languagevalueThere's been some recent speculation about what it looks like when the reddit admins get together, and we wanted to set the record straight:


On an unrelated note, there have been some dirty rumors that we've been spending all our time playing ping pong instead of working on the site. They are completely unfounded.typetext/htmlbasehttp://blog.reddit.com/atom.xml
[photos ]
iA WebTrends 2008
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languagevaluePosted by David Marmaros, Software Engineer

As you can imagine, those of us on the Google Calendar team spend a lot of time thinking about scheduling. We regularly talk to people who schedule and reschedule a lot of meetings: administrative assistants. Talking to them, we understand just how much time they spend looking at schedules, investigating other people's calendars, finding replacement conference rooms and rescheduling conflicts. And then some manager's travel plans change and everything starts over again.

If you're searching for something on the web, you don't just start randomly visiting pages looking for relevant content, you use a search engine. So we decided to apply some of Google's search experience to the problem of scheduling. We experimented with using ranking algorithms to return the most relevant meeting times based on specified criteria like attendees, schedule complexity, conference rooms, and time zones. Just like Google search ranks the web, our scheduling search algorithm returns a ranked set of the best candidate dates and times.

Today we're launching the result of that experiment, a gadget called Smart Rescheduler, in Google Calendar Labs. Once you turn it on, just select an event you'd like to reschedule, then click "Find a new time...":

You'll see ranked list of possible times for your meeting. By investigating the calendars others have shared with you, Google Calendar can make some educated guesses about how easy it might be to reschedule a conflicting meeting and even find you a replacement conference room nearby. This process is 100% automated — no Google employees are doing any work behind the scenes. You can refine the results by marking people as optional, changing the meeting duration, ignoring certain conflicts, or specifying the earliest and latest times you'll accept. The results will immediately update to reflect your new requirements.


This feature is still experimental, so we'd love your ideas and feedback. Of course, we can't make meetings more interesting, but we can try to save you frustration leading up to them. typetext/htmlbasehttp://feeds.feedburner.com/OfficialGmailBlog
[Google Apps Blog labs calendar ]
iA WebTrends 2008
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languagevalueAs an enterprise-class web analytics solution, Google Analytics not only provides site owners with information on their website traffic and marketing effectiveness, it also does so with high regard for protecting user data privacy. Over the past year, we have been exploring ways to offer users more choice on how their data is collected by Google Analytics. We concluded that the best approach would be to develop a global browser based plug-in to allow users to opt out of being tracked by Google Analytics. Our engineers are now hard at work finalizing and testing this opt-out functionality. We look forward to make it globally available to our users in the coming weeks.
Posted by Amy Chang, Group Product Manager, Google Analytics typetext/htmlbasehttp://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/tRaA

iA WebTrends 2008
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languagevalueThis Saturday, our engineers will be performing routine site maintenance from 10am to 2pm PDT. You'll be unable to log in to your AdSense and Ad Manager accounts during this time, but we'll continue serving ads to your pages and tracking your clicks, impressions, and earnings as usual. In addition, your ad targeting won't be affected.

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

London - 5pm Saturday
Dar es Salaam - 8pm Saturday
Chennai - 10:30pm Saturday
Singapore - 1am Sunday
Sydney - 4am Sunday

If you'd like to learn more about what goes on during these maintenance periods, check out this Inside AdSense post.

Posted by Dia Muthana - Inside AdSense team typetext/htmlbasehttp://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/tuAm
[Other ]
iA WebTrends 2008
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languageenvalue

W3C launched today the new WebFonts Working Group, which aims to bring typographic richness on the Web to it’s full potential. Font linking mechanisms are already standardized or in development, so the group will focus on WOFF, an interoperable font format for the Web. The group will work in public and will consult widely with the typographic community. Read the WebFonts WG charter, join the group, and learn more about Fonts on the Web.

typetext/htmlbasehttp://www.w3.org/
[Web Design and Applications Home Page Stories ]
iA WebTrends 2008
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languagevalueAt Facebook, we're constantly connecting with interesting people—from experts and researchers to celebrities or visitors to our office. Occasionally, we'll share these conversations on the Facebook blog in our "Connecting with..." series.


