[G] Introducing the Google Chrome OS

Official Google Blog: Introducing the Google Chrome OS

It's been an exciting nine months since we launched the Google Chrome browser. Already, over 30 million people use it regularly. We designed Google Chrome for people who live on the web — searching for information, checking email, catching up on the news, shopping or just staying in touch with friends. However, the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web. So today, we're announcing a new project that's a natural extension of Google Chrome — the Google Chrome Operating System. It's our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be.

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we're already talking to partners about the project, and we'll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve.

Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We're designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don't have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.

Google Chrome OS will run on both x86 as well as ARM chips and we are working with multiple OEMs to bring a number of netbooks to market next year. The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform.

Google Chrome OS is a new project, separate from Android. Android was designed from the beginning to work across a variety of devices from phones to set-top boxes to netbooks. Google Chrome OS is being created for people who spend most of their time on the web, and is being designed to power computers ranging from small netbooks to full-size desktop systems. While there are areas where Google Chrome OS and Android overlap, we believe choice will drive innovation for the benefit of everyone, including Google.

We hear a lot from our users and their message is clear — computers need to get better. People want to get to their email instantly, without wasting time waiting for their computers to boot and browsers to start up. They want their computers to always run as fast as when they first bought them. They want their data to be accessible to them wherever they are and not have to worry about losing their computer or forgetting to back up files. Even more importantly, they don't want to spend hours configuring their computers to work with every new piece of hardware, or have to worry about constant software updates. And any time our users have a better computing experience, Google benefits as well by having happier users who are more likely to spend time on the Internet.

We have a lot of work to do, and we're definitely going to need a lot of help from the open source community to accomplish this vision. We're excited for what's to come and we hope you are too. Stay tuned for more updates in the fall and have a great summer.

Posted by Sundar Pichai, VP Product Management and Linus Upson, Engineering Director

URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/introducing-google-chrome-os.html

[G] Segment your Traffic with the User Defined Report

Google Analytics Blog: Segment your Traffic with the User Defined Report

Have you ever been in the Visitors section of your favorite Google Analytics profile and wondered what the heck “User-Defined” was? Well today it's time to find out.

So, what is “User-Defined?"

The user defined variable allows you to "label" a visitor if they complete a certain action on your site, such as making a purchase or visiting a key page. These labels are useful because they last across multiple visits to your site.

These labels are often called Custom Segments (or Custom Segmentation). You can see the data from these Custom Segments in the User Defined report, which is the last report of the Visitors section in Google Analytics.

How do I add these “labels” to my website visitors?

Making use of the User-Defined report in Google Analytics requires a bit of extra coding help from your IT department or webmaster, but it’s often well worth the effort.

For example, let’s say that I want to add a label of “customers” to any visitor who reaches my shopping cart’s receipt page. In order to do this, I would add an additional line of code to the Google Analytics Tracking Code (GATC) on my receipt page. It would then look something like this:

<script type="text/javascript"> var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www."); document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E")); </script> <script type="text/javascript"> try { var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-XXXXXXX-1"); pageTracker._trackPageview(); pageTracker._setVar(”customers”); } catch(err) {}</script>

Notice the line in bold that includes _setVar. When this is present on a page within the Google Analytics Tracking Code, an additional cookie (called the __utmv cookie) gets set on a visitor’s computer, with its sole purpose being to identify the visitor by the label (or value) that you used in the code. If you take a look at the code example above, you will see that I used the term “customers,“ the label that I want to appear in the User Defined report.

Now, on their next visit to the site, they will be identified as a part of the “customers” segment in the User Defined report, allowing you to perform analysis on all visitors who have purchased something from your online store. Neat, huh?

Can I use _setVar when someone clicks on a link instead of visiting a page?

Yes - you can also use the pageTracker._setVar function when someone clicks on an important link on your site, or makes a key selection on an important form that you want visitors to fill out. For example, if you wanted to add a custom label to any visitor who clicks on your “Live Help” applet, you can ask your IT department or webmaster to add an “onClick” event, and give them the following line of code:

onClick="pageTracker._setVar('Needs Help');"

What will this look like in the end?

When all of your coding is complete, check the User Defined report after about a day or so and you should see something like this:

After the data has been collected by Google Analytics, you can interact with it just like you would with any other report. Click on the “Goal Conversion” tab directly above the table to see how many customers have reached key pages of your site, or use the dimensioning feature to see what sources of traffic were responsible for bringing these special visitors to your website!

Are there any other ways to use _setVar?

