Embed PowerPoint Presentations Using Google Docs

When you publish a presentation at Google Docs, there's a new option that lets you add the slideshow to your site. Google calls this "the mini presentation module", but it's more like a YouTube player that happens to display a presentation. Unlike YouTube, the embedded presentation doesn't use Flash and there's no auto-play, so you need to manually advance to the next slide.

To see the embedded presentation, click on the image:

Since Google's presentation app uses a lot of memory, doesn't have an export option and it's impossible to use if you want to create a decent presentation, the new viewer is a good option if you want to add an existing presentation to your site. You only need to upload it to Google Docs, publish it and then copy the code.

Other sites that offer presentation viewers are: Scribd (which accepts many other file types and has a multi-file uploader), Slideshare (that doesn't require login and has a file size limit of 30 MB). Surprisingly enough, none of these two sites offer auto-play and, even if it has the most advanced viewer, Scribd requires to scroll down to see the next slides. Here's the same presentation above at Scribd and at Slideshare.

{ Presentation by Brent Callinicos, Vice President and Treasurer at Google. News found by Google Blogoscoped }

Google Docs Adds Subfolders

Even if the interface doesn't completely reflect this change, you can now create subfolders to organize your files in Google Docs. To do that, go to one of the existing folders, click on New and select Folder from the drop-down. Alternatively, you can use the contextual menu.

Google choose an interesting way to visualize the hierarchy: folders can be expanded inline by clicking on the small arrow placed in front of their names. The left sidebar doesn't show any subfolder, but this is probably a flaw that will be fixed soon.

The folders from Google Docs continue to also act as labels, even if it's more difficult to treat them this way and the language used in the UI doesn't help too much. To add a file to a new folder you need to click on "Move to", select the folder and then click on "Add to folder".

More Xooglers

"After a life-changing four and a half years of working with the most talented group of people I have ever met, I've decided to take the plunge and do it all over again, working for a very small start-up. Today is my last day at the Big G," explains Kevin Fox, who designed the user interface for Gmail, Google Calendar and redesigned Google Reader. "Google is the first place I've ever worked where I feel that I'm part of the company as opposed to working for the company."

In December, Nathan Stoll left Google, after working as a product manager for Google News. "Google has been like a family, one of the most significant shaping influences in my life. (...) I'm grateful for the fortuitous opportunities I was gifted with during the past five years, the phenomenal people I've had a chance to work with, and the knowledge and experience I have gained that I'll carry through my career and life. (...) I've been comforted by the realization that Google benefits by my departure to tackle new endeavors. Great companies like Goldman Sachs, McKinsey & Company, Procter & Gamble, and GE all consistently turn out leaders in their fields; their employee departures complement the mother ship by spreading the culture and working ethos. Google has many more fine minds joining than it has leaving, and is training them to be technology-focused leaders with a passion for building great consumer focused services."

It's interesting to see more and more people leaving Google to build a start-up, to join Facebook or to other interesting things. The same Google that was named last year "the best place to work for" by the Fortune Magazine. Maybe Google has been a great school for many of them and they want to start anew, to prove they can still achieve great things in other contexts, without the pressure and the unfair advantage of working for Google.

Related search: "* * leaves Google".

{ via Search Engine Land}

The Rise and Rise of YouTube

This is the first YouTube video, uploaded on April 23rd, 2005. In the video you can see Jawed Karim, co-founder of YouTube.


One year and a half later, on Oct 21st 2006, Jawed Karim gave a talk at the University of Illinois. YouTube already had 30 million visitors per month and served more than 100 million videos daily. 12 days before this talk, YouTube had been acquired by Google for $1.65 billion.


Jawed Karim sayd that YouTube is a natural extension of other social sites like LiveJournal, Friendster, HotOrNot, Wikipedia, del.icio.us, Flickr and its success was possible because it was launched at the right time, when people started to have broadband and digital cameras. YouTube attracted a loyal audience that spent 30 minutes a day watching videos and then spreading their popularity.


{ via Jason Shellen }

Quantity Over Quality at Google Book Search

Campus Technology has a well-documented article about Google Book Search: The Good, the Bad & the Ugly, which suggests that Google's project is more about quantity than quality. For example, The University of California has to deliver 3,000 books a day to Google, according to their agreement. "All of the libraries are talking about that, in the sense of what might be the most interesting materials to scan. But I'll be very frank: There's a real balance point between volume and selection, especially when looking at these numbers. UC is trying to meet the needs of the contract it's signed," says Robin Chandler, former director of data acquisitions for UC's California Digital Library.

