Googland |
- [G] Get Traffic Conditions in Norway, New Zealand, and Hong Kong
- [G] Learn why a message ended up in your spam folder
- [G] Gamification for Improved Search Ranking for YouTube Topics
- [G] Hear from Google this week at SES NY
- [G] Learn why a message ended up in your spam folder
- [G] Recapping our recent North American AdSense in Your City events
- [G] FreedroidRPG Google Summer of Code Students Stand Up to the Bots
| [G] Get Traffic Conditions in Norway, New Zealand, and Hong Kong Posted: 20 Mar 2012 12:58 AM PDT Google Lat Long: Get Traffic Conditions in Norway, New Zealand, and Hong KongWe have expanded our live traffic coverage to Norway, New Zealand, and Hong Kong. Traffic in Google Maps was introduced in 2008, and since then our team has been working hard to bring this popular feature to more and more countries. Today, you can now get traffic conditions for major cities and highways in Norway, New Zealand, and Hong Kong.  Desktop View: Traffic conditions in Oslo, Norway To do so, simply go to maps.google.com and click on the traffic layer in the widget you can find on the upper right hand side of the screen. This useful traffic information is also available on Google Maps for Mobile devices and Google Maps Navigation.   Mobile View: Traffic in Auckland, New Zealand and Hong Kong If the roads you are traveling do not yet show traffic information, don't despair. You can help your fellow drivers and improve traffic data by using Google Navigation or Google Maps for Mobile while traveling. Posted by Håvard Kvålen, Software Engineer, Google Maps  URL: http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2012/03/get-traffic-conditions-in-norway-new.html       |
| [G] Learn why a message ended up in your spam folder Posted: 20 Mar 2012 12:58 AM PDT The Google Apps Blog: Learn why a message ended up in your spam folderPosted by Ela Czajka, Software EngineerMany of our users say the accuracy of our spam filter is one of the key reasons they love Gmail. And while we think you should never have to look in your spam folder, we know some of you may want to know why the messages there were marked as spam. So starting today, we'll be showing a brief explanation at the top of each of your spam messages. Simply look at any message in your spam folder and now you can find out why it was put there and learn about any potentially harmful content within the message.      URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/GoogleAppsBlog/~3/5_FYOpt-RqM/learn-why-message-ended-up-in-your-spam.html   |
| [G] Gamification for Improved Search Ranking for YouTube Topics Posted: 20 Mar 2012 12:58 AM PDT Research Blog: Gamification for Improved Search Ranking for YouTube TopicsPosted by Charles DuHadway and Sanketh Shetty, Google ResearchIn earlier posts we discussed automatic ways to find the most talented emerging singers and the funniest videos using the YouTube Slam experiment. We created five "house" slams -- music, dance, comedy, bizarre, and cute -- which produce a weekly leaderboard not just of videos but also of YouTubers who are great at predicting what the masses will like. For example, last week's cute slam winning video claims to be the cutest kitten in the world, beating out four other kittens, two puppies, three toddlers and an amazing duck who feeds the fish. With a whopping 620 slam points, YouTube user emoatali99 was our best connoisseur of cute this week. On the music side, it is no surprise that many of music slam's top 10 videos were Adele covers. A Whitney Houston cover came out at the top this week, and music slam's resident expert on talent had more than a thousand slam points. Well done! Check out the rest of the leaderboards for cute slam and music slam. Can slam-style game mechanics incentivize our users to help improve the ranking of videos -- not just for these five house slams -- but for millions of other search queries and topics on YouTube? Gamification has previously been used to incentivize users to participate in non-game tasks such as image labeling and music tagging. How many votes and voters would we need for slam to do better than the existing ranking algorithm for topic search on YouTube? As an experiment, we created new slams for a small number of YouTube topics (such as Latte Art Slam and Speed Painting Slam) using existing top 20 videos for these topics as the candidate pool. As we accumulated user votes, we evaluated the resulting YouTube Slam leaderboard for that topic vs the existing ranking on youtube.com/topics (baseline). Note that both the slam leaderboard and the baseline had the same set of videos, just in a different order. What did we discover? It was no surprise that slam ranking performance had a high variance in the beginning and gradually improved as votes accumulated. We are happy to report that four of five topic slams converged within 1000 votes with a better leaderboard ranking than the existing YouTube topic search. In spite of small number of voters, Slam achieves better ranking partly because of gamification incentives and partly because it is based on machine learning, using:
