Archive for May, 2008

Posted by Pamela Fox, Google Geo APIs Team

There's four big Geo events in the San Francisco Bay Area this month, and Mano and I will be at all of them. Here's the details:

Where2.0: May 12-14th

Sharing Your Content on the Google Maps API

In this session, you'll roll up your sleeves and learn about publishing and sharing using the Maps API. Then we’ll hear from Google partners about what constitutes “great” content and how they expose it.

Searching the Geoweb: Exposing Your Geo Data to Search Engines

Have you been wondering how to drive traffic to that cool maps mashup you created recently? We’ll show you how to get your maps mashup crawled and indexed, and how best to optimize your content for user discovery via search using KML.

WhereCamp: May 17-18th

No sessions planned! This is an unconference - that means the participants do the session planning on the spot. So if there's a Maps API or KML topic you want to talk about, come on by and propose it! (And stay for the slumber party, there'll be lots of hacking and coffee). And, it'll be at the Googleplex! And it's free!

Web 2.0 Mapping and Social Networks Group: May 20th

Communities + Google Maps: Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger

Pamela Fox will talk about the various ways of using Google Maps & the Maps API to create user-contributed maps, covering the spectrum from no-coding solutions to full custom databases and code, and showing examples of sites successfully using each technique.

Google I/O: May 28-29th

There's lots of Geo sessions at Google I/O, here's just 3:

Harnessing StreetView, Static Maps, and other New Additions to the Google Maps API:

Ben Appleton will review some of the recent additions to the Maps API including how to use Static Maps for fast page loads and printable maps, and how to incorporate Street View imagery in your app.

Hosting Your Geo Data, an Overview of Design Options:

Mano Marks will discuss the various options for hosting your Geo data, including Google App Engine, and explain how to choose the right data model for your project.

The World's Information in Context:

Michael T. Jones will discuss new product directions and key trends of importance to geo developers.

Be sure to visit the Google I/O website to see the complete list of sessions and to register. For those coming from out of town, we've arranged discounted room rates at nearby hotels. Read the details on the website to take advantage of the discount, but move fast because the hotel discount ends May 13th.

We're looking forward to seeing you at some of these events soon.

We’ve just launched three additions / fixes to Blogger’s site feeds:

• <thr:in-reply-to> elements from Atom Threading Extensions (RFC 4685). These elements point from comment feed entries to the post feed entry that they’re commenting on. They’re especially useful for associating comments from the per-blog comment feed with the relevant posts.
• Profile URLs in <person> entries. We’re now adding <uri> elements to <person> elements that point to the person’s Blogger profile or homepage. This matches the behavior on Blogger’s HTML comment pages. We’re also adding these elements to post <entry>s, but only if the author of the post lists the blog on his profile.
• RSS 2.0 feeds now validate. We’ve added dummy noreply@blogger.com email addresses to <person> entries so that they validate in RSS 2.0, which requires an email address.

How are these working out for you? Let us know in the Blogger API Google Group.

Posted by Sapna Mehta, Online Operations Associate

Hopefully by now you've had some time to play around with our different views for search results and find the one that best suits you.

For fans of grid view, we've added a new feature to make it easier to find what you're looking for. Now, when you're viewing search results in grid view you can roll over the video image for more information about the video. By moving your mouse over a video listed in the results, you'll be able to see multiple thumbnails of the video as well as the video description. This will give you a more representative idea of what each video is about as you browse your search results.


We've also restored some popular features. For those of you who upload videos to the site, you'll be happy to hear that our Community features (comments and ratings) and Advanced options settings (ability to restrict downloading as well as embedding and regional restrictions) are back.

To get these updates delivered right to you, click on the icon (on the blog sidebar) to add Google Video blog updates to your Google homepage or Google Reader.

My brother, Nigel, and I started the Flag and Bell event back in May 2006.

Since then, we've had a colourful calendar of events. Some of the highlights include: karaoke sponsored by Bond Marvel, OktoberFest Fun, Chinese New Year Special, Internet World, Dart Night, Queen Mary Thames River Special, and a Christmas Party at SkyPe's office.

We've also seen many a quiz tie-breaker played out with paper, scissors, rock and we've had some interesting networking games. More importantly, the FAB has facilitated business connections, the sharing of ideas and helped people to find work.

Thanks to everyone for coming along and being a part of this event. Details for the event in June coming soon.