And since Google has to scan a lot of books, it needs a scalable scanning technology. "When it first started, the technical challenge was simply building a scanning device that worked. The next technical challenge was being able to run this scanning process at scale. We would have been quite happy to use commercial scanning technologies if they were adequate to scale to this. We only built our own scanning process because that was the way to make this project achievable for Google," says Dan Clancy from Google.

Surprisingly, the scanning process involves humans, as you can see in some books from Google's index (TechCrunch, Google Blogoscoped, George Hernandez, The Genealogue spotted fingers). "If you go into Google [Book Search] and look at any book, you'll be able to see by the number of body parts and fingerprints that [the pages] are being turned manually," suggests Linda Becker, VP at Kirtas, the company that produces the fastest robotic book scanner in the world: APT BookScan 2400. "If you were to go to the Google site, you'd see that one out of every five pages is either missing, or has fingers in it, or is cut off, or is blurry."


Larry Page announced in October 2007 that the book search index is "over a million books". A search for "now" returns 2,190,600 results (1,740,600 available in limited preview and 214,600 fully available for reading and downloading).

The conclusion of the article is optimistic:

When it comes down to it, then, this brave new world of book search probably needs to be understood as Book Search 1.0. And maybe participants should not get so hung up on quality that they obstruct the flow of an astounding amount of information. Right now, say many, the conveyor belt is running and the goal is to manage quantity, knowing that with time the rest of what's important will follow. Certainly, there's little doubt that in five years or so, Book Search as defined by Google will be very different. The lawsuits will have been resolved, the copyright issues sorted out, the standards settled, the technologies more broadly available, the integration more transparent.

Google AdSense Stats

AdSense launched a section for new publishers - Newbie Center - where you can find a lot of basic things about the program, but also read some numbers. Google uses "might" whenever there's a number involved probably because they don't want to influence you too much.

"While there's no magic formula to determine how much revenue you'll receive based on a certain amount of traffic, it helps to be realistic about your earning potential. For example, for every thousand page impressions you receive, you might earn anywhere from $0.05 to $5.00." A 2006 article from Business 2.0 Magazine partially agrees to this: "CPM rates on Google AdSense and competing automated systems are estimated at anywhere from 50 cents to a few bucks."

Google also talks about the magical high paying ads: "while it's nice to receive higher paying ads, keep in mind that higher paying ads may be aimed at a smaller target audience and therefore generate less interest and ultimately fewer clicks." Google says that "for a larger site, 1% might be considered a decent clickthrough rate".

Google AdSense's TOS doesn't allow you to reveal the clickthrough rates for your sites and, by default, Google displays stats at the page level. So instead of seeing the average CTR and CPM for an ad unit, Google will show the average numbers for a web page. To see the real numbers, you need to go to advanced reports and select "show data by ad unit". Note that Google doesn't break down the data by domain or subdomain, so you need to create URL channels for each of your site. You can create up to 200 URL channels and they start tracking data only after you add them.


Google AdSense makes it difficult to find key information about ads and it doesn't separate the performance by ad block type, domain, referral etc. At some point, a post from Google Analytics blog suggested a possible integration with AdSense, but the current level of openness is not encouraging.

Google Artificially Promotes Recent Web Pages

Google paid a big price when it started to index pages faster and show them in the search results minutes after they're published. The problem is that you can't rank a page that has just been created because it has no backlinks so Google artificially inflates the rankings of the recently-created pages based on historical data and the few backlinks that are detected.

In some cases, if Google sees a lot of searches for a query that wasn't popular before, it assumes something has happened recently and shows more recent results.

These two changes are extremely visible today. If you go to Google's homepage and click on the special logo that celebrates 25 years of TCP/IP and the New Year, you'll be sent to the search results for [January 1 TCP/IP] and you should normally see a Wikipedia page as the top result. But the first page of Google's results has changed dramatically in the past hours and all the results are new: most of them are from spam sites, pages that discuss Google's logo and quote from Wikipedia. Most notably, the top result is a Digg page that links to a newly-created blog with a meaningful address: january-1-tcp-ip.blogspot.com and a highly-optimized title: "January 1 tcp/ip". Obviously, that blog hoped to take advantage of Google's new logo and succeeded: the two top results are Digg pages that link to that site and they're followed by that blog's homepage and a post from the same blog.



The site gets traffic both directly from Digg and from Google's homepage.


You can see at Google Trends that [january 1 tcp/ip] was the "hottest" query for December 31 in the US and continues to be very popular today.


