Google Opens Knol To Every One, Another Wikipedia With More Control and Monetization Option

Last December Google announced about their new service called Knol, a free knowledge tool and started inviting a selected group of people to try it. Knols are authoritative articles about specific topics, written by people who know about those subjects. Google announced yesterday that they are now opening Knol to everyone.

The web contains vast amounts of information, but not everything worth knowing is on the web. An enormous amount of information resides in people's heads: millions of people know useful things and billions more could benefit from that knowledge. Knol will encourage these people to contribute their knowledge online and make it accessible to everyone.

The key principle behind Knol is authorship. Every knol will have an author (or group of authors) who put their name behind their content. It's their knol, their voice, their opinion.

With Knol, Google is introducing a new method for authors to work together called "moderated collaboration." With this feature, any reader can make suggested edits to a knol which the author may then choose to accept, reject, or modify before these contributions become visible to the public. This allows authors to accept suggestions from everyone in the world while remaining in control of their content. After all, their name is associated with it!

Knols include strong community tools which allow for many modes of interaction between readers and authors. People can submit comments, rate, or write a review of a knol. At the discretion of the author, a knol may include ads from Google AdSense program. If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with a revenue share from the proceeds of those ad placements.

Google also had an agreement with the New Yorker magazine which allows any author to add one cartoon per knol from the New Yorker's extensive cartoon repository. Cartoons are an effective (and fun) way to make your point, even on the most serious topics.

Read more...

Google To Acquire Russian Context Ads Service Begun For $140 Million

Google announced today that it has signed an agreement with Rambler Media to acquire ZAO Begun ("Begun"), a leading Russian context advertising service, for $140 million, subject to customary adjustments. This agreement emphasizes Google's commitment to improving the service it offers users, partners and advertisers in Russia, where digital advertising is currently experiencing rapid growth.

The acquisition of Begun will give advertisers access to a broader network of sites to advertise on, and publishers will benefit from a wider set of adverts to run on their sites. Users will see more relevant advertising across a much wider set of websites. Google will bring its advertising expertise and experience to Begun's network of websites.

"Google is very committed to giving Russian users, advertisers and partners the best possible service and experience," said Mohammad Gawdat, Managing Director Emerging Markets, Google. "This agreement will result in better search results and more relevant advertising for our Russian users and publishers."

“Begun is an excellent business which can fully develop its potential under Google's ownership," said Mark Opzoomer, Chief Executive Officer of Rambler Media. "Google has the technological and financial capacity to improve Begun's established advertising service in Russia."

"The entire industry will benefit from this transaction as there is a high potential for synergies," said Alexey Basov, General Director of Begun "It brings together Google's visionary technology and Begun's six years of successful experience in building advertising and dealer networks and direct sales in Russia."

The transaction remains subject to customary closing conditions and receipt of applicable regulatory approval and is expected to close in the third quarter of 2008.

Read more...

Templates For Google Docs

The Google Docs Team has launched a new template gallery for documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. Now, whether you need business cards, letterhead, or employee time sheets, you don't have to start from a blank slate. Find the template that's right for you and start customizing it with your information – you'll save time on formatting and formulas.

To access the template gallery:

1. Log in to your Google Apps account at  http://docs.google.com/a/example.com (Be sure to replace 'example.com' with your actual domain name.)

2. Click 'New'

3. Select 'From template...'

The gallery includes hundreds of templates – some designed by Google and others developed by Avery Dennison, Vertex42.com, TemplateZone, and Visa Business. So before you get started on your next project, take a look at what's available in the Google Docs template gallery!

Read more...

Google Improves Gmail Contact Manager

Many Gmail users don’t prefer to have auto-added contacts. Many time it unnecessarily increase your address book. To help users, gmail is about to roll out an update to it’s contact manager. It separates your contacts into two groups: "My Contacts" and "Suggested Contacts."

My Contacts contains the contacts you explicitly put in your address book (via manual entry, import or sync) as well as any address you've emailed a lot (Gmail is using five or more times as the threshold for now).

