Googland |
- [G] Data Journalism Awards now accepting submissions
- [G] Is 2012 the year to brush up your measurement skills?
- [G] Biodiversity on the move
- [G] Keeping our environmental management and workplace safety standards high
- [G] Account performance at a glance with the AdSense Publisher Toolbar
- [G] Keeping our environmental management and workplace safety standards high
| [G] Data Journalism Awards now accepting submissions Posted: 19 Jan 2012 04:50 PM PST Official Google Blog: Data Journalism Awards now accepting submissionsLast November, we announced our support for a new Data Journalism competition, organized by the Global Editors Network. The competition is now open to submissions and today we hosted an event at our offices in London to share details on how to compete and win a total of six prizes worth EUR 45,000. The European Journalism Centre is running the contest and Google is sponsoring.Journalism is going through an exciting—if sometimes wrenching—transition from off to online. Google is keen to help. We see exciting possibilities of leveraging data to produce award-winning journalism. "Data journalism is a new, exciting part of the media industry, with at present only a small number of practitioners," said Peter Barron, Google's Director of External Relations. "We hope to see the number grow." In data journalism, reporters leverage numerical data and databases to gather, organize and produce news. Bertrand Pecquerie, the Global Editor Network's CEO, believes the use of data will, in particular, revolutionize investigative reporting. "We are convinced that there is a bright future for journalism," he said at the London event. "This is not just about developing new hardware like tablets. It is above all about producing exciting new content." The European Journalism Centre, a non-profit based in Maastricht, has been running data training workshops for several years. It is producing the Data Journalism Awards website and administering the prize. "This new initiative should help convince editors around the world that data journalism is not a crazy idea, but a viable part of the industry," says Wilfried Ruetten, Director of the center. Projects should be submitted to http://www.datajournalismawards.org. The deadline is April 10, 2012. Entries should have been published or aired between April 11, 2011 and April 10, 2012. Media companies, non-profit organisations, freelancers and individuals are eligible. Submissions are welcomed in three categories: data-driven investigative journalism, data-driven applications and data visualisation and storytelling. National and international projects will be judged separately from local and regional ones. "We wanted to encourage not only the New York Times's of the world to participate, but media outlets of all sizes," says Pecquerie. "Journalism students are also invited to enter, provided their work has been published." An all-star jury has been assembled of journalists from prestigious international media companies including the New York Times, the Guardian and Les Echos. Paul Steiger, the former editor-in-chief of the Wall Street Journal and founder of the Pulitzer Prize-winning ProPublica, will serve as president. Winners will be announced at the Global News Network's World Summit in Paris on May 31, 2012. Posted by William Echikson, External Relations (Cross-posted from the European Public Policy Blog)  URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/01/data-journalism-awards-now-accepting.html       |
| [G] Is 2012 the year to brush up your measurement skills? Posted: 19 Jan 2012 04:50 PM PST Google Analytics Blog: Is 2012 the year to brush up your measurement skills?As investment in digital marketing increases, data and insight continue to be critical assets for marketers and content owners. If 2012 is the year to develop your measurement and optimisation skill set, we have a range of resources to help you.Individual Qualification with Google Analytics Whilst you're improving your measurement skills and campaign results using Google Analytics you can also work towards becoming individually qualified with a recognised Google certification. Learn more at www.google.com/analytics/iq. Live Training & Events We have a stellar partner network who offer a range of courses and live training to help you through the basic and advanced capabilities of GA. Google certified trainers run regular 101, 201 and 301 seminars - you can find a Seminars For Success calendar here for North America, Australia and the UK. Another great way to learn about GA and meet the GA team is to attend one of the GAUGE events. This series is hosted by our partner network and is a great way to learn from experts within the network and within other companies likes yours. The next event takes place in San Francisco on March 8-9 where Phil Mui, Group Product Manager and other members of the product team will share some of our newest developments and maybe even hint at what's in store in 2012. European events are already planned in Brussels (March 20th), Amsterdam (March 21-22nd), and Stockholm (May 8th). Keep an eye on the blog for the schedule and registration details. Online Resources & Best Practices We also have published many articles to help you find your way around GA in our help centre and also have a vibrant forum. If you prefer watching to reading, visit the Google Analytics YouTube channel for a range of educational videos and webinars covering our latest feature releases. What else do you want to see or learn about in 2012? Let us know, leave a comment and we'll try to accommodate in our curriculum or within our partner events. Sophie Chesters, Marketing Manager for Google Analytics     URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/tRaA/~3/dcOvjGkGWUg/is-2012-year-to-brush-up-your.html   |