Demographics and interests of the voters do affect slam leaderboard ranking, especially when the voter pool is small. An example is a Romantic Proposals Slam we featured on Valentine's day last month. Men thought this proposal during a Kansas City Royals game was the most romantic, although this one where the man pretends to fall off a building came close. On the other hand, women rated this meme proposal in a restaurant as the best, followed by this movie theater proposal. Encouraged by these results, we will soon be exploring slams for a few thousand topics to evaluate the utility of gamification techniques to YouTube topic search. Here are some of them: Chocolate Brownie, Paper Plane, Bush Flying, Stealth Technology, Stencil Graffiti, Yosemite National Park, and Stealth Technology. Have fun slamming!  URL: http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2012/03/gamification-for-improved-search.html   |
| [G] Hear from Google this week at SES NY Posted: 20 Mar 2012 12:58 AM PDT Inside AdWords: Hear from Google this week at SES NYIf you're at SES New York this week for three action-filled days of education, new ideas, and networking, be sure to include Google in your plans. Avinash Kaushik, Digital Marketing Evangelist, will be on hand to kick off the event with a Tuesday morning keynote on "Business Optimization in the Digital Age." Later that morning, hear how to tie the influence of the social web to the metrics you care about using in Google Analytics, or listen in to the discussion on making the leap from search to display marketing. Here's a summary of the sessions: Business Optimization in a Digital Age Tuesday, March 20 from 9:00-10:00am We were promised that Marketing one day would become rocket science. Well, we are almost there! Search continues to become more complicated, and more exciting. Then there's Social and Email and Display and Video and... so many more things. It is hard to understand how to do one thing right, much less try to do all of them right. In his exciting keynote Avinash will share his unique perspective on balancing multiple media channels, leveraging super awesome metrics, grounding your digital existence in driving economic value, and leveraging the Clear Line of Sight model to ensure you are optimizing across all four of the most important business drivers (come to the keynote to learn which four!). Keynote Speaker: Avinash Kaushik, Digital Marketing Evangelist, Google Social Media as a Performance Channel with Google Analytics Tuesday, March 20 from 11:00am-12:00pm Social media has changed the way we shop and interact with brands, but marketers still lack a clear way to measure how their social investments lead to more sales. According to MarketingSherpa, only 20% of CMOs think social media marketing produces measurable ROI, while 62% consider it to be a promising tactic that will eventually yield ROI. The good news is that better measurement can help marketers make smarter decisions about their investments in social. Vanity counters, such as friend counts and reshares, can be augmented with bottom line metrics like conversions and purchases, allowing marketers to measure true social ROI of each campaign and compare the effectiveness with other channels. Join Phil Mui, Group Product Manager and Ilya Grigorik, Lead Engineer to learn how to tie the influence of the social web to the metrics you care about using in Google Analytics. Speakers: Phil Mui, Group Product Manager, Google Analytics Ilya Grigorik, Lead Engineer, Google Analytics Crossing the Digital Divide: The Leap from Search to Display Tuesday, March 20 from 11:00am-12:00pm Many advertisers who embrace the highly measurable, highly efficient world of search engine marketing remain on the sidelines in display. Historically, display advertising has lacked the precision in pricing, placement, and ROI of search. The advent of new display optimization technologies and next-generation ad exchanges, however, is offering a radically fresh take on an evolving media model. In this session you will hear:
Google speaker: Julie MaGill, Head of Agency Business Development, Google We hope to see you at the event. Posted by Katie Miller, Inside AdWords crew  URL: http://adwords.blogspot.com/2012/03/hear-from-google-this-week-at-ses-ny.html   |
