Sergey Brin is telling employees to stop making old products and start improving new ones. "For example, said Chief Executive Eric Schmidt, Google plans to combine its spreadsheet, calendar and word-processing programs into one suite of Web-based applications."

The parents are gone – guess it’s time for a poker party today! (This is the screenshot of someone’s public Google Calendar which turned up in a calendar search... the calendar is titled “Personal”, though. Not sure if it was made public by accident, as doing so requires two clicks, one of them approving a specific warning asking for confirmation.)

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The buzz about BlogRush has rushed into the blogging world. Some bloggers joined the rushed and immediately signed up and installed the Blogrush widget into their respective blogs. While some just ignore the rush and proceed with their blogging chores.

For those who are not in the know, BlogRush is a new content syndication network that promises loads of traffic into members’ blogs for free through BlogRush widgets that contains feeds of blogs related to the niche of members’ blogs.

Call it the adsense of blog traffic generation where bloggers get no money but instead will get tons of blog traffic. But of course, if you are monetizing your blog, then those tons of traffic would eventually transcend into financial gains.

But that all depends on how successful BlogRush is and how much buzz and attention it would generate since it was launched a few days ago.

To achieve its goal of providing free traffic to members, BlogRush employs a pyramid-scheme whereby members can get more traffic everytime they refer a new member who would later on refer another user. So the more you refer the more traffic your blog will get.

So, why you shouldn’t rush into BlogRush? There are many answers but ultimately you are the one who must decide for your own blog.

efore signing up with BlogRush, you might want to read BlogRush Review. From there you would also learn how to sign up for a BlogRush account.

Hopefuly, this new gig would be successful. So, good luck to us all and may our traffic rush into infinity and beyond.

Google Docs and Spreadsheets obviously has a larger market share in the industry, after all with the Google name and marketing team behind it its bound to have few users out there. GD&S; is a great lightweight tool, but having the best MS Compatibility and the highest level of feature functionality of any online office suite has propelled us into the second spot.

While Google is attempting to become the platform of choice, with everything from Gmail to a news service, we have focused on the office functionality and delivering it in ways that no one else can:

* offline/online, and now a hybrid with ThinkFree Premium
* on-demand/on-premise
* tiered accessibility Power Edit (Java) / Quick Edit (AJAX) / Flash
* tiered sharing - private, shared restricted, shared unrestricted, read only, published

Blogger Play is the name of a new service by Google’s blogging platform. It shows random photos from recently published blog posts in the form of a slideshow. (Note the photos are not always safe for work, as they’re random. Google says they’re applying SafeSearch, but there’s still nudity sometimes.) Clicking on an individual picture takes you to the blog post in question in a new window or tab and pauses the slideshow.

I’m a fan of universal, simplistic interfaces, and Google’s speed slider to adjust the delay from picture to picture is a perfect example of this – a snail to the left, a running person to the right:

Even when you can’t find a universal self-explaining icon for your interface, you can still often find an icon that at least helps to get a short text label across visually. Sometimes, graphic icons can also impose risks as they may bring culture-specific connotations you didn’t think of. (As a hypothetical example, let’s say snails are a symbol of death in the culture of Sampleonia, and a running stickman with two speed lines always indicates an emergency exit there!) At other times an icon may be completely connotation-free which would also cause your interface to “break” (say snails aren’t known in Sampleonia). Sometimes, we also need to keep in mind that an icon becomes an idiom even though taken on its own it might carry the wrong connotation; a disk icon for saving is an example of that, because disks aren’t normally used for saving anymore... and still, the icon may be learned by many users and thus may make sense (in the case of a save icon a pen on paper icon may make more sense these days, but that was just an example).

Other than the neat interface Blogger Play is a bit of an “island” solution... I can’t find any RSS/ iGoogle gadget capabilities, and the page also doesn’t scale too well if you just embed it in a small window (and the JavaScript is obfuscated, hindering reverse-engineering of the Ajax, or whatever they use). All that’s really needed for this feature is an RSS feed with images embedded, so that it can then be plugged into other slideshow tools like Google’s own RSS-capable photo screensaver. However if you want to try build your own Blogger slideshow, you can also access the XML feed of recent Blogger changes.

Also see the Blogger Play FAQ.

[Via Googlified.]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

Google’s Webmaster tools keeps getting better and better as more features are rolled out. Aside from the new look of the webmaster tools interface which was recently introduced, the webmaster tools now tracks subscriber statistics of every blog that users listed in their respectective accounts. The subscriber statistics tracks down all subscription made to blog feeds of enrolled sites, using the different Google services such as iGoogle, Reader and Orkut.

To check subscriber statistics, login to webmaster central, select the blog, and choose the statistics options - subscriber stats. There you will see how many aggregate subscibers your blog has.

Other new features of Google’s Webmaster Tools interface are:

• Expanding and contracting sidebar replaces the old tab navigation,
• Easier product navigation through Breadcrumbs,
• Added new sidebar topics such as Overview, Diagnostics, Statistics, Links, Sitemaps, and Tools
• Additional language availability for the Webmaster Tools, Turkish and Romania

Google has announced a new version of Google Moon, which has been available for a while doesn’t get as much attention as other Google properties. This new version has a variety of updates, including high-resolution imagery, photos from every Apollo landing, panoramas of the moon’s surface, and text search (of course!) Google Moon’s at http://www.google.com/moon/ .