| Posted: 19 Jan 2012 04:50 PM PST Google LatLong: Biodiversity on the moveEditor's Note: Today's guest author is Ari Daniel Shapiro from Atlantic Public Media (APM), a non-profit public media organization in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. APM was the recipient of a Google Earth Outreach Developer Grant, funded through the Google Inc. Charitable Giving Fund at the Tides Foundation. We're excited to showcase how Atlantic Public Media has weaved Google Earth and KML tours into engaging stories about the diversity of life. Life gets around. Tiny Arctic Terns soar from the Arctic to the Antarctic, and back, in a single year. A kind of sea algae known as "sea grapes" roam from Australia to the Mediterranean as stowaways, and then promptly conquer their new home. As a radio producer, I'm used to telling these kinds of stories with audio, weaving together interview tape, ambient sound, and narration. For the last two years, I've worked with Atlantic Public Media and the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) to produce an audio series entitled One Species at a Time. Each episode pays homage to a different organism that gallops or creeps or pulses on our planet. We collaborate on these stories with Marie Studer, the EOL's Learning and Education Director, who has championed our podcast as way to make the natural world come alive and generate excitement amongst people who want to learn about it and explore. While our podcast and public radio programming brought these tales of the natural world to listeners all over the planet, we always look for ways to tell these stories better and share them more widely. Eduardo Garcia Milagros, a biologist and KML developer in Spain, approached us last year with the idea to use Google Earth as a platform for these mini-documentaries. Brimming with enthusiasm, he shared "When I first opened Google Earth, I went to see my hometown. Once I started exploring KML capabilities, I realized that Google Earth can be an amazing educational tool, especially when you have a good story." Inspired by his excitement, we decided to identify species whose stories could really be best illustrated through a map, such as the Arctic Tern's annual migration. Our tour on Arctic terns can be viewed on YouTube or downloaded and explored in Google Earth. Incorporating Google Earth into our narratives proved to be an interesting challenge for me and Jay Allison, my editor on the project and the Executive Director of APM. We wanted to make the most of the map as a medium to bring to life the tale of the Arctic Tern and other species for viewers. By integrating geographic animation and imagery from all over the world with the audio and images from contributing scientists, we were able to support and enhance the story. For example, in the sea algae tour below, we circle the globe to the Amazon rainforest to illustrate a phenomenon in the ecology of the Mediterranean. Our sea algae tour can also be found on YouTube or downloaded for viewing in Google Earth. These tours combine voice, sound, images, video, and data-driven animations to explain how two creatures have been able to travel so much of our planet. Coming from a public radio documentary background, we tend to approach things from a purely narrative or poetic angle, but Google Earth tours allow for audio/visual dialogue as well. The movement isn't purely in the story. The map can become part of a "conversation," and we're just beginning to explore the possibilities. We hope to produce more of these Biodiversity on the Move tours in the future; we'd like to hear what you think of them and what we can improve next time. Drop us a line on the Encyclopedia of Life blog. Posted by Ari Daniel Shapiro, Atlantic Public Media and the Encyclopedia of Life  URL: http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2012/01/biodiversity-on-move.html   |
| [G] Keeping our environmental management and workplace safety standards high Posted: 19 Jan 2012 04:50 PM PST Official Google Enterprise Blog: Keeping our environmental management and workplace safety standards highPosted by Joe Kava, Senior Director, data center construction and operations(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog and the Google Green Blog.) For the last year, our data center team has been working on a project to bring our facilities to even higher standards for environmental management and workforce safety. Recently we got the good news that our work paid off. All of our U.S. owned and operated data centers have received ISO 14001 and OHSAS 18001 certification. We're the first major Internet services company to gain external certification for those high standards at all of our U.S. data centers. In a nutshell, both standards are built around a very simple concept: Say what you're going to do, then do what you say—and then keep improving. The standards say what key elements are required, but not how to do it—that part's up to us. So we set some challenging goals for ourselves, and we asked our auditors to confirm that we've followed through on them. Here's an example of the kind of improvements we've implemented: Like most data centers, ours have emergency backup generators on hand to keep things up and running in case of a power outage. To reduce the environmental impact of these generators, we've done two things: first, we minimized the amount of run time and need for maintenance of those generators. Second, we worked with the oil and generator manufacturers to extend the lifetime between oil changes. So far we've managed to reduce our oil consumption in those generators by 67 percent. A second example: each of our servers in the data center has a battery on board to eliminate any interruptions to our power supply. To ensure the safety of the environment and our workers, we devised a system to make sure we handle, package, ship and recycle every single battery properly. These are just two elements of what ultimately adds up to a comprehensive system of policies that our data center teams follow in their day-to-day operations. We do this because we want to be the gold standard in environmental and workforce safety, and because we care about the communities where we live and work. This is one more reason you can feel confident that when you're using our products, you're making an environmentally responsible choice. Our data centers in the following U.S. locations have received this dual certification. We plan to pursue certification in our European data centers as well.
