers realized how mapping could improve Afghanistan's economic, community and civic development. Starting from old paper maps and basic satellite imagery, the Afghan Map Makers employed unmatched strategy and diligence to map Herat in only a matter of weeks.

Shortly thereafter a new tech start-up incubator, the Herat Information Technology Incubator Program for Herat University entrepreneurs, was founded with the help of Department of Defense, giving five more start-up companies the resources to volunteer spare time to the mapping initiative. The group divided Herat's map into six equal parts, and each set of volunteers was responsible for mapping a particular section of the city.

Herat, Afghanistan: The "before and after" efforts of volunteer mappers from Microsis, Afghan Citadel Software Company, Afghan Cybersoft, Asia Cyber Tech, Herat4soo.com and Taktech.


Represented by Hasen Poreya, the Afghan Map Makers presented their project during a June visit to the Mountain View and New York Google offices. According to Hasen, the group encountered many roadblocks from the very beginning; everything from connectivity issues to old satellite imagery and an initial lack of volunteers. Since then, they've laid out the map of Herat and several volunteers have already mapped most of Kabul, Afghanistan. You can watch a mapping time lapse of Herat here and Kabul here.

This story is far more significant than the mapping of a city. It is a story of young people in a community coming together, taking ownership of their future and serving their country in a truly entrepreneurial and meaningful way. Congratulations to Hasen, Sadeq, the Herat start-up teams and thousands of Map Makers in more than 180 other countries, helping to map the world.

Posted by Megan Smith, Vice President, New Business Development
URL: http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2011/10/afghans-empowering-afghanistan-through.html

[G] Google Earth Outreach and Canadian non-profits connect over mapping tools

Posted: 06 Oct 2011 08:50 PM PDT

Google LatLong: Google Earth Outreach and Canadian non-profits connect over mapping tools


Last week Google Earth Outreach launched our program in Canada, offering support to non-profits and aboriginal communities that wish to leverage Google's mapping tools to improve understanding of critical issues facing Canada today. Our team spent the week in Vancouver inspiring and empowering these groups to spread their message through geographic visualizations.

Google Earth Outreach team member Tanya Birch works with a participant on Fusion Tables.

We kicked off the week with a 3-day workshop co-hosted with our partner Tides Canada. With their help, we were able to gather developers, communications and technology professionals from over 50 organizations to be trained on Google Earth, Google Maps and Google Fusion Tables. We met folks from a diverse set of organizations, such as Ecotrust Canada, Social Alterations, Living Oceans Society, and Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami.

These groups came into the workshop with varying levels of familiarity with Google's geo tools. While some participants leveraged the time to master the basics, others focused on advanced coding using the Maps APIs. Non-profits developed and worked on their project ideas with Earth Outreach staff on hand for guidance and technical help. Our team was amazed by some of the projects that came out of these sessions, including a Google Fusion Table map of Inuit communities and a Google Earth tour of the path of a migrating whooping crane.


Whooping crane migration path visualized in Google Earth by Matt Hanneman of Global Forest Watch Canada.

Our activities in Vancouver culminated in an event on Wednesday for the wider Vancouver non-profit community. We were honored to have David Suzuki, an influential Canadian scientist, author, broadcaster and co-founder of the David Suzuki Foundation, on hand to share his thoughts on how philanthropy, public engagement and technology can advance the reach, scope and impact of Canadian civil society. Our team's founder, Rebecca Moore, also took the stage to demonstrate how the rich variety of environmental and social issues in Canada can benefit from geographic visualizations as powerful tools for environmental advocacy and social justice. Afterwards, our team got to interact with the community face-to-face at demo stations featuring Google Earth, Google Maps, Google Fusion Tables, Open Data Kit as well as already developed Canadian mapping projects.

Inspiring examples of Canadian organizations already using mapping tools to communicate their work.

We are very excited about the next steps for these non-profits who have started their mapping initiatives and we can't wait to see what comes next! For Canadian organizations looking to learn more, please take a look at our new Canadian website in English or French.

Posted by Raleigh Seamster, Program Manager, Google Earth Outreach
URL: http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2011/10/google-earth-outreach-and-canadian-non.html

[G] Map Maker Graduation Part V: from Afghanistan to Antarctica

Posted: 06 Oct 2011 03:16 PM PDT

Official Google Blog: Map Maker Graduation Part V: from Afghanistan to Antarctica

(Cross-posted on the Lat Long blog)

Google Map Maker enables local experts to create maps and share their local knowledge with the world. These citizen cartographers help keep maps of their areas accurate and up to date. They add missing roads and new businesses—and even map areas that have little to no data yet on Google Maps.

Today, our latest crop of countries, territories and an entire continent are graduating from Map Maker—meaning the user-generated maps of these countries will now appear on Google Maps: Afghanistan, Antarctica, Ecuador, Georgia, Guatemala, Heard Island and McDonald Islands, Honduras, Iraq, Norfolk Island, Saint Pierre & Miquelon and Saudi Arabia.

Here are some before and after pictures that highlight how much detail Map Maker users have added to Google Maps for these regions (as well as some time-lapse videos):

Baghdad, Iraq

Kabul, Afghanistan

Tbilisi, Georgia

Each region has an impressive mapping story—from the Georgian Government's initiative to improve their country's map, to the group led by six students in Herat, Afghanistan who mapped their entire city in a matter of weeks.

Thank you to the Google Map Maker contributors who create better maps for these regions and others; their ongoing efforts can be seen at Map Maker Pulse. We encourage all local mappers to continue improving the maps of these areas and the more than 180 other regions of the world on Google Map Maker.

