More Advanced Search Options for YouTube

YouTube added some new options that allow you to filter search results by type. You can restrict the results to videos uploaded by YouTube partners, videos that have annotations or closed captions. There's also an option to restrict the results to feature length videos, but it doesn't seem to work yet.

Use the "partner videos" restriction to get official videos, annotations could be used for additional explanations or interactivity, while closed captions allow you to search inside the text of a video. The closed captioning features has been recently added to YouTube, so you won't find too many subtitled videos.


YouTube's interface doesn't let you combine the restrictions, but you can manually add parameters:

http://www.youtube.com/results?closed_captions=1&annotations=1&search_query=site:youtube.com (videos that have both annotations and closed captions)

http://www.youtube.com/results?partner=1&closed_captions=1&search_query=site:youtube.com (partner videos with closed captions)

Gmail Reply Enhancements

After adding 3 experimental features related to labels, Gmail Labs has 3 new features that deal with replying to messages.

"Quote selected text" changes Gmail's replying behavior and it lets you include a selection from the original message. This is especially helpful when you reply to long messages from people who don't use Gmail. Your reply will only include the necessary context, not the entire message.

This experimental feature works only when you use the keyboard shortcut for replying (r), not when you click on "Reply".


"Reply to all" changes the default replying option when you receive messages addressed to more than one person. Instead of replying only to the sender, the default option changes to "reply to all". Just make sure that your reply is really useful for everyone.

"Vacation time" is an enhancement of the vacation responder that lets you enter when you intend to go on vacation. This way, you won't have to remember to turn on the vacation responder. "While planning my own vacation, I didn't want to worry about composing, starting and stopping my vacation auto-response while I was on vacation. Call me a purist, but that defeats the whole point of being on vacation," explains Darick Tong, the author.


What other features would you like to see in Gmail Labs?

{ via Gmail Blog }

The Missing Doodles

Google started to customize its logo in 1999 for the Burning Man festival, an annual art event that encourages creative self expression.


Since then, Google's Dennis Hwang created hundreds of doodles that celebrate interesting holidays and events, from Halloween to Father's Day, from Picasso's birthday to the 50th anniversary of the LEGO brick. Dennis told CNN that the events selected for Google's doodles are the subject of an internal debate. "We talk about interesting holidays that are coming up, or various international holidays or any current events or news events that we think are cool and geeky or 'Google-y' in some sense and then we just sort of give it a go."

In fact, most Google doodles are cheerful, celebrate birthdays and innovations. Instead of creating doodles for any important event, Google chose to decorate its logo for events that have a lot in common with Google's values: excellence, cheerfulness, universality.

Some people noticed that Google choose not to commemorate 9/11. "The murder of 3,000 individuals by Islamic fanatics on September 11, 2001 is, to Google, apparently less important than the first hot air balloon flight, which the company commemorated on June 4 with a stylized logo in which a balloon replaces one of the O's," asserted Paul McDougall from InformationWeek.

Like many times before, Google answered by reminding people that doodles are a part of the company's brand. "The doodle selection process aims to celebrate interesting events and anniversaries around the world that reflect Google's personality and love of innovation. Although we are aware that our list of doodles is not exhaustive, we try to select doodles that show creativity and innovation in a fun, quirky way. Generally, we choose doodles from a variety of categories, such as those that celebrate holidays, anniversaries, and the lives of artists and inventors. We try to be sensitive that a doodle is not the most appropriate way to recognize certain events, especially those that are more somber in nature."

Doodles are inherently childish and unpretentious. According to Wikipedia, "a doodle is a type of sketch, an unfocused drawing made while a person's attention is otherwise occupied. They are simple drawings which can have a meaning, a shape or just irregular forms. Doodling is mainly made by young people around the world, notably students. This activity is normally made during long or boring classes as the students begin daydreaming or losing interest."