Chuck Martin and a team of researchers from the University of New Hampshire's Whittemore School of Business & Economics recently found that the amount of time students spend using social media and services like Facebook does not affect their grades. I talked with Martin, a lecturer at the school and the CEO of organizational research firm NFI Research, about those findings as well the use of social media in his classroom and its impact on the workplace. Martin is the author of eight business books, including his soon-to-be released "Work Your Strengths."


You and a team of researchers recently looked at the correlation between using social media and grades. What would you say is the big finding from your perspective?
The big finding is that there is actually no correlation between the amount of time that students spend using social media and their grades. We found that basically the heavy users and the light users get pretty much the same grades.


In addition to the finding that there isn't a correlation, what were some of the results about just how much students are using social media?

For the purposes of the study, we considered social media to be Facebook, YouTube, blogs, Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn.... This study was very wide. It was 1,100-plus students out of the 12,000 at the university, and we surveyed every college at the university.

But of the heavy users of social media, 63 percent got high grades, and of the light users, 65 percent got high grades. So there is no real difference between the two. And of the heavy Facebook users, 62 percent got high grades. The light Facebook users, 62 percent got high grades. It was identical.


And did that surprise you?
It didn't. Interestingly, the hypothesis of the students was that there would be no correlation and they were correct. But if you talk to any adults, adults were totally surprised by this. And adults and parents typically have the view that you need to spend more time on your homework and less time on your social media so that your grades stay high. Well, it turns out that it makes no difference.


Why do you think there is this disconnect? Is this just a generational gap, or something about how people use (social media) differently?
It's not just generational, it's actually behavioral. If you look at the students today, they have grown up with things like Facebook and YouTube and blogs and so forth, so it's not a separate thing. In the early days of the web, people would be at work or school and they would start surfing the web and two hours later they would come back and say, "What was I looking for? I forgot."

They basically got lost in the experience, and today with social media it's actually become integrated with people's lives. So it's not a separate thing where people leave life and go do (social media). It actually has become part of what they do every day....


They have a multitasking ability that's a little different?
I created a course for the university called "Social Media in Marketing." (During class) we had my presentation on the screen live, and we were dipping in and out of the web. We had a live Twitter feed projected to a large screen, and we had a third screen with another projection, where we had a back channel so that people could communicate anonymously on the big screen.... There were three big screens in front of the classroom with three live network feeds, and we also had video and we had people patched in by Skype.

Everybody in the room used a computer for the entire three-hour class, and they were encouraged and actually did interact. They were tweeting with people around the country during the class about the content, and people were tweeting from outside the classroom from different parts of the country with questions that we would then tackle as a group.

And it turns out that the engagement level of the students was higher than a traditional classroom. We talked to a neuropsychologist, who is actually one of my co-authors, about this multitasking aspect and his view was that it's not really multitasking. It's really using different media simultaneously on the same subject matter.


That's really fascinating because the conventional wisdom is, "Oh, this is just a distraction from paying attention to the lecture."
Right, we had people come in and monitor the class. We had trustees or we had the finance people, and they were all astounded by what they were seeing. Every class was longer than it was supposed to be because we couldn't really get the students to stop.


Do you find that it extends the conversation outside the actual class, and are there other ways of using things like Facebook beyond the lecture?
We actually, for that course, ran the course on Facebook.... Since this was social media, we decided that we needed to use social media and we created the course on a private (Facebook) group. So all of the members of the class were in the group, and then each of the (study) groups created their own Facebook groups for their teams. The difference between that and a traditional course was the course then ran 24/7 because people were having conversations about the content all the time.... We will be teaching this course again in the summer and will be using Facebook for that as well.