Posted by Anjali Joshi, Director of Product Management, Google Maps
URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/10/map-maker-graduation-part-v-from.html

[G] Unleash the QualityBots

Posted: 06 Oct 2011 03:16 PM PDT

Google Open Source Blog: Unleash the QualityBots

Are you a website developer that wants to know if Chrome updates will break your website before they reach the stable release channel? Have you ever wished there was an easy way to compare how your website appears in all channels of Chrome? Now you can!

QualityBots is a new open source tool for web developers created by the Web Testing team at Google. It's a comparison tool that examines web pages across different Chrome channels using pixel-based DOM analysis. As new versions of Chrome are pushed, QualityBots serves as an early warning system for breakages. Additionally, it helps developers quickly and easily understand how their pages appear across Chrome channels.


QualityBots is built on top of Google AppEngine for the frontend and Amazon EC2 for the backend workers that crawl the web pages. Using QualityBots requires an Amazon EC2 account to run the virtual machines that will crawl public web pages with different versions of Chrome. The tool provides a web frontend where users can log on and request URLs that they want to crawl, see the results from the latest run on a dashboard, and drill down to get detailed information about what elements on the page are causing the trouble.

Developers and testers can use these results to identify sites that need attention due to a high amount of change and to highlight the pages that can be safely ignored when they render identically across Chrome channels. This saves time and the need for tedious compatibility testing of sites when nothing has changed.



We hope that interested website developers will take a deeper look and even join the project at the QualityBots project page. Feedback is more than welcome at qualitybots-discuss@googlegroups.com.

By Richard Bustamante, Google QualityBots Team


URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/GoogleOpenSourceBlog/~3/4y6g6DkOUXQ/unleash-qualitybots.html

[G] Two more reporting enhancements to help you deep dive into your AdSense earnings

Posted: 06 Oct 2011 03:16 PM PDT

Inside AdSense: Two more reporting enhancements to help you deep dive into your AdSense earnings


In the last weeks, we've continued to iterate and improve the features in the Performance reports tab to give you as many tools as possible to understand your earnings. We are especially focusing on improvements that allow you to understand the cause of revenue fluctuations and where your earnings are coming from. With these goals in mind, we're excited to announce two new developments for all publishers:


Event history



You can now see small flags on your reporting graphs, which note actions you've taken that might have influenced your earnings. For instance, if you blocked a category of ads from your pages last Tuesday and then created a new leaderboard the next day, you'll see these two actions marked in your reports as well as details of the actions shown under the graph. Try the feature out by visiting the Performance reports tab, and clicking the 'Events' button just below the date range selector.







Tablets earnings included in the Platform report



Back in July we launched the Platforms report so you could analyze your earnings based on the type of device your visitors used to access your site. Now, you'll be able to view your earnings from users on tablet devices. These earnings were previously included under high-end mobile earnings but given the market trends towards mobile and tablet devices, we wanted to provide you with additional granularity in this report. If you notice a significant amount of your earnings coming from mobile and/or tablet devices, we recommend optimizing your site and ads for mobile users.







Leave us a comment and let us know what you think about these new features!



Posted by Louis Collard - AdSense Engineering



URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/tuAm/~3/366A2eErDow/two-more-reporting-enhancements-to-help.html

[G] Bringing German history online

Posted: 06 Oct 2011 03:16 PM PDT

YouTube Blog: Bringing German history online

Cross posted from European Public Policy Blog.



It's a new way of writing history. Today, we are joining with Germany's public TV broadcaster, ZDF, German weekly magazine "Stern", and other German marquee brands such as Bertelsmann, Robert Bosch, Daimler and Gruner+Jahr, to launch "Memory of the Nation" ("Gedächtnis der Nation") - a video platform dedicated to presenting the "collective memories" of German people throughout the 20th and the beginning of the 21st Century.







The project takes inspiration from the Shoah Foundation in Jerusalem, which records the experiences of Holocaust survivors. Similarly, "Memory of the Nation" provides more than a traditional historical archive. Thousands of prominent and ordinary people are being interviewed, and their personal accounts turn abstract history into real, emotional experiences.











This project is special, not just because of its content, but also because it is universally accessible via the Internet. Viewers would be unable to peruse their personal histories via traditional media in their own time, and on their own terms. Here, viewers choose what they want to watch - and are able to add personal details and observations to the stories.



Both young and old are invited to contribute. A ZDF team criss-crossing Germany in a "century bus" already has recorded more than 8000 hours of video interviews with eyewitnesses of historical events. Viewers are encouraged to upload their own videos through a second YouTube channel "Our History" ("Unsere Geschichte"). This interactivity ensures the platform will become a living resource for disseminating and learning about German history.











Google Germany and YouTube are excited to support this unique project. We have created a special interface for this channel that allows users to view the videos on a timeline, as well as search by topic, eyewitness or personality as well as specific keywords.



A non-profit group called "The Memory of the Nation" is spearheading the project. Germany's Federal President Christian Wulff is patron. The Board of Trustees includes personalities such as former Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher and literary critic icon Marcel Reich-Ranicki. We're delighted that so many prominent players in German society have come together and embraced the Internet to increase understanding of German history and culture.



Kay Oberbeck, Director of Communications and Public Affairs Germany, Austria, Switzerland, recently watched "Gedächtnis der Nation Trailer."


URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/youtube/PKJx/~3/uDsXQXG20eY/bringing-german-history-online.html
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