It seems that Google can no longer send users to a search results page from a doodle because the results can become unpredictable and they show a big flaw in Google's algorithms. The same bug can also be a feature if there's a devastating earthquake somewhere on the planet and people start to search for more information about it after they hear the news.

Update (9 hours later): Other blogs take advantage of the situation.

Top Google Apps in 2007

This is a top of the Google products that improved the most in 2007. For reference, here's the chart from last year:

10. Picasa + Picasa Web Albums
9. Blogger
8. Google Books
7. Google Calendar
6. Google Reader
5. Google Maps + Google Earth
4. Google Docs & Spreadsheets
3. Google Video + YouTube
2. Gmail
1. Google Search

... and here's the chart for 2007:

10. Google News launched an image version, added videos, comments from people in the news and started to host original content from news agencies. Google News also links to results from Blog Search and integrates news archive results.

9. Picasa Web Albums upgraded from 250 MB to 1 GB of free storage, added labels, a mobile version, an API, the option to geotag photos. You can search for public photos inside Picasa Web Albums and these photos can now be a indexed by Google Image Search.

8. Google Notebook has finally become more accessible this year by integrating with Google Bookmarks and being a part of Google Toolbar 5. Notes are a special type of bookmark that includes clips from the web page, comments and can be shared with other people. Google Notebook also added labels, a mobile version, exporting to Google Docs.

7. Google Personalized Homepage, now known as iGoogle, added features that should make you feel at home: create gadgets without writing code, dynamic themes, customizable layout, sharing tabs, Google Desktop gadgets.

6. Google Reader added trends, support for embedded content (e.g. YouTube videos), an offline version, search, recommendations, drag-and-drop feed management, shared items from your friends. Google's feed reader also updates feeds faster, using the ping mechanism from Blog Search.

5. Google Docs integrated with Gmail by adding a link next to attachments, added a better document list interface and a mobile version. In September, Google Presentations was launched with a basic set of features and probably in a alpha version. Among the many other small updates, it's worth mentioning: sharing documents with an URL, conditional formatting, autofill powered by Google Sets, importing online data and a storage API.

4. YouTube frequently updated its interfaces, launched a mobile version (it's also available as an iPhone application), customizable players, a bulk uploader, a Google Data API (that means a lot of new feeds). YouTube also introduced overlay ads and shares revenue with some content creators. The much-anticipated video identification technology might solve some of the issues with copyright infringement, but its success is probably limited. On the Google Video side, it added third-party sites in the index and became a video search engine.

3. This year, Gmail finally allowed anyone to sign up for an account. Gmail increased the maximum attachment size to 20 MB and the free storage quota to 6GB, while adding an option to pay for more storage. Gmail also added one of the most popular feature requests: IMAP and a a presentation viewer. It launched a new version with a rewritten AJAX backend and a lot of new features: AIM integration, colored labels, new contact manager, group chat, prefetched messages. Gmail 2.0 was launched for a limited number of users and had performance problems, but they were solved in less than a month after launch.

2. Google Search added more features than ever: personalization based on search history and location, plus boxes that extend the classic snippets, universal search results from specialized search engines, more fresh results and faster indexing, easier to access subscribed links. There's also a Google Labs site for search experiments that lets you preview new features and interfaces.

1. Google Maps added street view for 23 US cities, public transit directions for a small number of areas, changing routes using drag-and-drop, embeddable maps. You can now create personalized maps, collaborate with your friends and even allow anyone to edit your maps. Google Maps integrates mashups using mapplets, and includes geographic content from the web in the search results. Google Maps Mobile is now available for Windows Mobile devices, Symbian, iPhone and launched a feature that simulates GPS to detect your location. There's also a way to access local search by voice: GOOG-411. Google Earth has an option for exploring the sky, a flight simulator and many new layers, including one for YouTube videos and another one for weather.

2007 was definitely the year of Google Maps, but Google also added mobile interfaces for most of its applications and sprinkled social features to prepare for another great year.

Winning Even When You Lose

* April 1, 2004: Gmail launches in a private beta and starts to offer 1 GB of free storage.
* May 13, 2004: Yahoo increases the free storage from 4 MB to 100 MB. In 2005, Yahoo Mail's free storage grows to 1GB and now it's "unlimited".

* August 25, 2005: Google Talk launches. "Built to support industry standards, Google Talk enables Google users to connect to the Google Talk service and exchange IMs using any client that does the same, including Trillian, Adium, iChat, GAIM, and Psi."
* October 12, 2005: "Yahoo! Inc. and Microsoft Corp. today announced a landmark agreement to connect users of their consumer instant messaging (IM) services on a global basis. The industry's first interoperability agreement between two distinct leading global consumer IM providers will give MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messenger users the ability to interact with each other, forming what is expected to be the largest consumer IM community in the world, estimated to be more than 275 million strong."