Thinking further out, though, do you think that more classrooms will begin to adopt this idea of using social media both in the class and outside?
When we were doing the social media course...we had requests from outside the classroom from other parts of the country that they wanted a live streaming feed. So one time we just streamed it live onto the Net, and that's because of the demand. It's not necessarily because the teacher said he wished to do this. It's because the market said, "Hey, we should do this." Once you use the back channel in a classroom, for example, and it's highly interactive, it's difficult not to have it.


Where do you see Facebook and social media fitting into the workplace moving forward? What would be your advice to business leaders?
Let (employees) do it and encourage it. It's just like in the classroom: The great fear of adults for our class was that (we would have) all these people behind computer screens and that they weren't going to be paying attention to the class (but) going to be shopping and doing all these other things online.

Nobody did that, nobody. It just didn't happen, and if that happened it would mean that I was failing as a teacher.

It's the same thing in business. If you let your employees do their work more effectively, they will work more effectively.


Matt, a manager on Facebook's communications team, passed paper notes as a back channel when he was in school.typetext/htmlbasehttp://blog.facebook.com/atom.php

iA WebTrends 2008
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languagevalue

Around the globe, YouTube has become a metaphor for the democratizing power of the Internet and information. YouTube gives unknown performers, filmmakers, and artists new ways to promote their work to a global audience and rise to worldwide fame; makes it possible for political candidates and elected officials to interact with the public in new ways; enables first-hand reporting from war zones and from inside repressive regimes; and lets students of all ages and backgrounds audit classes at leading universities.

Yet YouTube and sites like it will cease to exist in their current form if Viacom and others have their way in their lawsuits against YouTube.

In their opening briefs in the Viacom vs. YouTube lawsuit (which have been made public today), Viacom and plaintiffs claim that YouTube doesn't do enough to keep their copyrighted material off the site. We ask the judge to rule that the safe harbors in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (the "DMCA") protect YouTube from the plaintiffs' claims. Congress enacted the DMCA to benefit the public by permitting open platforms like YouTube to flourish on the Web. It gives online services protection from copyright liability if they remove unauthorized content once they’re on notice of its existence on the site.

With some minor exceptions, all videos are automatically copyrighted from the moment they are created, regardless of who creates them. This means all videos on YouTube are copyrighted -- from Charlie Bit My Finger, to the video of your cat playing the piano and the video you took at your cousin’s wedding. The issue in this lawsuit is not whether a video is copyrighted, but whether it's authorized to be on the site. The DMCA (and common sense) recognizes that content owners, not service providers like YouTube, are in the best position to know whether a specific video is authorized to be on an Internet hosting service.

Because content owners large and small use YouTube in so many different ways, determining a particular copyright holder’s preference or a particular uploader’s authority over a given video on YouTube is difficult at best. And in this case, it was made even harder by Viacom’s own practices.

For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately "roughed up" the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent employees to Kinko's to upload clips from computers that couldn't be traced to Viacom. And in an effort to promote its own shows, as a matter of company policy Viacom routinely left up clips from shows that had been uploaded to YouTube by ordinary users. Executives as high up as the president of Comedy Central and the head of MTV Networks felt "very strongly" that clips from shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report should remain on YouTube.

Viacom's efforts to disguise its promotional use of YouTube worked so well that even its own employees could not keep track of everything it was posting or leaving up on the site. As a result, on countless occasions Viacom demanded the removal of clips that it had uploaded to YouTube, only to return later to sheepishly ask for their reinstatement. In fact, some of the very clips that Viacom is suing us over were actually uploaded by Viacom itself.

Given Viacom’s own actions, there is no way YouTube could ever have known which Viacom content was and was not authorized to be on the site. But Viacom thinks YouTube should somehow have figured it out. The legal rule that Viacom seeks would require YouTube -- and every Web platform -- to investigate and police all content users upload, and would subject those web sites to crushing liability if they get it wrong.

