Friday, April 13, 2012

Googland

Googland

[G] Coachella 2012 - Live on YouTube

Posted: 12 Apr 2012 06:28 PM PDT

YouTube Blog: Coachella 2012 - Live on YouTube





One of the best line-ups in music? Three days of live concerts?  In the desert?  Say yes to Coachella 2012, coming to you all weekend on YouTube! 





Since 2001, the the Coachella Music and Arts festival has brought thousands of fans to southern California to kick off the music festival season in style.  For the second year, YouTube will be live streaming the action, with a three day broadcast of the festival, presented by State Farm.





We're not sure if it's the promise of a weekend in Palm Springs, but Coachella always manages to pull together one the most impressive and diverse festival line-ups. YouTube will be streaming more than 60 artists over the weekend, including The Black Keys, Swedish House Mafia, Miike Snow, Andrew Bird, Florence + The Machine, and one of this year's biggest breakthrough acts, Gotye. 





It all begins at 3:50pm PT / 6:50pm ET this Friday, and you can check Coachella's YouTube channel for the latest schedule.









Tim Partridge, music marketing manager, recently watched tUnE-yArDs - 'My Country'



URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/youtube/PKJx/~3/hSCfGhZte7Q/coachella-2012-live-on-youtube.html

[G] Technologists and muckrakers pursuing a more perfect union

Posted: 12 Apr 2012 06:28 PM PDT

Official Google Blog: Technologists and muckrakers pursuing a more perfect union

Today, roughly 200 reporters, editors and technologists are gathering at the Googleplex in Mountain View for our first TechRaking summit. Co-hosted with the Center for Investigative Reporting, the oldest nonprofit investigative reporting organization in the United States, this gathering is meant to inspire muckraking by exploring tools that help reporters tell stories with greater interactivity, opportunities for long-form journalism to thrive in new mediums, best practices for verifying information and fact-checking online and much more throughout the course of the day. Think of it as the intersection of science and art when it comes to converting information into knowledge.

Here are a few of the highlights in store:
  • The Center for Investigative Reporting will discuss its new Knight Foundation-funded investigative news channel on YouTube that will be a hub of investigative journalism. Expected to launch in July, the channel will feature videos from major broadcasters and independent producers globally—both nonprofit and for-profit—and is an example of the power of collaborations that can serve the public.
  • The Google Fusion Tables team will discuss tips and tricks for data-driven journalists with Wendy Levy and Jeremy Rue during an afternoon breakout discussion. In another step toward making it easier for people in any industry to discover, manage and visualize data, this morning we announced a new interface for Fusion Tables, which helps you better explore and collaborate on data, includes more visualizations under the "experimental" tab and has a new Fusion Tables API for developers.
  • Richard Gingras, head of news product at Google, is kickstarting the day with a series of questions for journalists, newsrooms and technologists to consider. Mary Himinkool, who leads global entrepreneurship, is delivering a rapid-fire seven-minute look at lessons learned from entrepreneurs around the world, and Brian Rakowski from Chrome is sharing the process involved in rethinking the modern browser.
We wish we could have welcomed an even larger crowd, but for those who weren't able to join us in person, tune in to the Center for Investigative Reporting's Google+ page for updates from the day and highlights afterward. At 1:30pm PT we'll broadcast a Hangout with Krishna Bharat (distinguished research scientist at Google and founder of Google News), Amna Nawaz (Pakistan bureau chief/correspondent at NBC News), Nic Robertson (senior international correspondent at CNN), Sarah Hill (news anchor at KOMU) and Sree Sreenivasan (dean of student affairs and professor, Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism). You can also follow #techraking and participate on Twitter.

TechRaking was born out of a lunchtime conversation at NewsFoo, another unconventional conference focused on moving forward the future of journalism and technology. We look forward to seeing the ideas and outcomes that emerge and develop from today.

Posted by Sean Carlson, Global Communications & Public Affairs
URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/04/technologists-and-muckrakers-pursuing.html

[G] Working with your Data: Easier and More Fun

Posted: 12 Apr 2012 11:58 AM PDT

Google Research Blog: Working with your Data: Easier and More Fun

Posted by Rebecca Shapley, Fusion Tables Team



The Fusion Tables team has been a little quiet lately, but that's just because we've been working hard on a whole bunch of new stuff that makes it easier to discover, manage and visualize data.




