Stardates in Google Calendar

Star Trek fans will certainly like this. If you have a recent event in Google Calendar that contains "Star Trek", Google will automatically add a calendar titled "Stardates".

"Our team has been pretty excited about a certain movie premiering today. After yet another discussion of starships, phasers, and warp drives, we decided to put our enthusiasm to work and give Calendar a little boost. The result was the creation of a new calendar, pre-loaded with stardates to help you keep track of time in this universe and beyond," explains Google.

"A stardate is a means of specifying absolute dates in the fictional Star Trek universe. They are decimal numbers, usually rounded to a single decimal place, which replace absolute Gregorian calendar dates," according to Wikipedia.


To see the stardates calendar, create an event that includes "Star Trek" in the title and refresh Google Calendar. You should notice the new calendar in the left sidebar. Another way to take a look at the calendar is to sign out from Google and then visit Google Calendar's homepage.

{ via Bradley Horowitz }

Chrome Ad in the New York Times

Google bought a large expandable ad in the online edition of the New York Times to promote Google Chrome. The ad lets you play the 11 Chrome-related short films recently uploaded at YouTube.

Here are some of the reactions on Twitter:

patrickbeeson: "Saw a monster ad for Google Chrome on the front of nytimes.com this morning."

jlopezvalcarcel: "Google bought a display ad on NYTimes.com for Chrome. Quality content wins the day. Automated algorithms can only take you so far."

sydneyskybetter: "If an ad for Google's Chrome browser is going to take up 80% of NYTimes.com, the least they could do is offer a version for mac."

brooksjordan: "Man, Google has a cool ad/micro-movies abt Chrome on the NYTimes right now. I can't take a screenshot 'cause it only plays on hover."

Google Chrome is the most advertised Google product: you'll often see it promoted on Google's homepage, on YouTube, LinkedIn and other places. Word of mouth worked well for Google's search engine, but it's probably not enough to make you change your browser, especially when you don't even know what a browser is or when you think that the Internet is a blue icon on your desktop.

The Atomic Unit of Online Consumption

There's an intense debate in the US about the future of journalism. Some news organizations say that Google News and other news aggregators need to share revenue with publishers. While Google provides an easy way to opt-out from indexing, news sites need Google's traffic to gain new visitors. "We don't want to pull out of the digital ecosystem. We just simply want a fair compensation for the content that we publish," says Jim Moroney, publisher and chief executive of "The Dallas Morning News".

Newspapers can't figure out how to adapt to the online environment and Google is an easy target. News aggregators and search engines are the new destination for news, since users can choose from a lot of different perspectives. Marissa Mayer, Vice President at Google, found an interesting correlation between news articles, songs and short-form videos in her testimony before the US Senate Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet:

The atomic unit of consumption for existing media is almost always disrupted by emerging media. For example, digital music caused consumers to think about their purchases as individual songs rather than as full albums. Digital and on-demand video has caused people to view variable-length clips when it is convenient for them, rather than fixed-length programs on a fixed broadcast schedule. Similarly, the structure of the Web has caused the atomic unit of consumption for news to migrate from the full newspaper to the individual article. As with music and video, many people still consume physical newspapers in their original full-length format. But with online news, a reader is much more likely to arrive at a single article. While these individual articles could be accessed from a newspaper's homepage, readers often click directly to a particular article via a search engine or another Website.

Changing the basic unit of content consumption is a challenge, but also an opportunity. Treating the article as the atomic unit of consumption online has several powerful consequences. When producing an article for online news, the publisher must assume that a reader may be viewing this article on its own, independent of the rest of the publication. To make an article effective in a standalone setting requires providing sufficient context for first-time readers, while clearly calling out the latest information for those following a story over time. It also requires a different approach to monetization: each individual article should be self-sustaining. These types of changes will require innovation and experimentation in how news is delivered online, and how advertising can support it.

Speaking of innovation and experimentation, Google News has updated the way news clusters are presented and the new design integrates articles, blogs, local sources, images and quotes.


It's not clear whether newspapers will adapted to the changes, but Arianna Huffington, editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post, has a good conclusion: "The future of quality journalism is not dependent on the future of newspapers".

{ via Google Public Policy Blog }

Sort YouTube Results by Oldest

How to find the first video uploaded to YouTube? Just search for "YouTube" and sort the results by oldest. The new sorting option is a great way to find old videos and to see how YouTube evolved over the years.


If you find some interesting videos, post their link in the comments.

Sites that Require Registration? Use Google

Some web sites show different content depending on the referrer. News sites like the New York Times, which display many of the articles only if you are a subscriber, make an exception if visitors click on results from Google and other popular search engines.

Google has a feature called "first click free" for sites that require subscription. "First Click Free is designed to protect your content while allowing you to include it Google's search index. To implement First Click Free, you must allow all users who find your page through Google search to see the full text of the document that the user found in Google's search results and that Google's crawler found on the web without requiring them to register or subscribe to see that content. The user's first click to your content is free and does not require logging in."