Suggested Contacts is where Gmail puts its auto-created contacts. By default, Suggested Contacts you email frequently are automatically added to My Contacts, but for those of you who prefer tighter control of your address books, you can choose to disable usage-based addition of contacts to My Contacts (see the checkbox in the screenshot above). Once you do this, no matter how many times you email an auto-added email address it won't move to My Contacts.

Read more...

DoubleClick unveils new Proposal Exchange platform

In an effort to streamline the online media direct sales process, DoubleClick, a premier provider of digital marketing technology and services, today unveiled a new electronic proposal exchange platform for its publisher and agency customers. The new integration automates the media request for proposal (RFP) process via seamless data exchange between DART® Sales Manager (DSM), an end-to-end workflow and financial management solution for publishers, and DART® for Advertisers’ (DFA) MediaVisor planning tool. Also today, DoubleClick further strengthened its integrated platform for media sellers by announcing the release of an adapter designed to allow the seamless exchange of data between DSM and Salesforce CRM, salesforce.com’s industry-leading suite of CRM applications.

DoubleClick’s new proposal exchange platform is built upon application agnostic standards, which will ultimately allow for broader integration with other advertising technology solutions. The company has worked closely with the IAB in their efforts to establish a consistent standard for electronic order exchange across the online advertising industry. Establishing a common proposal exchange standard will also allow for better automation of discrepancy reconciliation – another key challenge for buyers and sellers of digital media.

In a 2007 survey of its ad agency clients, DoubleClick confirmed that the majority of the media RFP and contract process is still handled manually—via the exchange of emails, spreadsheets and faxes. Respondents also named lack of internal coordination at publishers and inaccurate proposal responses as top concerns. More than 70% of agencies responding said that a publisher’s use of an automated proposal tool would positively influence their decision to send that publisher an RFP. By digitizing and standardizing the RFP process, publishers are also expected to benefit from increased operational efficiency and accuracy, while advertisers will enjoy faster response times and more accurate proposals.

With DoubleClick’s new electronic order exchange feature, agencies can select DSM-enabled publishers directly from the MediaVisor planning tool. Selected publishers receive an electronic request for proposal directly within the DSM interface and can check inventory, build a proposal, and respond electronically. Once approved, the proposed media package can be trafficked by the publisher directly into DART for Publishers. Previously, publishers had to manually enter their proposals within MediaVisor for each advertiser in addition to their own system, often a time consuming and error-prone process. Currently, more than 20 publishers are testing the new order exchange platform including BabyCenter.com and Mansueto Ventures.

Also announced today was the release of a Salesforce.com adapter that allows DART Sales Manager to exchange data with this leading customer relationship management solution to deliver increased transparency throughout the ad sales cycle. The new adapter synchronizes opportunities and proposal information as well as sales data between the two systems, creating a more seamless end-to-end media sales solution.

“DoubleClick's vision is to help digital advertising scale by developing platforms that bring advertisers and publishers together,” said Group Product Manager Jonathan Bellack. “Our new proposal exchange platform reduces operational friction by eliminating error-prone manual data entry. In addition, our tight integration with Salesforce.com continues to develop DART Sales Manager's mission to enable an integrated quote to cash solution for publisher sales teams.”

About DART Sales Manager (DSM)

DART Sales Manager (DSM) is an end-to-end workflow and financial management solution for publishers. With over a dozen timesaving features for sales teams and six financial reports, DSM is a best-of-breed tool for media sellers with sales teams of all sizes. DSM is part of DoubleClick’s Revenue Center, a comprehensive suite of solutions for media sellers designed to maximize revenue and minimize operational friction throughout the digital ad sales process.

DART Sales Manager reduces the burden of manual data entry and improves the accuracy and transparency of the entire sales and service process. The result is increased visibility, including enhanced real-time inventory access for sales and additional pipeline and revenue forecasting capabilities for sales management.

Source

Read more...