One neat usage of the _setVar function is to use it to exclude your own traffic from reports when using a dynamic IP address. For example, let’s say that you wanted to exclude your entire company’s traffic from appearing in reports, and your company uses dynamic IP addresses.

Because it would be nearly impossible to write a filter to exclude traffic from a dynamic IP address, you can create an HTML page that is not a part of your website and add Google Analytics Tracking Code with the call to _setVar and a label of “employees” (or something similar).

Next, you can ask each employee to visit that page from their browser of choice – this will drop a cookie on their computer, identifying them as “employees.” Finally, you can then apply a filter with the following specifications to your profile, and your internal traffic will be excluded:

• Filter Type: Custom Filter >> Exclude
• Filter Field: User Defined
• Filter Pattern: employees
• Case Sensitive: No

Some technical notes about Custom Segmentation:

1. As we just talked about, when a person visits a page calling the _setVar function, the __utmv cookie is set on their computer. This is a persistent, first-party cookie that has a lifetime of two years. This means that every time a user with a __utmv cookie returns to your site, the label assigned to the user will continue to identify them as such until they either delete the cookie or visit another page with another call to _setVar with a different label.
   
   
2. The purpose behind something like a User-Defined report - and Custom Segmentation in general - is that it is not designed to be updated very often. This label, for the most part, should be a permanent one for a visitor. You should only use _setVar on pages like a receipt page of a shopping cart, or an account registration “success” page for a visitor who becomes a member of your site. You shouldn’t use _setVar on your homepage, or use several different _setVar’s with different labels scattered across many pages of your website.
   
   
3. Google Analytics - at this time - only has the capacity to store one custom segment at any one time for one website. So if you are using multiple calls to _setVar on your site, Google Analytics can only store the latest value that a visitor runs into in the __utmv cookie. John Henson at LunaMetrics – a fellow Google Analytics Authorized Consultant - has created a custom version of the Google Analytics Tracking Code that can support multiple custom segment labels at any one time.
   
   
4. On the other hand, Google Analytics uses what they call the “first association” of the session for visitor session calculations. If you are using multiple calls to _setVar on your site, be aware that if a user runs into the first one, and then runs into the second one in the same visit, their Goal Conversion and Pages per Visit metrics would be attributed to the label of the first encounter with _setVar.
   
   
5. For page view calculations, Google Analytics uses the most recently defined value. So if a person runs into the second instance of _setVar on your site, all of their pageviews afterwards - including the current pageview - will be attributed to the second _setVar’s label, even though as we just learned in #4 above, visitor session information is attributed to the first encounter of _setVar.

A full, technical explanation of _setVar and the User-Defined Report can be found here.

Summary

The User Defined report in Google Analytics is a great place to start segmenting your traffic. With a little bit of help from your IT department, you can not only begin to collect awesome data, but you can also begin to gain advanced knowledge about what makes your VIP website visitors register, sign-up for your newsletter, or purchase something from your online store. This will definitely help you become that Analysis Ninja that Avinash Kaushik loves to talk about!

Written by Joe Teixeira of MoreVisibility, a Google Analytics Authorized Consultant.

URL: http://analytics.blogspot.com/2009/07/segment-your-traffic-with-user-defined.html

[G] Help customers find their way with new Google Maps gadget

Official Google Enterprise Blog: Help customers find their way with new Google Maps gadget

Last week, I looked up directions to the hotel in Sacramento that I had booked for the Fourth of July weekend. As I had never been to that part of the state before, I was puzzled by the limited directions offered by their website - I had no idea whether I was approaching from the North, South, East or West or where the major highways were. What I needed were step-by-step directions from my exact starting point to the hotel that I could easily print and go.

With the new directions gadget from Google Maps, any business can offer just that. This simple gadget allows webmasters to add customized Google Maps directions to their business locations. With the directions gadget, you no longer need to type and update multiple sets of text directions. Let's face it: customers are only looking for directions from their specific location.

Google has made this process easy for you. The gadget allows you to pre-fill the "To" field with one or multiple addresses, a generic zip code or even a specific set of latitude-longitude coordinates. Customers are able to print their directions with a single click. And if they would prefer not to drive, the gadget also provides walking and public transit directions.

Take a look at how Legoland California, Emeril Lagasse, and Harvard University are using the gadget. And then test and create your own directions gadget here. For the many locations outside of the US, the gadget is available in 23 different languages.

If you're interested in learning more, head over to the Google Lat Long blog for a more detailed walk-through of the gadget's features.