Guest post by Matt Brown, concept3D

I’m Matt Brown, a kml developer and designer at concept3D in Boulder, Colorado.

Google Earth has provided a new group of developers with the opportunity to build virtual ‘geowebsites’ specific to vertical markets. Armageddon Pills, a travel book by John Higham, combines this power of Google Earth and a printed book to illustrate the tale of one family’s journey around the globe in 52 weeks.

After creating numerous kml files, he asked us (concept3d) to create a browser look and feel while in Google Earth. We attempted to simplify the Google Earth experience for a broader audience, focusing on its on-screen and balloon navigation systems.

When opening the file, you will find a main menu, or in this case the table of contents, of on-screen buttons. This menu is broken down into chapter groupings that contain sub-menus of icons related to the book. This allows the reader to find ‘where they are’ in the book, and gives them the ability to ‘read’ the kml from start to finish. Each balloon along the traveled path offers an interesting snippet and sometimes a photo or video associated with their locations. Navigation arrows were added to each balloon to allow the information to be chronologically documented and experienced by the end user, and a “home” button to get back to the main menu. Additionally, there are “menu” placemarks scattered around the globe that will help you find the main menu if you are lost in space.

We rely on feature anchors for navigating between balloons and a very high altitude (12680000 meters) to create the effect of a menu. You can download our full KML here.

A big thanks to Mano Marks for his insight and for taking interest in this project. If you have any questions or comments, please email me at matt.brown@concept3d.com.

New chatback badge style examples
One line basic:
Two line basic:
Hyperlink and status icon:	Chat with Itala

We recently added the ability to create Google Talk chatback badges in several new styles. These options are available by clicking on the “Styles” drop down menu when creating a chatback badge. Examples of the new types of formats can be seen on the right.

The two borderless versions of the badge make it easier to fit into your page and customize the appearance as you like. You can just paste the code where you want the link to appear. If you want to further tweak the appearance, you can add some style parameters: Add fontfamily and fontsize to choose a specific font or size, and textcolor and linkcolor to set the colors using a hexadecimal RRGGBB value. You can add these parameters to either the new badge URL or to the iframe's src URL in the generated HTML. You can also use the h and w parameters to specify the height or width of the badge.

For example, &fontfamily=courier%20new&fontsize=13&linkcolor=000000&textcolor=880000 will give you Courier New 13 with black for the link text and dark red for the rest of the text. Here is an example of how this looks with the classic badge:

In addition to providing more flexibility in terms of appearance, chatback can now be used on web sites that don’t allow frames. For these sites, use the new HTML version of the badge. This version can’t display a status messages but it will show your status as a colored circle anywhere you can embed an image. And if you can’t embed an image (like in an email message), you can use the hyperlink by itself or just the URL.

To create a badge, visit http://www.google.com/talk/service/badge/New or, if you are a Google Apps user, visit http://www.google.com/talk/service/a/DOMAIN/badge/New replacing DOMAIN with the name of your domain.

Bruce Leban
Software Engineer

Posted by Michael Cohen, Product Manager

As we've mentioned before, the Google Video team wants to make it possible for you to search every video on the web. This is a tall order, and we're constantly working to make sure we have the latest and greatest videos. Ever wondered how we actually discover all the videos that make it into video search?

While we receive a small percentage of our videos from user uploads, we get the vast majority of them by crawling the web. We've gotten pretty good at this over the past several years, but of course it's helpful when webmasters tell us exactly where to look to find their videos. This is where a protocol called Video Sitemaps (an extension of the Sitemap Protocol) comes in. Video Sitemaps allow webmasters to give us links directly to their videos and provide valuable descriptive information such as a video's title, description, and length. We can then target our crawlers at these videos and pull them into the Google Video index, allowing them to show up in Google Video searches as well as searches on Google.com.

Some key information provided by a sitemap includes:

• A link to the video's "landing page" (i.e., the link you'd visit in your browser)
• A title of the video for us to display in our search results
• A description of the video to accompany each result
• The duration of the video
• An image thumbnail that we can show in our search results
• A link to an embeddable video player -- so you can watch the video in TV view

If you administer a website with video and would like to see your site appear in our search results, a Video Sitemap is definitely your best bet. To get started, create a Video Sitemap, sign into Google Webmaster Tools, and add the Video Sitemap to your account.

Recent research from Microsoft has demonstrated that "search trails" have ...

"profound implications for the design of Web search ranking algorithms and the improvement of the search experience for all search engine users ... "