Google Launched Elections Video Search Gadget To Translate Speech to Text

Google speech team (part of Google Research) is launching the Google Elections Video Search gadget today. With the help of Google’s own speech recognition technologies, videos from YouTube's Politicians channels are automatically transcribed from speech to text and indexed.

Using the gadget you can search not only the titles and descriptions of the videos, but also their spoken content. Additionally, since speech recognition tells exactly when words are spoken in the video, you can jump right to the most relevant parts of the videos you find.

The gadget only searches videos uploaded to YouTube's Politicians channels, which include videos from Senator Obama's and Senator McCain's campaigns, as well as those from dozens of other candidates and politicians.

It usually takes less than a few hours for a video to appear in the index after it has been published on YouTube. Candidates can control the videos that appear in the gadget by managing the content they upload to YouTube. While some of the transcript snippets you see may not be 100% accurate, however you'll find this gadget useful for most purposes. Speech recognition is a difficult problem that hasn't yet been completely solved, but Google is constantly working to refine it’s algorithms and improve the accuracy and relevance of these transcribed results.

Read more...

Lively - 3D Virtual Experience By Google

Google today released it’s new service called “Lively” - a 3D virtual experience. Lively is a new product available in Google Labs. It helps you to create an avatar and chat with your friends in rooms you design. The Lively aims to experience you a new dimension of the web.

If you enter a Lively room embedded on your favorite blog or website, you can immediately get a sense of the room creator's interests, just by looking at the furniture and environment they chose. You can also express your own personality by customizing your avatar's look, showing people who you are without having to say a word. You can also chat with each other, and you can also interact through animated actions.

What can you do with Lively ?

Socialize in 3D places on the web: Lively by Google has interactive 3D places on web pages where visitors can see each other's avatars and chat. Customize your avatar and decorate rooms to add another dimension to social networking!

Express yourself: Your avatar represents you. Pick a character that suits your personality or mood and customize it to make it unique. Dress your avatar to express your style. Use your avatar's animations to add some body language to chats!

Create and share your own places: Anybody can create and publish their own room. Pick a room shell that provides a good foundation and decorate it any way that you can imagine. Invite people to visit your room -- they can decorate it too!

 

For more details, check out this lively help page.

Read more...

New Gmail Feature Allows You To Track Your Recent Sessions

Gmail team today introduced a new feature that enables you to track your recent sessions and you can also sign yourself out remotely.

You may access your gmail account from multiple computers (cyber cafe or friend’s home). Most of time, you remember to sign out, but sometime it happens that you are in hurry and not sure whether you really signed out or not. It will be a matter of worry when your gmail account contains important emails. Now no longer you have to worry.

At the bottom of your inbox, you'll see information about the time of the last activity on your account and whether it's still open in another location:

A quick glance at the footer shows you that your account is indeed open in one other location. It also provides you the IP address of that location. You can get more details about your recent activity by clicking on the Details link:

The top table, under "Concurrent session information," indicates all open sessions, along with IP address and "access type" -- which refers to how email was retrieved, for example, through iGoogle, POP3 or a mobile phone. The bottom table, under "Recent activity," contains most recent history along with times of access. You can also view your current IP address at the very bottom of this window, where it says "This computer is using IP address..."

With this information, you can quickly verify that all the Gmail activity was indeed yours or not.

Read more...

Google Open Sourced It’s Internal Development Tool Called “Protocol Buffers”

Google today announced availability of their most widely-used internal development tools "Protocol Buffers" to the Open Source community.

Google deals with thousands of different data formats to represent networked messages between servers, index records in repositories, geospatial datasets, and more. Most of these formats are structured, not flat. It’s interesting to know How do they encode it all ? To handle it, Google developed it’s Protocol Buffers.

Protocol buffers are a flexible, efficient, automated mechanism for serializing structured data – think XML, but smaller, faster, and simpler. You define how you want your data to be structured once, then you can use special generated source code to easily write and read your structured data to and from a variety of data streams and using a variety of languages. You can even update your data structure without breaking deployed programs that are compiled against the "old" format.

Take a look at the documentation or you can download the code.