Posted by Julie Zhou, Product Marketing Manager, Google Maps team

URL: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2009/07/help-customers-find-their-way-with-new.html

[G] Site maintenance on Saturday, July 11

Inside AdSense: Site maintenance on Saturday, July 11

This Saturday, July 11th, our engineers will be performing routine maintenance. While you won't be able to access your AdSense and Ad Manager accounts from 10am to approximately 2pm PDT, your ad serving and targeting won't be affected. In addition, your clicks, impressions, and earnings will continue to be recorded as normal.

We've converted the maintenance start time for a few cities around the world:

London - 6pm Saturday
Cairo - 8pm Saturday
Agra - 10:30pm Saturday
Singapore - 1am Sunday
Brisbane - 3am Sunday

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

URL: http://adsense.blogspot.com/2009/07/site-maintenance-on-saturday-july-11.html

[G] 7 Deadly Sins of Landing Page Design webinar ready for viewing

Official Google Website Optimizer Blog: 7 Deadly Sins of Landing Page Design webinar ready for viewing

Last week, Tim Ash, one of our Website Optimizer Authorized Consultants, gave a webinar on the 7 Deadly Sins of Landing Page Design. In this webinar he exposes common errors in landing page design that might be holding back your conversion rate and shows you how you can fix them. If you missed it, or if you just want to review your sins, you'll be happy to know the webinar is now on the Website Optimizer YouTube channel.

While you're visiting our channel, have a look around. We have a bunch of videos including conference sessions, previous webinars, and helpful tips.

Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Website Optimizer team

URL: http://websiteoptimizer.blogspot.com/2009/07/7-deadly-sins-of-landing-page-design.html

[G] Releasing Neatx, an Open Source NX Server

Google Open Source Blog: Releasing Neatx, an Open Source NX Server

We at Google have been looking at remote desktop technologies for quite a while. The good old X Window system can be used over the network, but it has issues with network latency and bandwidth. Neatx remedies some of these issues.

In 2003, NoMachine released a large portion of the source code of their NX product under the GPL licence. NX is a protocol compressing X requests and reducing round-trips. Although mostly Open Source, NoMachine's NX product contains one closed component, the NX server. It's the part connecting clients with the Open Source libraries doing the work.

A free implementation of an NX server based on NoMachine's libraries named FreeNX was published in 2004 by Fabian Franz. FreeNX's primary target is to replace the one closed component and is written in a mix of several thousand lines of BASH, Expect and C, making FreeNX difficult to maintain.

Last week, we released the source code of our own proof-of-concept implementation of an NX server, Neatx. Designed from scratch with flexibility and maintainability in mind, Neatx minimizes the number of involved processes and all code is split into several libraries. It is written in Python, with the exception of very few wrapper scripts in BASH and one program written in C for performance reasons. Neatx was also able to reuse some code from another Google Open Source project, Ganeti. The code still has some issues, but we're confident interested developers will be able to fix them.

Also, Neatx implements features not found in FreeNX, such as the drop-down menu for session control in rootless sessions. At the same time, not all of FreeNX's features are implemented in Neatx.

Michael Hanselmann gave a presentation at FISL 10 in Porto Alegre, Brazil describing our implementation and use of virtual workstations (slides: PDF, 200 KB).

More information and the code can be found at the Neatx code.google.com project. You can also send us questions and feedback on the Neatx discussion list. Happy hacking!

By Euan Guttridge, Stephen Shirley and Michael Hanselmann, Systems Administration Team

URL: http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2009/07/releasing-neatx-open-source-nx-servier.html

[G] Help customers find their way with new Google Maps gadget

Inside AdWords: Help customers find their way with new Google Maps gadget

As an AdWords advertiser, it's important for you that potential customers find you on the Internet. If your business has one or more physical locations, it's just as important that customers can find where you are.

To help your customers find your business locations, you can now add customized directions to your website from Google Maps. With the Google Maps directions gadget, you no longer need to write out and update multiple sets of directions from the North, South, East or West. After all, customers are looking only for directions from their specific location, and they may not know which direction they're coming from.

(click to view larger image)

We wanted to make the process of implementing the gadget on your web site easy for you. You can pre-fill the "To" field with one or multiple addresses, a generic zip code or even a set of latitude-longitude coordinates. Customers only need to enter where they're coming from and are able to print their directions with a single click. And if they would prefer not to drive, the gadget also provides walking and public transit directions.

(click to view larger image)

Take a look at how Legoland California, Emeril Lagasse, and Harvard University are using the gadget. Then test and create your own directions gadget here. The Google Maps gadget is available in 23 languages.