So you can see doodles as glimpses from an imaginary Googleworld that gathers some of the greatest human achievements. The missing doodles are hidden somewhere inside this drawing:

("Up in the Clouds" by Grace Moon, winner of the Doodle 4 Google US competition)

Table of Contents, Dictionary and Thesaurus in Google Docs

It's no longer necessary to use bookmarklets if you want to add a table of contents in Google Docs because this feature is now available in the interface: Insert > Table of contents. To add a table of contents, your document needs to include headings from the Format menu.

Google Docs actually creates a bookmark for each heading from the document and displays the bookmarks hierarchically using lists. Unsurprisingly, when you open the document in Microsoft Word, the application treats the table of contents created in Google Docs as a list.


You can find more information about a word directly from Google Docs: click on the Tools menu and look up the word in Merriam-Webster's dictionary and thesaurus and in Encyclopædia Britannica.



In the Tools menu, there are two other options that allow you to search the web for the selected text. It would be nice to see the results in a pop-up box and to link to them directly from Google Docs, but this is not yet possible.

{ Thanks, Mike. }

Google Presently Redesigned

The three applications included in Google Docs have never been properly integrated and there's always an interesting feature that is only available in Google Spreadsheets or in the word processor.

Google redesigned Presently and added the old-fashioned menu already included in the word processor. The interface have been streamlined and there's more room for editing slides.

A notable new feature that can be found in the Slide menu is zooming in/out, but the keyboard shortcuts aren't very intuitive: Ctrl+Shift+left/right arrow.

Google Presently today

Google Presently at launch (September 2007)

Better Label Management in Gmail

Gmail Labs added 3 new experiments that improve the way you manage labels.

"Go to label" adds a keyboard shortcut for selecting a label. Gmail already has shortcuts for navigating to the inbox (g+i), drafts (g+d), starred messages (g+s), but you can now type g followed by l to get a box that lets you enter the name of a label. In most cases, you only need to type the first letters of the label and then press Enter.


If you like the colors that can be associated with labels, but you find the number of options too limited, there's a new option to add custom colors by selecting colors for background and text.


Probably the less useful experimental feature, "Navbar drag and drop" lets you reorder the boxes displayed by Google in the left sidebar: Gmail Chat, labels, Quick Links, Invite a friend.

The three new features can be enabled in Gmail Labs, a section available in the new version of Gmail and only for English interfaces.



Related:
Experimental Gmail features
Hidden labels in Gmail

{ via Gmail Blog }

Google Digitizes Historical Newspapers

In its never-ending quest to organize the world's information, Google started to digitize old editions from newspapers like Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, St. Petersburg Times, Today's News-Herald and make them available at Google News Archive.


"Today, we're launching an initiative to make more old newspapers accessible and searchable online by partnering with newspaper publishers to digitize millions of pages of news archives. This effort expands on the contributions of others who've already begun digitizing historical newspapers. In 2006, we started working with publications like the New York Times and the Washington Post to index existing digital archives and make them searchable via Google News Archive," explains Google Blog.

The newspapers digitized by Google are available for free in an interface similar to the one from Google Book Search. Unfortunately it's quite difficult to read articles, even though Google automatically detects headlines and centers the associated content.

Google Video Suggest

Google Video started to display suggestions in the search box. The suggestions are identical to the ones used for YouTube probably because Google has a single platform for searching videos which is used by both YouTube and Google Video.

The number of suggestions is 5 and they can be disabled in the preferences page by selecting "Do not provide query suggestions in the search box".


So why use Google Video instead of finding videos on YouTube? Google Video indexes videos from hundreds of sites, many of the videos can be played without opening a new page and you can share them with your Gmail contacts.

Use Multiple Google Accounts Simultaneously in Google Chrome

Google Chrome's incognito mode is less sophisticated than IE8's InPrivate browsing, but it has a feature that will be useful for those who have more than one Google account.

When you open a window in incognito mode (Ctrl+Shift+N), your cookies from the standard session are no longer available and you can easily log in to a new Google account.


