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.

Searching Google Search With Google Suggest

Google Search, the item that put Google on the technology map, has just been updated with a new feature called Google Suggest, which provides real-time suggestions while your searching with the world's #1 search engine. This product has been in Google Labs for quite some time, and has finally graduated and will now appear on the Google.com homepage, note that the time of this posting it hasn't appeared on the Google.ca homepage. The whole purpose of this is to save time, for example if you type in st. lois instead of st. louis, you can select the proper spelling and st. louis search item from a list of search suggestions. In this case, I would select st. louis blues, since they are my favorite hockey team. Google Suggest is a nice, simple addition to Google Search, and is very good at saving time.

Microsoft + Jerry Seinfeld = Stuck In The 90's
In case you haven't heard, Microsoft is going to get Jerry Seinfeld to advertise its Vista OS, for the low low price of $300 million. I'll admit that I still watch reruns of Seinfeld, that show about nothing is just so funny, I actually want the commercials to be good, even though I am not much of a Microsoft fan. But, I just can't see how these commercials are going to help Vista, Microsoft just isn't "cool" anymore and the public sees Vista as an overpriced bad product. On the opposite end of the spectrum, the area of cool belongs to Google and Apple , they release products that are extremely user friendly, are updated frequently, and changes are made to better the user experience. Microsoft seems not to be following these basic guidelines, Vista is absolutely brutal. Now I'll admit that I own a computer running Windows XP, but the reason for this is cost, Apples are too pricey for me, and convenience, I would love to switch to Linux but it would cause so many compatibility problems at home and at work.
If this was the late 90's when Seinfeld was at its peak, and Microsoft was closing in on it's own high, the commercials would have been a great success. Now they'll be as cool as plastic rubber bracelets, extremely baggie jeans, Limp Bizkit, and that greasy dirty grunge look.

Google Roundup for August 17th-24th

The Olympics are almost over....two weeks of sports I barely watch is enough for me. Here is some news/updates in the world of Google:

• Check out this Google Earth visualization of geothermal energy available in the US. This allows viewing of geothermal energies at various depths along with time animation to view the different depths.
• Google News has released a feature called cross-language search, not much else to say here, pretty self explanatory except that you will only see results in a different language if they are as good as those in your own language.
• If your interested in the US political campaign, check out google.com/powerreaders. Here you can see news shared by the Obama and McCain political campaigns, this is viewed in Google Reader.
• If your a Google Checkout user, you can save money ($5 or more) at many stores, note that this is for a limited time.
• If your you are using YouTube on your phone, you may have seen some display ads on pages of the YouTube mobile site in US and Japan.

That's it for news in the house of Google, check back again next week.

Google Earth+Geothermal Energy

Google Docs Gearing Up for Back to School?

I just read the latest Google Docs blog post that thanked their interns for the hard work over the summer. If you read it through, lines such as " oops....I almost gave away the other killer features which haven't launched yet" appear. My prediction is that in the next month or so, maybe even the next couple of weeks, there are going to be a bunch of new features released, just in time for all of those students heading back to school. I use Google Docs for a lot of my work, I just love avoiding the file transfer step and being able to access the document from anywhere, including my phone. Once these programs become a bit more advanced, I'm hoping to avoid my desktop based word processor, spreadsheet, and presenter. Watch out Microsoft, here comes Google Docs!!!

Listen to Google: Its All About the White Space

Maybe you have heard about "white spaces", maybe you haven't. Anyways, these are the unused portions of the TV spectrum that could be used to expand internet access through low power personal devices. Basically, this could allow affordable, high speed wireless internet access nationwide (the nation being U.S., haven't heard too much on the Canadian side of the border). If this happens, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) must allow it. This decision will come in the next few months, in anticipation of this Google has launched a Free The Airwaves awareness/action plan. I like how Google mentions in its official blog that they have a "clear business interest" in this, at least they are being honest. If you want more information on this, such as why companies like Microsoft and Motorola are supporting the use of white spaces, check out this article at cnet.

Google Roundup for Aug. 10th-17th

I hope you all are enjoyin' the Olympics. My country, Canada, finally got some medals, yesterday they picked up 7, and what about Phelps for the US, crazy hey? Here goes another round of roundup:

• As you all know, we are undergoing climate change. One of the most affected areas is and will be the Arctic. If you have time, check out the animations in Google Earth provided by the National Snow and Ice Data Center for 30-day ,60-day and 90-day showing the change in Arctic ice.
• If your an ESRI software user, your GIS information can be viewed in Google Maps with the ArcGIS JavaScript Extension.
• To increase it's appeal to the international market, Google News is available in 9 more countries, check out this post for more details.
• If you have a RSS feed, and you are using Adsense, ads can now be placed in your feed, and the list of languages and countries for video units has increased. Languages supported are: English, French, German, Japanese, and Spanish; countries included: Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, India, Ireland, Italy, Germany, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Spain, United Kingdom, and United States.
• Google Calendar is now available in 38 languages, recent ones added are: Latvian, Romanian, Filipino/Tagalog, Serbian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Hindi and Indonesian.
• If your a user of Google Docs forms, then a few welcomed changes has occurred. These are now accessible in the Docs List page and from within other editors (i.e., Presentations). Also, the forms interface has become more user friendly.

• I love Google Reader, and an excellent feature has been added. Instead of only being able to share with all of your friends, now a custom friends list can be created to selectively choose who you want to share with.

Climate Change via Google Earth.