If you're interested in learning more, head over to the Google Lat Long blog for a more detailed walkthrough of the gadget's features.

Posted by Austin Rachlin, Inside AdWords crew

URL: http://adwords.blogspot.com/2009/07/help-customers-find-their-way-with-new.html

[G] Lost a tab? Not to worry.

Google Chrome Blog: Lost a tab? Not to worry.

Google Chrome has a lot of features that make your browsing easier, but you might not notice them all right away. This is because we've taken great care to keep our design clean, so features don't get in your way when you're not using them. A great example of this is our session restore functionality, which lets you reopen tabs and windows you recently closed. Here's how to use it:



Posted by Nick Baum, Google Chrome team

URL: http://chrome.blogspot.com/2009/07/lost-tab-not-to-worry.html

[G] Books Are Full of Visual Gems: 19th century fashion edition!

Inside Google Books: Books Are Full of Visual Gems: 19th century fashion edition!

Posted by Ryan Sands, Google Books Online Team

It may come as no surprise to the book nerds out there (you know who you are), but the annals of written history are full of visual gems.

When you come across something amazing in a public domain title scanned via our library project, you can simply snag the chunk of text or image using our Share this Clip feature in Google Books (). Then, simply take the Embed HTML code and copy and paste it in to your site or blog to add it.

Today, on the birthday of fashion designer Pierre Cardin, I was thinking about the shifting trends of fashion and their depiction in print media. Exquisite (and often hilarious) public domain materials from the early days of American fashion magazines can be found within the archives of Google Books. This includes complete issues of Harper's Magazine and The Delineator, one of the premier women's fashion magazine at the turn of the century.

I used the Share this Clip feature to pull together this small collection of 19th and early 20th century fashion writing. Simply click any image to view the original book source!

[Please note, some content may not be available in full view to users outside of the United States.]


Harper's Magazine


The Delineator


Fashion in Deformity by William Henry Flower


Etiquette in society, in Business, in Politics and at Home by Emily Post


Harper's Magazine


School Sewing Based on Home Problems by Ida Robinson Burton

URL: http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2009/07/books-are-full-of-visual-gems-19th.html

[G] Google Apps Standard Edition: still free

Official Google Enterprise Blog: Google Apps Standard Edition: still free

We've heard some questions about why the link to Google Apps Standard Edition disappeared from the Enterprise Apps home page, so we wanted to share the answer. As we explored a few design changes to the page, the link to Standard Edition was inadvertently dropped, although the free version of Apps was, as always, available here. We've put the link back where it belongs so that it's easy to find.

We have no intention of eliminating Standard Edition, and we apologize for any confusion.

In other news, we've taken Google Apps out of beta today. You can read more about that here.

Posted by Ellen Leanse, Google Enterprise team

Get timely updates on new features in Google Apps by subscribing to our RSS feed or email alerts.

URL: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2009/07/google-apps-standard-edition-still-free.html

[G] Removing the beta label

Official Google Docs Blog: Removing the beta label

If you look closely in the upper left hand corner of Google Docs later in the day, you'll notice that we've removed the small grey word "beta" from our logo. We're dropped our "beta" label today along with the other Google Apps (Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Talk). You can read more about this change on the Official Google Blog.

Over the past year, we've launched hundreds of features and product improvements to Google Docs, many of which we've documented on this blog and our What's New page. We still have a long "to do" list of features and enhancements that we're actively working on. Look for these changes over the coming months and years.

Posted by: Jonathan Rochelle, Group Product Manager, Google Docs

URL: http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2009/07/removing-beta-label.html

[G] Gmail leaves beta, launches "Back to Beta" Labs feature

Official Gmail Blog: Gmail leaves beta, launches "Back to Beta" Labs feature

Posted by Keith Coleman, Gmail Product Director

We get asked all the time why Google keeps its products in beta for so long. And Gmail, five years after launch, is consistently a subject of this questioning, even of jokes.

Some people thought that once we opened sign-ups, Gmail should have come out of beta.

Others said that once we integrated chat, developed new anti-spam technology, expanded to 53 languages, shipped a mobile app, added group chat, launched an iPhone UI, added a vacation autoresponder, launched Gmail Labs, subsequently modified the vacation autoresponder with a Gmail Lab, launched 48 other Labs, launched video chat, enabled open protocols and APIs (POP, auto-forwarding, IMAP, and the Contacts Data API), let you POP mail in from other accounts, added a delete button, rearchitected our entire javascript code base, and added key functionality to get large companies, startups, universities, and many other organizations (in addition to Google itself) running on Gmail, we should have come out of beta.