Viacom’s brief misconstrues isolated lines from a handful of emails produced in this case to try to show that YouTube was founded with bad intentions, and asks the judge to believe that, even though Viacom tried repeatedly to buy YouTube, YouTube is like Napster or Grokster.

Nothing could be further from the truth. YouTube has long been a leader in providing media companies with 21st century tools to control, distribute, and make money from their content online. Working in cooperation with rights holders, our Content ID system scans over 100 years worth of video every day and lets rights holders choose whether to block, leave up, or monetize those videos. Over 1,000 media companies are now using Content ID -- including every major U.S. network broadcaster, movie studio, and record label -- and the majority of those companies choose to make money from user uploaded clips rather than block them. This is a true win-win that reflects our long-standing commitment to working with rights holders to give them the choices they want, while advancing YouTube as a platform for creativity.

We look forward to defending YouTube, and upholding the balance that Congress struck in the DMCA to protect the rights of copyright holders, the progress of technological innovation, and the public interest in free expression.

Posted by Zahavah Levine, YouTube Chief Counsel

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iA WebTrends 2008
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At next week’s CTIA Wireless Show, Opera Software will for the first time allow video recording and photography of Opera Mini for iPhone. Opera will also be showcasing its latest Opera Mini 5 product running on the Android platform thus bringing fast browsing and a full feature set to two of the world’s fastest-growing mobile platforms.

iA WebTrends 2008
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languagevalueOrkut is now ready to roll on mobile phones with Android. Now you can stay connected to your orkut friends wherever you go -- via scrap notifications, direct photo uploads to your orkut albums, and a phonebook synced to your orkut friends' phone numbers and status messages. Orkut for Android lets you stay in touch with pals through...

Orkut friends live folders
Simply add the list of your orkut friends as a live folder on your home screen, and you'll be able to browse through your friends list even when not under data network coverage. The live folder also lets you communicate (via call, scrap or SMS) with your friends in a single click. To install a live folder, click "Menu > Add > Folders > Orkut" on your Android device's homescreen after installing the orkut for Android application.




Photo uploads to your orkut albums
Gone are the days when you needed to download photos from your Android phone to your computer and then upload them to your orkut albums. Now you can simply upload photos from your Android Photo Gallery. Just click "Menu > Share > Orkut" while browsing your photos in the Android Photo Gallery to get started.




Scrap notification
You will get notifications on your Android device when you have new scraps on orkut. The notifications will appear on your Android device notification bar; clicking on notifications will take you to your scrapbook page.


To install the orkut for Android application visit Android Market from your Android device and search for "orkut" under the social applications category. You can also directly scan the QR code below to install it. Note that this application is available only for Android devices running version 1.6 or higher.

Hope to see you on orkut for Android soon!

Posted by Deepak Sethi and Alok Goel, software engineer and product manager

(Cross-posted on the Google Mobile Blog)


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iA WebTrends 2008
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Brazen Careerist is a premier Generation Y career-based social network. Our goal is to help shift job seeker's and the recruiter's approaches to focus on social strengths and ideas instead of just experience. We have been using Drupal for almost two years to help us scale and add social features rapidly. Using it as a platform has been crucial to our success and will continue to be in the foreseeable future.

Most recently, we gave our users new and powerful ways to participate in idea-based conversations. We also rolled out innovative integrations with external social-networking sites and revolutionary ways to display your online resume. We'd like to showcase some of these new features to the Drupal community, and hopefully get some more great ideas from you guys!

read more

[Drupal showcase Drupal 6.x ]
iA WebTrends 2008
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Following the introduction of the Choice Screen in Europe, Opera Software is experiencing a dramatic uptake on downloads of its latest browser, Opera 10.50. After the Choice Screen launch in early March, on average, more than half of the European downloads of Opera’s latest browser come directly from the Choice Screen.

iA WebTrends 2008
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languagevalueIf you've got a question for the director of Avatar, now's your chance to ask it. The famous director is opening himself up to the YouTube community, allowing our own DaveyBoyz to interview him based on the questions you submit via the Official Avatar Channel on YouTube.



