wavelinks

Google Public Policy Blog: Introducing DataLiberation.org: Liberate your data!

[well I have tried to get 7GB of  Gmail into a new 25GB pad up the road in Google Apps for Domains street and I had to leave 5GB behind so I read with interest]

Imagine you want to move out of your apartment. When you ask your landlord about the terms of your previous lease, he says that you are free to leave at any time; however, you cannot take all of your things with you – not your photos, your keepsakes, or your clothing. If you’re like most people, a restriction like this may cause you to rethink moving altogether. Not only is this a bad situation for you as the tenant, but it’s also detrimental to the housing industry as a whole, which no longer has incentive to build better apartments at all.

Although this may seem like a strange analogy, this pretty accurately describes the situation my team, Google’s Data Liberation Front, is working hard to combat from an engineering perspective. We’re a small team of Google Chicago engineers (named after a Monty Python skit about the Judean People’s Front) that aims to make it easy for our users to transfer their personal data in and out of Google’s services by building simple import and export functions. Our goal is to “liberate” data so that consumers and businesses using Google products always have a choice when it comes to the technology they use.

via Google Public Policy Blog: Introducing DataLiberation.org: Liberate your data!.

For every Judean People’s Front there is a People’s Front of Judea, Data, lig amach é!

Google Fast Flip

[Honey I froze the web] Google Fast Flip is a web application that lets users discover and share news articles. It combines qualities of print and the Web, with the ability to “flip” through pages online as quickly as flipping through a magazine. It also enables users to follow friends and topics, discover new content and create their own custom magazines around searches.

via Features : Google Fast Flip – Google News Help.

How to Access Gmail When It’s Down – Gmail – Lifehacker

Last week’s Gmail outage is just the latest in a long series of outages in our favorite webmail application, but you don’t have to let that stop you from accessing your email and getting things done.

Access Gmail Through Alternate Modes

Just because the Gmail web interface went down doesn’t mean that Gmail is entirely down—often you can continue to access your account using one of the alternate web interfaces, which often are still accessible even when the regular web interface goes down.

via How to Access Gmail When It’s Down – Gmail – Lifehacker.

Embeddable Google Document Viewer

Google Docs offers an undocumented feature that lets you embed PDF files and PowerPoint presentations in a web page. The files don’t have to be uploaded to Google Docs, but they need to be available online.

via Embeddable Google Document Viewer.

Seven Easy Ways to Integrate Your Google Apps – Google Apps – Lifehacker

The information you keep in Google apps like Gmail, GCal, Reader, and Voice doesn’t just live in one place. Check out a few easy but non-obvious ways to plug different Google apps together and share their data and features.

via Seven Easy Ways to Integrate Your Google Apps – Google Apps – Lifehacker.

google-docs-upload – Project Hosting on Google Code

A tool for batch upload documents to a Google Docs account with recursive traversing of directories. The tool supports PDF upload.

Total list of supported formats: csv, doc, docx, html, htm, ods, odt, pdf, ppt, pps, rtf, sxw, tsv, tab, txt, xls, xlsx.

To run the application you need Java 1.6 or greater installed.

via google-docs-upload – Project Hosting on Google Code.

Google bigotry « BuzzMachine

Google has an image problem – not a PR problem (that is, not with the public) but a press problem (with whining old media people). Google is trying hard – too hard, perhaps – not to argue with the guys who still buy ink by the barrel. Google is only causing them to buy fewer barrels. And newspaper people will use their last drops of ink to complain about Google’s success and try to blame it for their own failures rather than changing their own businesses.

What should Google do? I think it needs to become news’ best friend.

via Google bigotry « BuzzMachine.

Helvetireader

Helvetireader is a userscript that pares down Google Reader to what I consider to be the essentials. In particular, it’s made for looking at just unread feeds in the expanded view, using Keyboard Shortcuts instead of on-screen buttons. It’s not going to suit how everyone uses Google Reader, so you can take the CSS and personalise to your hearts content!

All you need is a browser that supports userscripts (see below) and, of course, Helvetica.

via Helvetireader.

Official Google Blog: Google Domestic Trends: tracking economic sectors

Google Domestic Trends tracks Google search traffic across specific sectors of the economy. The changes in the search volume of a given sector on google.com may provide useful economic insight. We’ve created 23 indexes that track the major economic sectors, such as retail, auto and unemployment.

For example, the Google Luxuries Index tracks queries like [jewelry], [rings], [diamond], [ring], [jewelers], [tiffany] and so forth. As you can see from the screenshot below, this index has seasonal spikes in December — however, in the last two years there has been a pronounced decrease as the recession made consumers wary of spending on luxury items.

via Official Google Blog: Google Domestic Trends: tracking economic sectors.

Google Improves AdSense Competitive Ad Filter | jatiN mahindrA doT coM

In August, Google announced that it was upgrading its category filtering feature for AdSense, and extending the feature into more countries (like the US and the UK). Today, Google announced that they have added two additional improvements to the Competitive Ad Filter.

These improvements would be faster filtering and increased filter size.

“In the past, the Competitive Ad Filter sometimes took up to several hours to block URLs you’d entered,” says Arlene Lee of Google’s Inside AdSense Team. “Knowing you’ve wanted a faster filtering system, we’re excited to let you know that URLs added to your Competitive Ad Filter are now usually blocked within 30 minutes. We hope that this will help you quickly make changes to maintain a positive user experience on your sites.”

via Google Improves AdSense Competitive Ad Filter | jatiN mahindrA doT coM.