Chrome's help center has more details about this feature. "Webpages that you open and files downloaded while you are incognito won't be logged in your browsing and download histories; all new cookies are deleted after you close the incognito window. You can browse normally and in incognito mode at the same time by using separate windows." Michael Jeffrey explains that "incognito mode is a window-level mode - all pages viewed within this window are not persisted to the user's history, and incognito pages use a temporary cookie store that is blank at the start of the incognito session".

When you close the incognito window, all the cookies are deleted so you need to log in again the next time you browse in incognito mode. This trick can be used for any other services that allow multiple accounts, but you can only use two accounts at the same time: one in a standard window and the other one in incognito mode.

The Troubles with Google FeedBurner

Migrating FeedBurner to Google Accounts hasn't been a smooth process and the new FeedBurner doesn't look very promising. Last month, Google officially launched AdSense for Feeds and asked those who want to join the program to "burn" their feeds using FeedBurner. If you were already using FeedBurner, Google provided an email address where you could contact a Google employee to manually migrate your account (since then, the email address has been replaced by a form).

After a day or two, FeedBurner's new home at feedburner.google.com finally allowed you to log in. Some people found that the number of subscribers dropped to 0, but the most visible changes were the features which have been removed. The Googlified FeedBurner no longer includes web stats probably because of the overlap with Google Analytics, the feed stats history isn't available and you can no longer manage the list of email subscribers.

Another strange issue is that Google Blog Search stopped indexing this blog and many other blogs after migrating to the new FeedBurner. There are many other bugs related to this transition, but FeedBurner failed to acknowledge them.



Update. In about 2 weeks, Google has addressed some of the issues:
* Blog Search indexes feeds
* you can manage the list of email subscribers (there's even a new option to filter that list)

Blogger Followers, a New Social Application

Blogger has recently released a feature that lets you publicly subscribe to other blogs. Google calls this "following" and you can only follow blogs powered by Blogger, at least for now.

"Do you have a favorite blog and want to let the author and readers know that you are a fan? Well now you can do that and more with the Blogger Following feature," explains the help center.

Bloggers can add a widget that lists the people who follow a blog. Visitors can follow a blog from the widget and see their subscriptions in Blogger's dashboard or in Google Reader.


In most feed readers, subscribing to a feed is an anonymous action and the only public information is the total number of subscribers. The new Blogger feature indirectly adds public subscriptions to Google Reader.

Googler John Panzer has more details about the next steps:

"The Followers gadget lets you surf the network of people who read and interact with blogs. Just click on any of the followers and you'll go to their profile. For now, that profile is just their Blogger profile page with the blogs they own... but down the road, we'll also be integrated with Friend Connect. Which will open up this network further, in a couple of ways: A non-Blogger site can add a Friend Connect gadget to show the people following it; and you can filter the followers of a blog to show only the friends you already have on your favorite social network. Which you can view as extending your social network out into the blogosphere, or as the blogosphere incorporating all social networks -- take your pick. Of course all of this is based on OpenSocial, so anyone will be able to add gadgets and talk the OpenSocial protocol to access, with user permission, all of this network data and do new and interesting things on top of it. This represents a natural evolution of the loosely joined, standards-based pieces that have always characterized blogging."

The "followers" feature is not yet available for all Blogger users, but you can enable it by following a blog. The address is:

http://www.blogger.com/follow-blog.g?blogID=<BLOGID> (e.g: follow Google OS).

There are two options: follow the blog publicly and appear in the list of subscribers or subscribe anonymously. In both cases, the blog will appear in Blogger's dashboard and in a read-only Google Reader folder
that can be hidden in the settings.


Instead of building a social network like MyBlogLog, Google creates an application on top of other social networks. Incidentally, the application is first tested for blogger.com, but a future Google Reader API and the migration to OpenSocial/FriendConnect will make it look more interesting.