Questions will be organized into the following categories — the environment, technology, the military-industrial complex, vision of the future, and imagining a society — and you'll have until 11:59 p.m. ET on March 21 to submit and vote on them. DaveyBoyz, who already has experience talking to the cast at the film's London premiere, will pose the 10 most popular questions to the director in an exclusive interview in L.A. on March 23. The interview will be uploaded to YouTube during the week of April 19, so stay tuned to see how it went.
Nate Weinstein, Entertainment Marketing Associate, just watched "Acting for the Camera." typetext/htmlbasehttp://feeds.feedburner.com/youtube/PKJx
[movies science and technology ]
iA WebTrends 2008
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We've added the ability to add your own custom tracking parameters to app invites. You can use parameters to track in many different ways; you see which user sent the invite, automatically start a new user at a certaint point in a game, conduct A/B testing around the invite itself or use any other contextual information you wish.

In the requestShareApp call, simply pass your own object as the fourth parameter, opt_params. When a user adds an app from an invite, and is redirected to the canvas page, the custom params can be read using gadgets.views.getParams().<your key here>.

Here's a sample snippet of code:

var casino = gadgets.views.getParams().casino;
var table = gadgets.views.getParams().table;

var friendId = '6221';
inviteParams = {"casino":"Sun Monte Carlo","table":"blackjack123"};
var reason = opensocial.newMessage('hi [recipient], join [sender] in the casino game [app]');

var navParams = opensocial.newNavigationParameters();

navParams.setField(opensocial.NavigationParameters.Field.PARAMETERS, inviteParams);
navParams.setField('destinationType',opensocial.NavigationParameters.DestinationType.RECIPIENT_DESTINATION);

opensocial.requestShareApp(friendId, reason, null, navParams);

See the App Invite wiki for more details and sample code: http://wiki.developer.myspace.com/index.php?title=App_Invites#Including_custom_parameters

Let us know what you think about the implementation and if you have any additional suggestions. Expect more key improvements rolling out soon!

[app invites custom app params appParams NavigationParameters newNavigationParameters ]
iA WebTrends 2008
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languagevalue

The more eagle-eyed Reader users have noticed a few tweaks being made to Reader's mobile interface over the past few days:

• We've brought over a few more features from the desktop version of Reader: magic ranking and search. Both can be found in the option drop-down menu.
• For better consistency with the desktop version, we've made the titles of items be links to the original page
• The top of each item now has "collapse" and "next item" links. This way there's always a consistent space for your thumb to hit so you can advance to the next item.

Since we know the best mobile content is short and sweet, we're going to leave you with that. Feel free to get in touch with us on Twitter or on our help group with feedback on these changes.

typetext/htmlbasehttp://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/dtKx

iA WebTrends 2008
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languagevalueIn May of last year, we announced 20 hours of video were uploaded to YouTube every minute. We then challenged you to keep the uploads coming to see whether or not we could get a day’s worth of video – 24 hours – uploaded in the same brief time span.

Today, we’re announcing that you’ve done it! In just 60 quick ticks of the second hand, more than a full, action-packed day in Jack Bauer’s life is now uploaded to YouTube. To put this into context, imagine how much stuff happens in 24 hours:

• The earth rotates 360 degrees as it orbits the sun
• The second hand on your bedside clock ticks 86,400 times
• The most skilled climber reaches Mount Everest’s summit
• 2.5 days go by on Jupiter

A day’s worth of content uploaded to YouTube every minute is a big achievement for our community and speaks to the role video plays in connecting and changing the world one upload at a time. So what’s next? 30 hours? 36 hours? Tell us in the comments below what you think the next big YouTube upload milestone should be.

Hunter Walk, Director, Product Management, recently favorited “The LXD: In the Internet age, dance evolves...”