Read more...

Google Open-Sourced It’s C++ Testing Framework, “Google Test”

In order to make it easier for everyone to write good C++ tests, today Google has open-sourced Google C++ Testing Framework (Google Test for short), a library that thousands of Googlers have been using in C++ programs. Highlights of the project include:

• Google Test is portable: it works on a variety of platforms (Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, and more), with several versions of GCC and MSVC compilers, and with or without exceptions. You can even use it in embedded systems like Windows CE and Symbian. Build tools and test runners for many of these are under active development, with Linux Autotools support already in place.
• It supports both fatal and nonfatal assertions. The test will continue after a nonfatal failure. This allows more problems to be uncovered and fixed in a single edit-compile-test cycle.
• It provides many assertions for common testing needs, and lets you easily define new assertions for less common cases.
• On Linux, you can write death tests to ensure that your code crashes with expected errors.
• Because it's based on the popular xUnit architecture, Google Test is easy to learn if you've used any testing framework in this family before.

  It will take you about 10 minutes to learn the basics and get started.

Read more...

Google Talk Goes To iPhone

Attention iPhone owners! You can now chat with all your Google Talk buddies while on the go. Google Talk team has just released in the US a new version of Google Talk designed specifically for the iPhone and iPod Touch browsers. In addition to sending your friends Gmail messages from your iPhone, you can now chat with them while you're on the move, too! In your iPhone browser, just go to www.google.com/talk, sign in and start chatting. That's it. Google Talk runs entirely in the browser so there's no need to download or install anything.

There are some differences from using Google Talk on your computer. For instance, in order to receive instant messages with Google Talk on your iPhone, the application needs to be open in your Safari browser. When you navigate away to another browser window or application, your status will be changed to "unavailable" and your Google Talk session will be restarted when you return.

Other than that, interface design is almost similar to one we use on desktop. You can select from a quicklist of the people you contact most, search your contacts, and manage multiple conversations. And because it is built for the browser, it will work on today's iPhones as well as on tomorrow's 3G iPhones.

Read more...

Google Improves Algorithm For Indexing Textual Content In Flash Files

Google has been developing a new algorithm for indexing textual content in Flash files of all kinds, from Flash menus, buttons and banners, to self-contained Flash websites. Recently, Google has improved the performance of this Flash indexing algorithm by integrating Adobe's Flash Player technology.

In the past, web designers faced challenges if they chose to develop a site in Flash because the content they included was not indexable by search engines. They needed to make extra effort to ensure that their content was also presented in another way that search engines could find.

Now that Google has launched it’s Flash indexing algorithm, web designers can expect improved visibility of their published Flash content, and you can expect to see better search results and snippets.

Below is Q&A from Google Webmaster Central Blog:

Q: Which Flash files can Google better index now?

We've improved our ability to index textual content in SWF files of all kinds. This includes Flash "gadgets" such as buttons or menus, self-contained Flash websites, and everything in between.

Q: What content can Google better index from these Flash files?

All of the text that users can see as they interact with your Flash file. If your website contains Flash, the textual content in your Flash files can be used when Google generates a snippet for your website. Also, the words that appear in your Flash files can be used to match query terms in Google searches.

In addition to finding and indexing the textual content in Flash files, we're also discovering URLs that appear in Flash files, and feeding them into our crawling pipeline—just like we do with URLs that appear in non-Flash webpages. For example, if your Flash application contains links to pages inside your website, Google may now be better able to discover and crawl more of your website.

Q: What about non-textual content, such as images?

At present, we are only discovering and indexing textual content in Flash files. If your Flash files only include images, we will not recognize or index any text that may appear in those images. Similarly, we do not generate any anchor text for Flash buttons which target some URL, but which have no associated text.

Also note that we do not index FLV files, such as the videos that play on YouTube, because these files contain no text elements.

Q: How does Google "see" the contents of a Flash file?