Some people think we should wait until we launch < one of ongoing secret projects >.

Others say that, over the last five years, a beta culture has grown around web apps, such that the very meaning of "beta" is debatable. And rather than the packaged, stagnant software of decades past, we're moving to a world of rapid developmental cycles where products like Gmail continue to change indefinitely.

The end result (many visible and invisible changes later) is that today, beta is a thing of the past. Not just for Gmail, but for all of Google Apps — Gmail, Calendar, Docs, and Talk.

However, we realize that after five years, this leaves some of you wrestling with some tough questions. How will you ever get used to using Gmail without that familiar grey "BETA" text greeting you when you log in everyday? What example will you cite the next time you make an internet joke about perpetual betas? Don't despair... for those of you long-time Gmail-ers who might feel some separation anxiety, we've got a solution. Just go to Settings, click on Labs, turn on "Back to Beta," and it'll be like Gmail never left beta at all.

URL: http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/gmail-leaves-beta-launches-back-to-beta.html

[G] Paving the road to Apps adoption in large enterprises

Official Google Enterprise Blog: Paving the road to Apps adoption in large enterprises

Google Apps has always been a compelling offering for small and medium sized companies, and they've accounted for much of our growth to 1.75 million businesses. Large enterprises can also get great results with Apps, as Fairchild Semiconductor and the dozens of other big companies that have Gone Google have discovered. Still, we appreciate that there have been some boulders along the road to adoption for the largest businesses in the world.

Since the beginning of the year, we've focused on making it as easy as possible for those large enterprises to switch to Google, and offline access, BlackBerry and Microsoft Outlook support, and enterprise contact management were the dynamite that cleared the road to Apps.

Today we're paving the road. We're taking the beta label off of Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Talk to remove any doubt that Apps is a mature product suite.

We're also launching a tool that will be particularly useful to administrative support staff to screen and send email on behalf of others – a feature called email delegation. And to help customers comply with regulations that may exist specific to their industry, we're adding email retention so that IT administrators can set up policies to determine when email will be purged. Both retention and delegation are in testing with customers, and will start rolling out to all Premier edition domains over the next weeks.

Finally, we're continuing to implement additional procedures to ensure that our business customers enjoy even greater reliability: live replication of data to other locations for near-instant disaster recovery, and special handling of business users' data in our data center operations.

While we believe these features will be most useful to big companies, we hope they'll also help today's small business grow into tomorrow's global enterprise. To complement these new features, enterprise IT managers can access tools for switching to Google Apps in our Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes resource centers.

Posted by Rajen Sheth, Senior Product Manager, Google Apps

Get timely updates on new features in Google Apps by subscribing to our RSS feed or email alerts.

URL: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2009/07/paving-road-to-apps-adoption-in-large.html

[G] Google Apps is out of beta (yes, really)

Official Google Blog: Google Apps is out of beta (yes, really)

We're often asked why so many Google applications seem to be perpetually in beta. For example, Gmail has worn the beta tag more than five years. We realize this situation puzzles some people, particularly those who subscribe to the traditional definition of "beta" software as not being yet ready for prime time.

Ever since we launched the Google Apps suite for businesses two years ago, it's had a service level agreement, 24/7 support, and has met or exceeded all the other standards of non-beta software. More than 1.75 million companies around the world run their business on Google Apps, including Google. We've come to appreciate that the beta tag just doesn't fit for large enterprises that aren't keen to run their business on software that sounds like it's still in the trial phase. So we've focused our efforts on reaching our high bar for taking products out of beta, and all the applications in the Apps suite have now met that mark.

Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Talk — both enterprise and consumer versions — are now out of beta. "Beta" will be removed from the product logos today, but we'll continue to innovate and improve upon the applications whether or not there's a small "beta" beneath the logo. Indeed, today we're also announcing some other Google Apps features that we think will appeal to large enterprises: mail delegation, mail retention and ongoing enhancements to Apps reliability.

We have much more in store, and IT managers can read more about how to make the switch to Apps in our Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes resource centers. One more thing — for those who still like the look of "beta", we've made it easy to re-enable the beta label for Gmail from the Labs tab under Settings.