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iA WebTrends 2008
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languagevalueThe Dublin AdSense team would like to wish all of our publishers a very happy St. Patrick's Day! Today we'll be dotting our i's with shamrocks, crossing our t's with shillelaghs, and wishing you all the luck of the Irish.


Posted by Siobhán McCormack - Inside AdSense Team typetext/htmlbasehttp://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/tuAm
[Other ]
iA WebTrends 2008
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languagevalue[Cross-posted from the Google Public Policy Blog]

It’s not every day that you get to ask your country’s leader questions about issues you care about. But that’s exactly what Canadians did this afternoon when Prime Minister Stephen Harper sat down with YouTube.

Roughly 170,000 votes were cast through Google Moderator for nearly 1,800 questions -- giving voice to thousands of Canadians. And don’t think that these were softball questions. Canadians asked their Prime Minister questions on a wide variety of important topics: from the deficit to Canada’s role in Afgahistan, from child care to protecting pensions. We tried to select questions that represented the most popular topics and would solicit conversation. (We also minimized duplicate questions so we could cover a range of issues.) Neither the Prime Minister nor his office knew in advance which questions he’d be asked.

You can see the Prime Minister respond to your questions in this video:



Prime Minister Harper is the second world leader to answer your questions in a YouTube Interview. It’s your appetite for political discussion on YouTube that creates these opportunities to access public leaders in this format, and we look forward to conducting more YouTube Interviews soon.

Posted by Jacob Glick, Google Canada Policy Counsel typetext/htmlbasehttp://feeds.feedburner.com/youtube/PKJx
[policy community citizentube government google politics ]
iA WebTrends 2008
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Starting today, TIM, through a partnership with Opera Software, will offer the new version of the Opera Mini browser to its client base. The application, available as a free download, delivers a PC-like experience, with Web pages being displayed as they would on a desktop computer.

iA WebTrends 2008
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languagevalueRight up there with our love of award-winning Texas BBQ is our love of independent music and the people who create it. That’s why the indie-centric SXSW Music Conference in Austin is the perfect place to launch the YouTube Partner Program (YPP) for musicians, aka Musicians Wanted. It's just the latest step in the YPP's continual expansion.

This time, we’re inviting thousands of artists who made the trek to Texas -- and the rest of you accomplished musicians at home -- to apply today. If accepted, you'll join stars like ukulele songstress Julia Nunes, singer-songwriter David Choi and many others who, as partners, are able to make some money from their YouTube videos. Here's multi-instrumentalist and YouTube musician extraordinaire Jack Conte and songstress Nataly Dawn (aka Pomplamoose) to tell you more:


We've also got a few words from our most recent YPP Music partner. You may have heard of them – they're a little band with a viral hit or two and recently made headlines by starting their own indie label. As OK Go's Damian Kulash puts it "YouTube has always been a great match for OK Go - creativity flourishes and we can connect directly with our fans. So when we heard about Musicians Wanted, it was a no-brainer: it sounds great for us. We're honored and excited to be the first applicants. We can't wait to get new videos up on our channel."

So whether you make hip-hop, folk, noise-rock, jazz or a genre of your own invention, we are looking for all types of original music video content. One thing to keep in mind is that right now this program only supports video content by U.S.-based artists, though there are plans to roll out the program more widely in the future.
We'll leave you with a final call to apply now to join our Musicians Wanted campaign and perhaps you, too, will find yourself autographing CDs, reporting from the road and collaborating with other amazing musicians on the site.

Michele Flannery, Music Manager, recently watched "Bulldozer." typetext/htmlbasehttp://feeds.feedburner.com/youtube/PKJx
[music musicians wanted partners ]
iA WebTrends 2008
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Registration is now open for the Red Dirt RubyConf. Our "early bird" special ends in ten days, so sign-up now for the best prices.

We have an excellent program of speakers and a ton of surprises in store for attendees. We're starting this conference with a bang, so don't miss it!