We've developed an algorithm that explores Flash files in the same way that a person would, by clicking buttons, entering input, and so on. Our algorithm remembers all of the text that it encounters along the way, and that content is then available to be indexed. We can't tell you all of the proprietary details, but we can tell you that the algorithm's effectiveness was improved by utilizing Adobe's new Searchable SWF library.

Q: What do I need to do to get Google to index the text in my Flash files?

Basically, you don't need to do anything. The improvements that we have made do not require any special action on the part of web designers or webmasters. If you have Flash content on your website, we will automatically begin to index it, up to the limits of our current technical ability (see next question).
That said, you should be aware that Google is now able to see the text that appears to visitors of your website. If you prefer Google to ignore your less informative content, such as a "copyright" or "loading" message, consider replacing the text within an image, which will make it effectively invisible to us.

Q: What are the current technical limitations of Google's ability to index Flash?

There are three main limitations at present, and we are already working on resolving them:

1. Googlebot does not execute some types of JavaScript. So if your web page loads a Flash file via JavaScript, Google may not be aware of that Flash file, in which case it will not be indexed.

2. We currently do not attach content from external resources that are loaded by your Flash files. If your Flash file loads an HTML file, an XML file, another SWF file, etc., Google will separately index that resource, but it will not yet be considered to be part of the content in your Flash file.

3. While we are able to index Flash in almost all of the languages found on the web, currently there are difficulties with Flash content written in bidirectional languages. Until this is fixed, we will be unable to index Hebrew language or Arabic language content from Flash files.

Read more...

Google Is Retiring AdSense Referrals

During the last week of August, the AdSense referrals feature will be retired for both AdWords advertiser products and Google products. Now advertisers and publishers will have only two alternatives : AdSense for content and DoubleClick Performics Affiliate.

Beginning in late August, any remaining referral ads on your site will no longer work, and will appear as blank space on your website. In order to prevent a decrease in your AdSense earnings, Google recommends to replace all referral ad code on your sites with AdSense for content ad code prior to the last week of August. You can get this ad code by signing in to your AdSense account, selecting the AdSense Setup tab, and choosing AdSense for content as the product.

As part of the integration of DoubleClick, the DoubleClick Performics Affiliate Network will now operate as the Google Affiliate Network for advertisers targeting users located in the United States. Similar to the AdSense Referrals program, the Google Affiliate Network enables publishers to apply for advertiser programs and get paid based on
advertiser-defined actions instead of clicks or impressions.

Once Adsense referral is closed, no more clicks will be tracked and recorded for referrals. If a user completes the advertiser's required action within 30 days of clicking on your ad, earnings will accrue to your account through the end of September. After that time, you will no longer be able to earn money from referral ads. Your payments won't be affected; you'll continue to be paid once you've reached the payment threshold.

Read more...

‘Google Affiliate Network’ To Connect Advertisers & Publishers

Google Affiliate Network connects advertisers and publishers who want to increase sales and drive leads through affiliate marketing.

As an advertiser using Google Affiliate Network, you'll discover pre-screened publishers who can refer consumer traffic to you. As a publisher, you can market your site to advertisers in the network; if selected to participate in an advertiser's program, you'll earn a percent of sales or a referral bounty.

Google Affiliate Network offers:

• Industry-leading advertiser and publisher service
• Rigorous network quality standards
• Reliable conversion tracking
• Detailed reporting
• Automated payments to publishers
• Simple link and creative delivery tools
• Flexible commissions
• Access to top brands on the web

For Advertisers

Google Affiliate Network helps advertisers to attract quality publishers which in turn drive more sales. With Google Affiliate Network, you can manage a custom affiliate marketing program and attract publishers to grow your affiliate channel. More …

For Publishers

Google Affiliate Network connects publishers to quality advertisers and help them discover new advertiser referral programs and generate more revenue. More …

Performics was founded as the first full-service affiliate network in 1998 and was acquired by DoubleClick in 2004. Google acquired the DoubleClick Performics Affiliate operations in March 2008. Today Performics Affiliate operates as Google Affiliate Network and remains committed to delivering affiliate channel growth for advertisers and publishers.

Read more...