Posted by Matthew Glotzbach, Director, Product Management, Google Enterprise

URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/google-apps-is-out-of-beta-yes-really.html

[G] Help customers find their way with new Google Maps gadget

Google LatLong: Help customers find their way with new Google Maps gadget

Last week, I looked up directions to the hotel in Sacramento that I had booked for the 4th of July weekend. As I had never been to that part of the state before, I was puzzled by the directions offered by their website - I wasn't whether I was approaching from the North, South, East or West or where the major highways were. What I needed were step-by-step directions from my exact starting point to the hotel that I could easily print and go.

With the new directions gadget from Google Maps, any business can offer just that. This simple gadget allows webmasters to add customized Google Maps directions to their business locations. With the directions gadget, you no longer need to type and update multiple sets of text directions. Let's face it: customers are only looking for directions from their specific location.
Google has made this process easy for you. The gadget allows you to pre-fill the "To" field with one or multiple addresses. Customers are then able to print their directions with a single click. And if they would prefer not to drive, the gadget also provides walking and public transit directions.

Second, if someone entered a vague starting address, they would have the option to specify a more exact address, which will then fly into the "From" field.

Providing directions from Google Maps is very flexible; in addition to run-of-the-mill addresses, you can give your customers directions to everything from a generic ZIP code to a specific set of latitude-longitude coordinates for any of your locations.

Example destinations:
123 River St, Woods, MA
90210
42.06782° N, 71.756963° W

You can also give your address an alias, or a name that everyone will understand, particularly if your business has more than one location. You can do this by putting the alias in parentheses just after the address:

42.06782° N, 71.756963° W (Grandma's House)
Take a look at how Legoland California, Emeril Lagasse, and Harvard University are using the gadget. And then test and create your own directions gadget here. For the many locations outside of the US, the gadget is available in 23 different languages.

Posted by Julie Zhou, Associate Product Marketing Manager

URL: http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2009/07/help-customers-find-their-way-with-new.html

[G] Auto-disabling: experimentation auto-pilot

Official Google Website Optimizer Blog: Auto-disabling: experimentation auto-pilot

When you run an experiment with Website Optimizer, you're testing new content to see whether it improves your conversion rate. We can often find big winners, but, of course, some of our variations are going to be losers in that they perform significantly worse than our original content.

While you've been able to disable poor performing variations on your own for some time now, you needed to sign in, check your reports, and manually prune away the losers. No longer! Today, Website Optimizer adds a new feature: auto-disabling.

With auto-disabling, Website Optimizer will automatically prune poor performing variations for you. This keeps overall conversion rate high while testing. Additionally, by removing poor variations automatically, your traffic is focused on only the variations that have a chance at winning, which means experiments should complete faster. Lastly, we think auto-disabling gives you more freedom to try really big changes. If that crazy variation just doesn't work out, it'll be disabled. And if you've been anxious about running a test, you should be able to relax knowing that a losing variation won't hurt your overall conversion rate.

Auto-disabling is available for any Website Optimizer experiment with more than two variations (i.e. you can't use it for an A/B test, but you could for an A/B/C test). You can enable it from the experiment settings page. You can read more about setting up auto-disabling in this Help Center article.

Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Website Optimizer team

URL: http://websiteoptimizer.blogspot.com/2009/07/auto-disabling-experimentation-auto.html

[G] Scary Shorts in the Screening Room

YouTube Blog: Scary Shorts in the Screening Room

Been a while since your last good scare? Then check out the new round of short horror films in The YouTube Screening Room, our destination for top independent films from the film festival circuit.



This series of shorts, which have played at some of the world's most prestigious festivals, including Sundance, Tribeca and London, have something in common beyond their caliber. From sadistic serial killers to beautiful zombies to tales of romance gone horribly, horribly wrong, these films all take "twisted" to the next level.







This collection comes courtesy of Warner Bros.'s "The Orphan", coming to theaters July 24, which tells the story of a couple terrorized by the seemingly innocent child they adopt after the death of their baby girl.



Boo!



Sara Pollack


Entertainment Marketing Manager


The YouTube Team

URL: http://www.youtube.com/blog?entry=yTWCB-ziTLg

[G] Improving real estate search on Google Maps

Google LatLong: Improving real estate search on Google Maps

The web is becoming increasingly indispensable to people looking for a new home to buy. For example, you can use Street View to check out the neighborhood before driving to an open home; use driving directions to find out exactly how to get there; and Transit to work out what your new commute might be if you went ahead and moved house.