 URL: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2012/01/keeping-our-environmental-management.html   |
| [G] Account performance at a glance with the AdSense Publisher Toolbar Posted: 19 Jan 2012 04:50 PM PST Inside AdSense: Account performance at a glance with the AdSense Publisher ToolbarWe're always looking for new ways to make it easier for you to use our tools, help you save time, and better understand account performance. With this in mind, we're happy to share with you a new Chrome extension called the AdSense Publisher Toolbar. When viewing your website, this feature will show you a snapshot of your AdSense account performance as a widget in the corner of your browser window. It also includes ad overlays that describe the recent performance of specific ad units, and gives you the option to access AdSense directly. At the moment this toolbar is only available in English, but we're working to make it available in additional languages in the near future.  To start using this new toolbar, just follow these steps:
And that's it! The AdSense account overview widget will appear and show you an earnings summary, broken down by recent and all time performance as well as your top channels. You can also enable ad overlays directly on top of your ad units, which will tell you how a particular ad unit has performed today, yesterday and in the past seven days. Clicking on the ad overlay will bring you to the "My ads" tab in your account, where you can edit this ad unit. If you have ad units using the older version of the code, or ad units created on partner sites like Blogger, we'll instead show information on the ad unit size or channel. Rest assured that clicking on the ad overlay generated by the toolbar won't create invalid clicks.  For more detailed instructions on how to use this toolbar, visit our Help Center. We hope that this new feature provides a useful way to quickly check on your AdSense account performance while browsing the web. Stay tuned for updates as we work on adding new functionality to the toolbar. Posted by Gregory Block -- AdSense Engineering    URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/tuAm/~3/j1mxxnfKS9A/account-performance-at-glance-with.html   |
| [G] Keeping our environmental management and workplace safety standards high Posted: 19 Jan 2012 04:50 PM PST Official Google Blog: Keeping our environmental management and workplace safety standards highFor the last year, our data center team has been working on a project to bring our facilities to even higher standards for environmental management and workforce safety. Recently we got the good news that our work paid off.All of our U.S. owned and operated data centers have received ISO 14001 and OHSAS 18001 certification. We're the first major Internet services company to gain external certification for those high standards at all of our U.S. data centers. In a nutshell, both standards are built around a very simple concept: Say what you're going to do, then do what you say—and then keep improving. The standards say what key elements are required, but not how to do it—that part's up to us. So we set some challenging goals for ourselves, and we asked our auditors to confirm that we've followed through on them. Here's an example of the kind of improvements we've implemented: Like most data centers, ours have emergency backup generators on hand to keep things up and running in case of a power outage. To reduce the environmental impact of these generators, we've done two things: first, we minimized the amount of run time and need for maintenance of those generators. Second, we worked with the oil and generator manufacturers to extend the lifetime between oil changes. So far we've managed to reduce our oil consumption in those generators by 67 percent. A second example: each of our servers in the data center has a battery on board to eliminate any interruptions to our power supply. To ensure the safety of the environment and our workers, we devised a system to make sure we handle, package, ship and recycle every single battery properly. These are just two elements of what ultimately adds up to a comprehensive system of policies that our data center teams follow in their day-to-day operations. We do this because we want to be the gold standard in environmental and workforce safety, and because we care about the communities where we live and work. This is one more reason you can feel confident that when you're using our products, you're making an environmentally responsible choice. Our data centers in the following U.S. locations have received this dual certification. We plan to pursue certification in our European data centers as well.
 URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/01/keeping-our-environmental-management.html   |
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