| [G] Learn why a message ended up in your spam folder Posted: 20 Mar 2012 12:58 AM PDT Official Gmail Blog: Learn why a message ended up in your spam folderPosted by Ela Czajka, Software EngineerMany of our users say the accuracy of our spam filter is one of the key reasons they love Gmail. And while we think you should never have to look in your spam folder, we know some of you may want to know why the messages there were marked as spam. So starting today, we'll be showing a brief explanation at the top of each of your spam messages. Simply look at any message in your spam folder and now you can find out why it was put there and learn about any potentially harmful content within the message. URL: http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2012/03/learn-why-message-ended-up-in-your-spam.html   |
| [G] Recapping our recent North American AdSense in Your City events Posted: 19 Mar 2012 03:01 PM PDT Inside AdSense: Recapping our recent North American AdSense in Your City eventsRecent months have been busy and exciting for the AdSense in Your City team! Since January, we've met with over 500 publishers across the U.S. and Canada. To date, the AdSense in Your City team has met with close to 1500 publishers in more than 30 cities and we can't wait to host more events. We've had a great time working with our AdSense publishers and sharing our optimization tips and best practices for AdSense, DoubleClick for Publishers Small Business (DFP SB) and Mobile. It's also great to see so many of our publishers networking with one another and making friendships. One publisher in Albuquerque excitedly told me, "This is the first time I've been in a room where everyone knows what AdSense is!" We hope that we can continue to provide forums for our publishers to get together and share their stories and insights. From snowy days in Portland, OR and Victoria, BC to a visit to the "Music City" in Nashville, TN, the team has brought back wonderful AdSense success stories and feedback. A publisher from Oregon, who attended our Las Vegas event in November, was snowed in during the Portland event but came to Albuquerque to meet with us again. After implementing our tips from Las Vegas, the publisher saw a revenue increase by 40%.  We appreciate all of our publishers who have taken the time to attend our events, especially those who have traveled great distances to meet with us. Our team is looking forward to continuing to meet with even more of our amazing publishers. We'll be announcing our next 15 cities soon, so stay on the lookout for our next update. If you want the AdSense in Your City team to come to your city, let us know by adding your North American city in the comments section below. Courtney Yamada, the North American AdSense in Your City team    URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/tuAm/~3/xDFpr1AomOw/recapping-our-recent-north-american.html   |
| [G] FreedroidRPG Google Summer of Code Students Stand Up to the Bots Posted: 19 Mar 2012 10:48 AM PDT Google Open Source Blog: FreedroidRPG Google Summer of Code Students Stand Up to the BotsFreedroidRPG is an open-source role playing game that has been around for a few years, written by a dedicated small team. The project participated in the Google Summer of Code program in both 2010 and 2011 with a total of 7 students over the two years, and we set out to offer the best possible learning experience for our students. Our goals were twofold: we wanted to acquire new, regular contributors, and we wanted to share our passion for writing a free software game. Our participation in Google Summer of Code was quite a success and taught us a lot about how to make newcomers feel welcome and encourage them to speak their mind and contribute. Mentoring students requires a lot of time and patience, therefore it requires your project so your project participants have to be ready to invest a significant amount of time. As with all investments, it may or may not turn out to be "profitable" - many people are attracted to game development but after they've taken part they realize that it's not as easy as they thought. As a result, it is to be expected that not every student will be a good match for your project - not all students will stay after the program ends. Our advice to mentors is to define precisely what the goals of the project's participation in Google Summer of Code are. Only when you know what you want can you accurately drive your project in the right direction. This year, we made the decision not to apply to Google Summer of Code for a couple of reasons. The first is that we feel that other organizations deserve their turn and after two summers and a presentation at FOSDEM'12, FreedroidRPG appears to be quite a relevant open source game, and others should be given a chance to acquire the kind of success that we've had. The second is that the mentors have spent the last two years investing their time mentoring students and did not have much chance to actually write any computer code. We like free software a lot which is why we don't wish to stop writing code and spend all of our time mentoring students. So in 2012 we will be taking care of our own passion for code, hopefully coming back in future years to Google Summer of Code with exciting new project ideas and top-level mentors! We believe that video games are a great way to discover the world of computer programming because it is appealing to so many of us. At FOSDEM'12, I made a presentation in the games developer room aimed at showing a few of the technical problems that we face every day when writing FreedroidRPG. Hopefully the video can help the readers understand why I love writing games so much. By Arthur Huillet, FreedroidRPG lead developer and Google Summer of Code mentor/org admin