We want to keep making it easier for people find the real estate information they're looking for and have it returned to them in a useful way. So, from today, if you enter a query like <<homes for sale in san francisco>> on Google Maps, you'll see that we make it easy for you to see all your results on a map with a one-box that will take you to real estate listings. Previously, you had to specify "real estate" from the search options menu, but now we're making it easier to find available listings
You'll notice that we've made some other enhancements that will improve your real estate searching experience. We've added lots of markers that will show not only the ten most relevant listings with pins on the map, but also show a small circle on every other listing in that area using the search results layer, so you can get a really good idea of the distribution of properties for sale. You can click on each marker and each small circle to get more detailed information about the property.

This feature means you can now conduct a real estate search around a specific neighborhood, or see at a glance all the properties close to a BART stop. You can also pan the map to another area entirely to see listings there if you decide that another part of town is more your speed.

Finally, feedback from users has told us that it's more helpful for the address of a property to be in the headline of a listing rather than the number of beds and bathrooms as we were previously showing, so we've updated this too.

We've also expanded the feature to cover real estate in Australia and New Zealand properties for rent and sale, and made it easier to provide property listings for inclusion.

Check out maps.google.com/realestate to check out more information on how Google Maps can be a useful tool in your real estate search.

Posted by Andrew Foster, Product Manager

URL: http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2009/07/improving-real-estate-search-on-google.html

[G] Use YouTube to drive awareness and conversions

Inside AdWords: Use YouTube to drive awareness and conversions

If you'd like to expand your advertising to YouTube, consider using YouTube Promoted Videos. You can make a video about your business and then promote that video alongside relevant YouTube search results. Similar to AdWords, YouTube Promoted Videos lets you decide where you'd like your videos to appear on YouTube, place bids in an automated online auction, and set daily spending budgets.

Last week we launched "Call-to-Action," a new feature that allows you to add a clickable overlay to your Promoted Videos. This allows you to drive viewers to a website off-YouTube, which can help you drive more conversions and generate engaged, well-targeted traffic for your brand or product.

You can learn more about this new conversion feature of by visiting the recently launched YouTube Biz Blog. To start using Promoted Videos today, visit ads.youtube.com.

Posted by Amanda Kelly, Inside AdWords crew

URL: http://adwords.blogspot.com/2009/07/use-youtube-to-drive-awareness-and.html

[G] President Obama ate here

Google Public Policy Blog: President Obama ate here

Posted by Adam Kovacevich, Senior Manager, Global Communications and Public Affairs

Attention D.C.-area foodies: Alex Nicholson over at Brightest Young Things used the My Maps feature to make a Google Map of the area restaurants visited by the Obamas. Who knows where the first family's culinary explorations will take them next?

View Obama Ate Here in a larger map

URL: http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2009/07/president-obama-ate-here.html

[G] Partner Profile: Lijit

Blogger Buzz: Partner Profile: Lijit

Periodically, we profile a Blogger partner that can add functionality to your blog. This week we'd like to spotlight Lijit, a company building "search powered web applications for publishers" (that's you!). Lijit has made adding its "wijit" as easy as could be - just fill in your blog's URL and complete the sign-up wizard, you'll be good to go.

What does Lijit give you? For starters, Lijit provides a nice search tool for your site that will not only search your blog, but search the blogs of your friends, and all of the related sites (Flickr, YouTube, Picasa, del.icio.us bookmarks, etc.) that you and your friends use regularly.

Where Lijit shines is in the stats they gather for you: what are people searching for when they come to your blog? Once they arrive, what do they then look for? Where are they coming from? How has search traffic changed over time?

Best of all, Lijit lets you expose this info via a customizable "wijit" so that your visitors can see where other visitors are coming from and what they are looking for. To see this in action, take a look at Dark UFO's Lost Spoilers site, a Blogger blog focused on unraveling the mysteries surrounding the TV show Lost. The Lost Spoilers wijit shows not only the most recent searches that have brought visitors to the Lost Spoilers site:

It also shows a map of their visitors:

And finally it shows a list of the most recent visitors, their locations, and if they used a search to visit the site, the search term they used:

Interested? Give Lijit a try - just visit their site and you'll have it on your blog in just a few minutes!

URL: http://buzz.blogger.com/2009/07/partner-profile-lijit.html

[G] Update on New Channels

YouTube Blog: Update on New Channels

It's been a week since we announced that a new version of channels is coming, and we wanted to give you an update on our progress. Well over a million of you have now opted in to the beta, and many of your channels are looking really good -- we were just admiring shotscience's and muzik4machines's designs.