  • A new way to look at your Fusion Table - Try the "Experimental" version of our Fusion Tables web application. The new design helps you explore and collaborate better on data. Faceted search make it easier to dive into a big data set and specify what you want to see. Multiple tabs let you experiment, trying different views of a table. And the new card layout lets you give a row of data your own custom layout. Give it a spin.










  • More visualizations on lots of data - People love using Fusion Tables to put data on a map, but there are new visualizations available in our Experiment menu.Try the Zoomable Line chart. Playing with social network data? Try out the Network Graph visualization.








  • New Fusion Tables API works great with javascript - Our new API, currently available to trusted testers, is more powerful and easier to use. The API can now return data in JSON so it's easy to get data and manipulate it with javascript, right from the browser. You can now also RESTfully modify tables, templates and map styles. Want to try it out early and give your feedback? We're looking for Trusted Testers... just join this group to become one.






You'll notice a bunch of our new things are "Experimental"....that's because we need you to use them and tell us what you love and what could be better. But we didn't want to keep them secret any longer! On behalf of the Fusion Table team, thanks for all you do with Fusion Tables, and we're looking forward to hearing your thoughts and feedback.


URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/gJZg/~3/4PA2O6ntU8g/working-with-your-data-easier-and-more.html

[G] A message from an AdSense publisher: How to balance conflicting interests

Posted: 12 Apr 2012 11:58 AM PDT

Inside AdSense: A message from an AdSense publisher: How to balance conflicting interests


Editor's Note: Today we'd like to share some tips from AdSense publisher Dave Taylor, owner and author of askdavetaylor.com. Dave Taylor has been online for over thirty years and has been producing helpful tech content for just about all of that time. You can find him online at http://www.davetayloronline.com/.

It's a tricky balancing act being an AdSense publisher because once you start seeing your earnings increase, there's a natural desire to shift your attention to your revenue. The problem with focusing on your revenue is that you're taking attention away from producing the most useful content for your readers. And without readers, you have no audience to run ads for in the first place.

I know, because it's a challenge I face as an AdSense publisher too. I run a popular tech support site called Ask Dave Taylor and my focus since 2003 has been on answering tech questions in a simple, free, and easily obtainable manner. I had over 18 million visitors to the site last year -- but it's also a business, not a hobby, so maximizing my per-visitor revenue is important.

I'm sure you've heard that "it's all about content," and that the best sites have high quality content that's regularly updated and provide a value to their customers. That's still true, and it's important to have your primary focus be the experience you offer to your reader.

But there's that tension. It's the lure of the dark side, in Star Wars terminology. What is the perfect middle ground along the content/revenue continuum?

Here's how I try to balance things…

The first place I stop every week is Google Analytics. The data gives me food for thought, like how many visitors are using mobile devices. This helped me decide how much money to invest in a mobile-friendly version of the site (and when it made sense for me to add AdSense for Mobile Content to my advertising mix). Analytics also shows the most popular pages on my site, which offers great insight into what my readers visit most frequently. Since I categorize all my content, it helps me understand if tutorials about the Sony PSP are garnering more traffic than those about the Apple iPod, for example.

Hook Analytics to AdSense (and yes, I have an article about how to do that on my site) and you can also produce a report of your most profitable pages, a cross-correlation between traffic and AdSense revenue. You'll gain a reliable way to figure out if that blog entry you wrote three months ago is actually now generating 11% of your overall site revenue.

But there's the ugly head of profiteering rearing up again.

Let's look at this a different way. There's a name for a restaurateur who focuses exclusively on per-customer revenue and keeps raising prices: out of business. On the other hand, a restaurant that doesn't pay attention to what items are popular, what daily specials get people excited, and the fluctuations in supply cost runs the risk of ending up with a menu that's completely out of touch with customer desires and they too go out of business.

I spend the majority of my time and attention on producing the best possible content and use my desire to maximize revenue as a secondary goal, something for me to keep in mind as I proceed. It doesn't launch my ship, but it helps me build it most efficiently.

If you're a long-time AdSense publisher, you've hopefully also found that sweet spot between being completely content driven and ignoring the business side of your publishing business. If not, here's a suggestion based on my years of participation: Once a month, really dig into your AdSense reports to understand what categories, what topics and what pages on your site are performing well. Set a goal of producing more of the same in the following 30 days, then put revenue out of your mind and focus completely on what you can contribute to your customer community. Rinse, wash, repeat.

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Posted by Raina Rathi, Strategic Partner Manager, AdSense


URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/tuAm/~3/ppFr5eicgk0/message-from-adsense-publisher-how-to.html
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