I'm really proud of the program we have put together, so check this out if you haven't seen it yet:

Keynotes

Living here in hell—Ruby and the search for perfection Dave Thomas, The Pragmatic Programmers

(Parenthetically Speaking) Jim Weirich, EdgeCase

Ruby

Ruby and the Unix Philosophy Matt Yoho, Hashrocket

Sinatra: Microapps Running on Rack Tim Gourley, Engine Yard

Javascript and Friends: Scripting Ruby with JavaScript for Fun and Profit Charles Lowell, The Frontside Software, Inc

Design and Modularity in Ruby Glenn Vanderburg, Relevance, Inc.

Rails 3

Rails in the Large: How We're Building One of the Largest Rails Apps for an Enterprise Neal Ford, ThoughtWorks

Bundler: Painless Dependency Management André Arko, Engine Yard

Active Record Makeover: Rekindle the relationship Marty Haught, Haught Codeworks

With a Mighty Hammer Ben Scofield, Viget Labs

NoSQL

Scaling with Cassandra Ryan King, Twitter

Data Driven Applications with Ruby and MongoDB Kyle Banker and John Taber, 10gen and Tiger Nassau, Inc

CouchDB, Ruby, and You Will Leinweber, merge.fm

Plain Old Tokyo Storage Jeremy Hinegardner, Collective Intellect

Servers/Hosting

Rails and Sinatra on Google AppEngine John Woodell, Google

Rumble in the Jungle... Fernand Galiana, liquidrail llc

Redis To The Resque Jade Meskill, Integrum Technologies

The Rise of DevOps Corey Donohoe, Teamsters

Trainings

The Ruby Your Mother Warned You About James Edward Gray II and Glenn Vanderburg, Gray Productions Software Inc. and Relevance, Inc.

The Rails 3 Ropes Course Gregg Pollack, Envy Labs

Introduction to Riak Sean Cribbs, Basho

Living Among the Clouds Jim Mulholland and Jason Derrett, Squeejee

Other Highlights

• A hackfest is planned
• There will be a live recording of the Ruby5 podcast
• We will have good food (seriously!)

I hope you all find that as exciting as I do and I hope to see you there!

James Edward Gray II

iA WebTrends 2008
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languagevalueIt's March 17th, which means it's time to put on your favorite green hat, shirt, or shoes, grab a three leaf clover and head outside to celebrate St. Patrick's Day!

St. Patrick's Day, named after the patron saint of Ireland, is a holiday celebrating friendship, fun, and of course, Irish culture. In countries around the world (including the US, Argentina, and Australia, just to name a few), you can see people, restaurants and even whole city streets decked out in green and in the mood to party.

The orkut team wanted to make sure that we wore our green as well (in the US you can be pinched if you’re caught without it!), so we created this special holiday doodle:



Want to get together with friends for your own celebration of the date? Try creating an event, and be sure to let all of your orkut friends know that you’ve got the St. Patrick’s Day spirit by changing the color of your orkut profile to green as well.

Here's to a very green (and pinch-free) day!

Posted by Karen Callahan, orkut operations team


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iA WebTrends 2008
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languagevalueEarlier today, the Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Julius Genachowski sat down for an exclusive YouTube Interview, right on the heels of the FCC’s announcement of a National Broadband Plan -- the agency’s strategy to deliver high-speed Internet to more Americans across the country. You might be surprised to learn that -- even though the Interent was invented in the U.S. -- broadband penetration in the states is considerably lower than many other developed nations. Chairman Genachowski’s YouTube Interview is part of a series of conversations we’re having with public figures in which citizens submit and vote on their favorite video and text questions on CitizenTube. Earlier this year we spoke with President Obama in the White House, and engaged with leaders of Congress after the bipartisan health care summit.