* July 2007: To bid for the 700MHz spectrum in the US, Google asks four conditions, the most important being to allow people to use any application and any device (these two conditions were accepted).
* November 27, 2007: Verizon Wireless announces "that it will provide customers the option to use, on its nationwide wireless network, wireless devices, software and applications not offered by the company".

* November 2, 2007: Google launches OpenSocial, "a set of common APIs that make it easy to create and host social applications on the web".
* December 13, 2007: Facebooks opens its application platform. "Now we also want to share the benefits of our work by enabling other social sites to use our platform architecture as a model. In fact, we’ll even license the Facebook Platform methods and tags to other platforms."

At the end of the day, it's not important if your product doesn't win when your offerings can make changes for everyone.

2007 Metrics

Last year, when I posted some stats for this blog, I didn't realize that many blogs do that. These stats aren't very important to me, but I'll still post some numbers that could reflect the evolution of this blog. The stats are provided by Google Analytics and FeedBurner.

Unique visitors: 3,977,796 (5,217,234 visits)
Pageviews: 7,704,133

Top referrals:
1. google [search results]: 53.12%
2. direct: 10.32%
3. digg.com: 8.46%
4. google.com [referral]: 7.75%
5. yahoo [search results]: 1.65%
(followed by: lifehacker.com, netvibes.com, techmeme.com, slashdot.org, del.icio.us)


Top countries:
1. US: 45.40%
2. UK: 8.10%
3. Canada: 5.44%
4. India: 4.27%
5. Australia: 2.57%
(followed by: Germany, France, Netherlands, Spain, Italy)

Top cities:
1. London: 2.68%
2. New York: 1.77%
3. Los Angeles: 0.98%
4. Sydney: 0.88%
5. Chicago: 0.88%
..............
60. Mountain View: 0.24%

Interesting corporate networks:
60. Opera Software ASA (most popular posts: Google Talk for mobile phones, Gmail Mobile Java application)
61. Google Inc. (Google Pack adds StarOffice)
106. Microsoft Corp. (Google Earth Flight Simulator)
217. Cisco Systems Inc. (Google Earth Flight Simulator)
267. Yahoo Inc. (Picasa Web integrates with Google Image Search, Google intends to integrates its social apps)
448. Sun Microsystems Inc. (Google Pack adds StarOffice)
450. Apple Computers (Google Phone, Screnshots of YouTube's new player)

Top browsers:
1. Firefox: 52.55%
2. Internet Explorer: 38.53% (IE7: 50%, IE6: 49.25%)
3. Safari: 4.13%
4. Opera: 3.03%
.............
8. Netscape: 0.13%

Top operating systems:
1. Windows: 85.49% (XP: 84.85%, Vista:9.90%)
2. Mac: 9.10%
3. Linux: 4.63%
4. iPhone: 0.05%
5. FreeBSD: 0.04%
6. SunOS: 0.03%
7. SymbianOS: 0.02%
8. Playstation Portable: 0.02%
9. iPod: 0.01%
10. PalmOS: 0.01%

Top posts from this year:
1. Google Earth Flight Simulator
2. Screnshots of YouTube's new player
3. Google Pack adds StarOffice
4. Google Presently
5. Easter egg in iGoogle

Top posts linked from corp.google.com:
1. Plus Box: a new way to look at search results
2. Google Page Creator has a sitemap
3. Google Web History
4. Live Search launches a major update
5. Screenshots of Google Talk's integration with AIM

Feed subscribers: 51,344 (number for Dec. 29)
In February, Google started to report the number of subscribers and that's the explanation for the sudden growth.


Top feed readers:
1. iGoogle/Google Reader: 58%
2. Netvibes: 15%
3. Bloglines: 7%
4. BlogRovR: 4%
5. Firefox Live Bookmarks: 2%
6. Outlook 2007: 2%
7. Newsgator Online: 2%
8. My Yahoo: 1%
9. Windows RSS Platform: 1%
10. Zhuaxia: 1%

There's also a chart that has a questionable ranking system, but people find it valuable: Technorati Top 100. Google Operating System is currently at #67:


Some conclusions: unlike last year, when most of the traffic was artificially inflated by social news sites (most notably, Digg), this year search engines ranked Google Operating System much better (in some cases, inaccurately) and other sites linked to my posts without having to see them at Digg. As usually, popular things are not necessarily better and they don't necessarily reflect the truth.