I heard about Google Summer of Code for the first time two years ago. I was finishing my senior year at university and was looking for a summer occupation. After reading the announcement of Google Summer of Code I thought it would be great: there was no need to relocate, I could work on open-source projects and solve real problems all in the same role. I started reading articles describing the experience that students had in previous years. There was a lot to read, but the most helpful advice I learned was that the odds of being selected and successfully completing your project is much higher if you are really interested in the project and organization as a whole. That is how I met Freedroid. This organization had an ideal combination of algorithms and game development, two things I like a lot. I took a brief look at other organizations and when the time came I applied to FreedroidRPG. Several months earlier a classmate of mine had shown me the NetHack game, which carried me away for a long period (and I still play it from time to time today). The most exciting feature in NetHack was the randomness of all kinds: you would never know what to expect after the next door. I was amazed to see that FreedroidRPG proposed a project called "random dungeon generation" and right then and there I decided that no one but I would work on this project! I began collaborating with the organization while working on my application document. I tried to elaborate on several parts: project decomposition on sub-tasks, time schedule, algorithms description. My would-be mentor asked potential participants to complete small tasks of their choice in order to confirm their ability to work with the code, a common practise among free software organizations. There was also a technical interview over IRC which is a bit unusual for Google Summer of Code and is not strictly required, but it was very interesting for me and very helpful as it turned out. Generally speaking, the student selection process varies a lot and depends on the organization. When I started to work on my project random levels where quite simple, as you can see in the screenshot below.  It was tedious for players to roam within the dungeons so the aim of my project was to make it more clear and I used various techniques in order to do this. First, I split some of the dungeon rooms with a bit of empty space so they did not look adjacent anymore. Next, I made themed rooms that contained various types of objects. Finally, I turned some rooms into corridors so the level did not just look like a bunch of cells. The final look is illustrated below.  The last part of my project was devoted to the brand new random level types - random open areas. Though I initially marked it as an extra project in my plan (a "bonus" project), I managed to complete it before the summer was over. Along with dungeons there are open levels in the game mostly containing natural objects: why can't we have those be random as well? For generating these levels types I used a fractals-based approach yielding natural looking areas based on an initial shape that is preserved. On the following screenshot you can see how a random level can be generated with a shape describing a path:  Apart from the priceless experience in learning how to write free software, there was another positive element in my participation to Google Summer of Code: I significantly improved my English. The reason was my strict mentor who was adamant on having me correct the grammar mistakes in my code comments as well as in regular chat conversations. I believe I do not have to insist on the importance of English in the field of software development. Finally, I think that the experience and the title of Google Summer of Code student substantially helped me find a full-time job after graduation. I had two on-site interviews with one of the world's most famous corporations and finally got a great offer from a local company. I wish every student developer had the opportunity to be a Google Summer of Code student at least once. By Alexander Solovets, Google Summer of Code 2010 student     URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/GoogleOpenSourceBlog/~3/NE0lV_mRFJI/freedroidrpg-google-summer-of-code.html   |
| You are subscribed to email updates from Googland To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |
No comments:
Post a Comment