While the first click is free, when you click on a link from the page, it's likely that the site will ask you to register. This is especially annoying for sites like nytimes.com, which use article pagination to increase the number of page views.

One workaround is to copy the URL of the page you can't access directly in Google's search box and click on the first result. If Google didn't index the page, you can use SearchWiki to add the page in the list of search results: make sure you are logged in using your Google account and click on "Add a result" at the bottom of Google's search results page.


Another option would be to use the credentials collected by BugMeNot.

Googleplex in 200 Seconds

The video below shows some interesting facts about Googleplex, Google's headquarters from Mountain View. Googleplex is a vivid mix of technology, fun activities, healthy food, eco-friendly materials and college campus atmosphere.


Wikipedia's article has a detailed description of the Plex.

"The four core buildings, totaling (47,038 m²), were built for and originally occupied by Silicon Graphics (SGI). (...) Since the buildings are of relatively low height, the complex covers a large area. The interior of the headquarters is furnished with items like shade lamps and giant rubber balls. The lobby contains a piano and a projection of current live Google search queries. The facilities include a gym (Building 40), free laundry rooms (Buildings 40 and 42), two small swimming pools, a sand volleyball court, and eleven cafeterias of diverse selection. Google has also installed replicas of SpaceShipOne and a dinosaur skeleton. In late 2006 and early 2007 the company installed a series of solar panels, capable of producing 1.6 megawatts of electricity. At the time, it was believed to be the largest corporate installation in the United States."

{ via Blogoscoped Forum }

Gmail Gadget Incompatible with Secure Setting

Gmail's iGoogle gadget stopped working if you've enabled "always use HTTPS" in Gmail, a setting that redirects any Gmail URL to the secure version. "The Gmail gadget does not support the Always use https setting that you chose in full Gmail. If you would like to use https, please open full Gmail," mentions the error message.


It's worth mentioning that Google didn't enforce the option in iGoogle until now, even if the setting to force the secure connection was added last year. There are many incompatibilities between the HTTPS setting and Google applications like Google Toolbar, Gmail Notifier and the mobile Gmail application, which weren't design to support this option.

Here's Google's explanation:

As several of you have noticed, we made a change in iGoogle to the way that iGoogle's Gmail gadget works. If you previously set Gmail to only access your mail using https by selecting "Always use https" in Gmail's settings, you will now see a message in iGoogle's Gmail gadget asking you to open the full version of Gmail. We made this change in iGoogle for those users who want to ensure that their Gmail is transmitted using https.

We know that many of you would like to access your mail from iGoogle with https, and we're investigating ways to provide https support for iGoogle's Gmail gadget. In the meantime, you have a couple of choices:

- If you'd prefer to access your mail with https, please visit Gmail directly at https://mail.google.com/mail.
- If you'd rather get your Gmail on iGoogle with the Gmail gadget, visit Gmail's Settings page and select "Don't always use https."

I think it's great that Gmail supports secure connections, a feature that's not available in other popular webmail services like Hotmail and Yahoo Mail. The option to always use HTTPS is just an added bonus, since you can easily bookmark https://mail.google.com/mail/ and use that URL. To prevent the incompatibilities, Google could add independent HTTPS settings for all the applications and services that use Gmail, so that the gadget or the notifier work even if you've enabled "always use HTTPS" in the desktop version of Gmail.

{ Thanks, Simon and Michael. }

First Google Latitude Applications

Google Latitude started as a service that managed to obtain your location and shared it with a group of people, who also revealed their locations. The service was available as part of the mobile Google Maps application or as an iGoogle gadget.

To make the information stored in Google Latitude more useful, you can now display it on a web page, in a feed or add it as a constantly-updated Google Talk status. The location can be added to a badge and embedded on any web page, but there's also an option to get a list of the most recent locations as a KML or JSON feed. Since you may not want to share your precise location, Google Latitude has an option to display the city-level location.


If you only want to share your location with the Google Talk contacts, enable the new location status. The feature "automatically updates your status message with your current city's name as you move".

It's interesting to notice that the two new features are actually applications and it's likely that Google Latitude will implement an API that could be used by other location-based services, much like Yahoo's Fire Eagle. "They are two separate apps, so you can select which one(s) you'd like to use and customize exactly how you'd like to share your Latitude location. (...) Both apps adhere to the same terms and conditions -- you must explicitly opt in to the application and of course, you can always disable an app by going back to the app's page," explains Google.

"Apps use the same location as the Google Latitude location tied to your Google Account. While Latitude is enabled and updating your location from your mobile phone or iGoogle where available, your apps will show your most recently updated location. If you simply stop updating your location from your phone or computer by closing iGoogle, letting your phone run out of battery, turn your phone off, etc., your last updated or manually set location will still be visible in your other apps, even if it's old," informs the help center.

The location from Google Latitude, which is obtained from a variety of sources (GPS, cell towers, WiFi location), could be used in many applications: better local results in Google Search, easier to use GOOG-411, viewing your routes in Google Maps, customized geo-alerts and probably other useful-but-somewhat-creepy services.