Google Is Playing With Adsense Fonts

I recently observed the change in adsense ads fonts on my blog as well as on my startup site. I don’t know whether any of you have observed the same thing or not.

Well, it looks like google is playing with adsense fonts to help adsense publishers to increase the revenue. I captured few screenshots (728x90 Ads) that clearly indicates the change in adsense font as below:

By looking at these screenshots one can easily figure out the kind of experiment google is doing with adsense fonts.

Discussion on WebmasterWorld tells that many people observed the change in adsense fonts while refreshing the page. Couple of people observed the “comic sans” fonts in ads.

Read more...

Turn Your PC Into Television Using Google Media Server

Televisions were most popular in old days. You can get news, watch movies and do much more. However these days computers are becoming dominant in the area of news, music, games and other entertainments as whatever you want to listen or watch, you can store as well as access everything through PC.

To make your PC a perfect entertainment device, Google recently released a gadget called Google Media Server.

Google Media Server is a Windows application that aims to bridge the gap between Google and your TV. It uses Google Desktop technology such as Desktop gadgets for the administration tool and Google Desktop Search to locate media files. All you need is a PC running Google Desktop and a UPnP-enabled device (e.g. a PlayStation 3). At the touch of a button, you can then:

• Access videos, music, and photos stored on your PC
• View Picasa Web Albums
• Play your favorite YouTube videos

Below is a screenshot of Google Media server.

Read more...

Blogger.com Rocks With the Introduction Of Lots Of New Features

Blogger in Draft, a draft version of blogger.com, has released lots of new features yesterday that will surely rock your blog. Below is a list of all new features that they released.

1. Star Rating

With this new Star Ratings feature, your readers can easily rate your posts — or the things you post about — from one star to five stars with a single click, right from the post footer.

Think of Star Ratings as a mini-poll for each of your posts. If you blog about fashion, food, crafts, quotes, or art, this will be particularly useful to you.

To enable Star Ratings, log it to http://draft.blogger.com/ and go to your Layouts page. From there, click the “Edit” link for the Blog Posts page element and then check the “Show Star Ratings” checkbox.

You can customize the location of the stars within the post by dragging the preview around in the “Arrange Items” box.

Notes

• This is a Layouts-only feature. If you’re using a Classic template you’ll need to upgrade to Layouts to add Star Ratings.
• The star ratings widget should blend seamlessly with most solid-colored blog backgrounds (one exception is Rounders, where the edges of the widget will be visible via a color change). The text and background colors for the ratings are taken from the following skin variables:
  • Foreground: textcolor, textColor
  • Backrgound: mainBgColor, bgcolor
• If you have customized your blog widget’s template you may not see the Star Ratings. You will need to either reset your blog widget’s template or copy the Star Ratings code from a fresh template.

2. Webmaster Tools for Blogger

Ever wonder why your blog shows up where it does in the Google search rankings? With this new Webmaster Tools integration that information is just a click or two away.

Webmaster Tools is a Google service that provides you with detailed information about your website’s visibility to Google’s search engine. You can see how often Google’s web crawlers visit your site, find out who links to your site, what searches are used to find your site, and even control how your page appears in the Google web results.

You will find a new link from the Blogger in Draft dashboard to take you directly to Webmaster Tools. If you follow it, blogger.com will automatically add all your blogs to Webmaster Tools and verify them for you. From there, you can poke around and learn about how Google search sees your blog.

You can learn more about Webmaster Tools at Google’s Webmaster Help Center.

3. Embedded Comment Form

Many of us don’t like the existing comment form as it’s on a separate page from the post, styled in a way that doesn’t match the blog. Well, this new embedded comment form addresses that by putting the comment form where your readers expect it: at the bottom of the post.

To turn on the embedded comment form, log in to http://draft.blogger.com/ and go to Settings > Comments for your blog. You’ll see that the “Show comments in a popup window?” setting has been replaced with the new “Comment Form Placement” setting. Just click “Embedded below post,” save your settings, and go check out a post to see your new comment form.