Your feedback over the past two months has shaped -- and will continue to shape -- the evolution of this whole site and particularly your channels. We've been hard at work fixing some of the bugs you've pointed out, as well as taking care of some of your top requests. For instance, we're happy to announce that we'll be supporting transparency so that your backgrounds can indeed shine through -- this will be done prior to switching over to the new channel design. And some of the bugs we've taken care of now include reducing the occasional sluggishness that some users have reported, as well as fixing the scrollbar that broke for some when ads appear. (For a longer list of fixes and additions, go to our beta blog.) We'll share more of our progress later, too.



As always, you can learn more about how to switch to the new version of channels by visiting our Help Center, where we also have some tips on setting things up. We also encourage you to continue pointing out bugs in the beta and letting us know how we can improve. Best places to comment are below in this blog, in our beta blog or in the comment portion of our announcement video.



Best,

Brian Glick

Product Manager

The YouTube Team

URL: http://www.youtube.com/blog?entry=HRQE8RjgHcQ

[G] Picking a good test page with Google Analytics

Official Google Website Optimizer Blog: Picking a good test page with Google Analytics

A common question we hear from users of Website Optimizer is, "What page should I test?" Of course, people have different opinions. For example, some experts say that you should never run a test on your homepage while others may disagree. We recommend taking a data-driven approach when choosing a test page. Simply put, test a page that needs improvement.

By using Google Analytics, you can find pages on your site that could most benefit from website testing. We've put together a short video showing how you can quickly identify these top choices:



Enjoy!

Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Website Optimizer team

URL: http://websiteoptimizer.blogspot.com/2009/07/picking-good-test-page-with-google.html

[G] Need a new number?

Google Voice Blog: Need a new number?

Your Google Voice number is tied to you rather than a device or a location, so it stays with you as you move, change jobs, or switch phone companies. Your forwading phones may change but your Google number remains the same, so you don't need to send out updates all the time about new numbers to reach you at.

But we also realize that there are times where you might want to change your Google number. Maybe you'd prefer to have a local number after moving to another area code. Or maybe you'd just like to find a more personalized number than what you have now to keep for the long term. For situations like these we have added the ability to change your Google Voice number. There is a one-time $10 charge for changing your number, and it can be done in your account settings within a few minutes.

Because changing phone number is rarely a smooth process -people to notify, forms to update, etc.. - we have added a few extra touches to make the process as painless as possible. After you pick a new number, it will become effective right away, but your old number will keep working for another three months, so you have time to update everyone. During that period, calls and SMS to both numbers will show in your account. And before your old number expires, we'll let you know who's still calling it so you can update them individually.

Posted by Vincent Paquet

URL: http://googlevoiceblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/need-new-number.html

[G] London Open Source Jam 13

Google Open Source Blog: London Open Source Jam 13

Here in London, we recently hosted London Open Source Jam 13 (Our 14th jam, as naturally we count from zero.) - unlucky for some, but not for us! We threw the floor open to talks of any kind and we had a bumper crop of lightning talks on a diverse range of topics. We learned how to make a wiki in 58 lines of python, why open source developers should care about open standards, some new approaches to database design, and a whole lot more.

Kai Hendry talked about Webconverger, a teeny weeny Linux Live CD designed for web kiosks, and his experience commercialising an open source project by offering services to go with it.

Zak Cohen shared his experiences using open source libraries in the games world in developing the award-winning game Climbactic. It turns out there's some great open source stuff out there, but sometimes paying for support is the only way to get the features you need.

Frederik Dohr and Mike Mahemoff spoke about TiddlyWeb, a generic RESTful store for structured data, and Scrumptious, a jQuery-based web app that allows people to annotate and comment on web pages, which uses TiddlyWeb for storage.

Other contributors included:

• Simon Stewart - Testing Google Wave with WebDriver
• Jon Skeet - The Dynamic Language Runtime and C# 4.0
• Zaheda Bhorat - Open Standards
• Ambikesh Jayal - Open source e-Learning middleware
• Paul Walmsley - Bayesian data modelling
• David Sheldon - Where's Java's CPAN?
• Robert Rees - Bazaar Wiki
• Rob McKinnon - Politics and representation
• Ivan De Marino - Caching templated CSS
• Matt Godbolt - Testing+Mobile
• Nicolas Roard - Seaside and Smalltalk
• Phil Dawes - New approaches to database server design

The OSJam website has more information about all the talks, and the photographs taken at the event are available on Picasa Web Albums.

We'll be planning the next OSJam for a couple of months' time - subscribe to the London Open Source Jam Group or keep any eye on the OSJam website (Atom feed) for more details.

By Malcolm Rowe and Matt Godbolt, Software Engineering Team

URL: http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2009/06/london-open-source-jam-13.html