Google Roundup for August 26th - September 1st

This summer has gone by so fast, I cannot believe that it is Labour Day, and back to work tomorrow followed by teaching. It has been a busy summer on the Google front, now its time for some more news:

• If your a blogger like myself, you'll notice a new feature over the next few weeks. The new feature is called Following and it allows you to know who is following your blog. When the followers icon is clicked on, followers can be browsed, along with the blogs they write and you can read any other blogs they are following. Also, a new tab has been added to the Blogger dashboard called Blogs I'm Following, this will show automatically the latest posts from blogs that you follow. I love social networking.

Blogger + Social Networking

• Related to the above bullet, for any Google Reader users, you will now see a special folder called Blogs I'm Following, which allows you to see all of the blogs that your following. In the future, Google Reader will become more social by adding the Google Friend Connect.
• Hurricane Gustav is all over the news, and if you want to check out its current track, click off the weather layer to see satellite photos, radar, storm tracks etc. Check out many of the weather tools available in Google Earth by clicking on this file created by the Google Earth people.
• For all of you GPS people (I think I may be one soon),WikiLoc is a site that allows users to upload and share GPS tracks. This is now available in Google Earth as its own layer.
• Here is some more good news for Google Earth and Maps users, a new satellite which will be launched on Sept. 4th, will provide imagery for both of these programs, and it does this super fast, an area the size of New Mexico can be done in 1 day!! The name of the satellite is the GeoEye-1 adn has the highest ground resolution color imagery commercially available.
• Google Sites had just received a nice improvement. In the past, if you wanted to add a Google Spreadsheet to your site, it would have to be published to the world (shared with everyone), but no more, the requirement has been dropped.
• Some new features have been introduced to Google Calendar, adding a friend's calendar, creating new events for those busy schedules, and reminder times have been improved, check out this blog for more details.
• IES (Integrated Environmental Solutions) has released a free plugin for Google Sketchup that calculates a building's energy use and carbon dioxide emissions. It looks like the environmental movement is here to stay!!
• YouTube has introduced a new caption feature to videos. Check out this page for more information.

Enjoy the rest of Labour Day, and remember to fill up with an extra dose of coffee in the morning. See you all next week.