The first thing you’ll notice at the site is a series of little astronaut icons with flags. These are sites for Apollo landings. You can click on them to get summaries and pointers to more zoomed-in views and information on the missions. (Go to the Apollo 11 mission and click on placemark 10 for a panorama view. Awesome!)

And there is a text search as well. A search for crater found over 1800 results. Results are listed in text on the left and mapped on the right. Note that it appears that explanatory text from the missions is being mapped as well as feature names. You’ll also get varying amounts of results depending on how far you’re zoomed in/out. Zoom all the way out for max results. (And for some fun results, search for joke.)

There is a lot to see here but apparently Google is not satisfied and wants more. The company is offering a $20 million first prize to the team that can “successfully land a privately funded craft on the lunar surface and survive long enough to complete the mission goals of roaming about the lunar surface for at least 500 meters and sending a defined data package, called a “Mooncast”, back to Earth.” (The quote is from the Web site for the competition, http://www.googlelunarxprize.org/ .)

This post came from ResearchBuzz, a site with news and information about online data collections. Visit us at ResearchBuzz.com .

Wow, this is nice. The Yahoo blog has announced MapMixer, a way to overlay your own maps on to Yahoo Maps, and give your overlays Yahoo-Map-Like functionality. You can try it at http://maps.yahoo.com/mapmixer (you’ll need a Yahoo account.)

You can jump right in by uploading a map but I recommend browsing the existing maps to get an idea of how people are using the feature. Take a look at the Cerritos College map for an example of an overlay that crams a huge amount of information into what was a couple of blank blocks.

Note there’s a “layer opacity” slide bar in the upper right corner of the map that allows you to choose which layer of data is more prevalent. Sometimes the opacity tool is itself hard to find depending on how complicate the overlay is.

There are some limits to what you can do with the overlay. You can switch to satellite zoom without a problem, but I found that for some of the locations, switching to satellite was meaningless as pictures were not available for as close a zoom as the overlay. When the pictures WERE available, the overlay over a satellite image became very interesting (see this Los Angeles Convention Center map to do some zoom experimenting) Of course if you zoomed out too far you’d lose the overlay.

Uploading a map requires logging in to your Yahoo account, specifying an address, and then uploading an image. You can “point match” — specify two matching points on your and Yahoo’s map to allow Yahoo to align them. You can adjust the alignment as well if Yahoo doesn’t get it quite the way you want it. Note that all maps are searchable and public.

This is going to be a great tool for sites that have large areas that aren’t detailed in a mapping program, or businesses who want to create direction/map services with lots of landmarks. From here I’d love to see customized inlay maps — create an overlay, then an persistent inlay (maybe just an uploaded image?) That would provide a building layout, specific parking map, etc.

I know someone that got a hand-written letter in blue ink that says:

Dear (name)
My name is David, my wife is Jennifer. We would like to buy your house at (address). Please call me @ 408-772-0507.

Sincerely,
David Jan

My friend thought this was strange and did a Google search for 408-772-0507 and came across this page on David Jan. Several other people report getting similar notes. They speculate that it’s a property flipper looking for cheap houses without having to compete against other house buyers, because 4-5 other people mention that they’ve gotten these hand-written letters as well.

One difference is that the other earlier letter refers to “my assistant Jennifer” instead of “my wife Jennifer.” Did David Jan marry his assistant? Or maybe his wife is his assistant?

I like that Google can help with stuff like this. Someone gets a handwritten letter in the mail that sounds like a personal offer, but a quick search uncovers that this David Jan fellow has probably sent a bunch of these letters.

If you didn’t see this post about better date-based searching by Ionut Alex Chitu, I highly recommend that you check it out. As Google has gotten fresher, our advanced search page started showing more useful options for restricting searches by date. The shortest time frame used to be something like three months; now you can look for things that are less than 24 hours old.

What GoogleOS noticed is that the advanced date search affects a url parameter called “as_qdr” and Chitu figured out some of the possible values:

The nice thing is that you can change the value of as_qdr to custom intervals. Here are all the possible values of the as_qdr parameter:

d[number] - past number of days (e.g.: d10)
w[number] - past number of weeks
y[number] - past number of years

This little tweak is as handy as “&strip=1″ on cache: queries and “&filter=0″ on site: queries. Why? It’s an easy way to see new urls that Google has just discovered in the last few days.

For example, there’s been a lot of fast progress on iphone stuff recently. A query such as http://www.google.com/search?q=iphone+source+code&as_qdr=d1 would show all the new urls for the query [iphone source code] within the last day, because d1 stands for 1 day.

Suppose you wanted to see all the new urls that Google found on your site within the last 7 days. For the domain mattcutts.com, I’d use a query such as http://www.google.com/search?q=site:mattcutts.com&as_qdr=d7 to find those urls (remember, “d” stands for days and “7″ stands for, well, 7). Previously, you could check whether Google had indexed a new url by (say) searching for content from that url, so this isn’t completely new, but it still simplifies life for site owners.

I’m already using this parameter in my power searching all the time. If you need a way to remember the parameter name, I think of as_qdr as “advanced search — query date range,” although I haven’t checked if that’s what the letters actually stand for.