You can see the entire interview posted below. Chairman Genachowski answered Brooklyn-ite Elizabeth Stark’s question on cost by saying the FCC needs to eliminate all barriers to competition so more Interent providers can compete and drive down prices. When Evslin in Vermont asked about rural broadband access, the Chairman said the FCC will take funding currently allotted for rural phone lines and instead use it to provide broadband to rural communities. And when Michael Tapp asked if broadband should be considered government infrastructure or a commercial service, the Chairman shied away from calling the Internet a fundmental right -- but he did say that all Americans “need to have access to this critical infrastructure.”

All in all, the Chairman took 17 questions, including two lightning rounds of “F-C-Caesar,” in which the Chairman gave a thumbs up or thumbs down to more straightforward “yes” or “no” questions posed by users. 


You can submit your feedback to the National Broadband Plan on Broadband.gov, or feel free to leave a comment about the interview on the YouTube video itself.

More and more world leaders are coming to YouTube to speak directly with citizens about important events, so stay tuned for more interviews in the future. We’d love to know you who’d like to hear from next.

Steve Grove, head of News and Politics, recently watched, “Announcing the National Broadband Plan.” typetext/htmlbasehttp://feeds.feedburner.com/youtube/PKJx

iA WebTrends 2008
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Folks,

We’ve been watching the StatCounter stats for our blog with interest over the last few days…



We can’t help with Polish or Italian but we can certainly tell you how to say Happy St. Patrick’s Day in Irish…

Lá Fhéile Pádraig Sona Duit (to one person)
(Pronounced: Law ale-ah paw-rig sun-ah ditch)

Lá Fhéile Pádraig Sona Daoibh (to more than one person)
(Pronounced: Law ale-ah paw-rig sun-ah deev)

An Old Irish Blessing
“May the road rise up to meet you.
May the wind always be at your back.
May the sun shine warm upon your face,
and rains fall soft upon your fields.
And until we meet again,
May God hold you in the palm of His hand.”

From our HQ in Dublin, Ireland the StatCounter Team wishes you all a very happy St Patrick’s Day!

PS: Now – it’s over to you! How do you say Happy St Patrick’s Day in YOUR language?!

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iA WebTrends 2008
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Hi all – Eric Duprat, GM of PayPal’s mobile team here. We’re excited to announce that PayPal’s Send Money 2.0 iPhone application is available in the Apple iTunes app store today. Great new features include tapping iPhones together to transfer funds (via Bump technology), splitting the check for a meal ...

iA WebTrends 2008
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languagevalueBack in August, we announced plans to give publishers the ability to allow multiple Google-certified ad networks to compete for display ad space on your site. While this feature was initially available only to publishers located in North America and Europe, we're happy to announce that all publishers will now have access to these participating ad networks.

Allowing these ad networks to compete for your display ad space means that more ads will be eligible to appear on your pages, leading to potentially higher earnings in the long run. Our system will show the ads that will generate you the most profit, whether they're from these Google-certified ad networks or the AdWords program. As a reminder, all Google-certified ad networks are required to adhere to our standards for user privacy, ad quality, and speed. In addition, you can use the controls in your Ad Review Center to specify which ad networks can appear on your pages.

Finally, some ad networks use tools similar to Google's interest-based advertising to show more relevant ads to users on the sites they visit. We'll allow certified networks who comply with user privacy guidelines to show ads using these tools, but they won't be permitted to collect data from your site for the purpose of subsequent interest-based advertising. You'll be able to opt out of receiving ads based on user interests from these certified networks, and we have changed our requirements for third-party ad serving to reflect this. We're dedicated to providing users with a positive experience, while helping publishers effectively monetize the ads appearing on their sites. We believe you'll find that more competition translates into better ads and increased revenue in the long run.

We're continuing to certify additional ad networks, so please keep in mind that you won't see immediate changes in your earnings or ads. As we continue to add new ad networks, you'll see them appear in your Ad Review Center. To learn more about managing your account settings and Google-certified ad networks, visit our Help Center.

Posted by Atul Bhandari - AdSense Product Manager typetext/htmlbasehttp://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/tuAm
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iA WebTrends 2008
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