wavelinks

Your Google docs: Soon in search results? | Webware – CNET

Users of Google Docs and Spreadsheets accustomed to publicly publishing their documents might want to rethink exactly how publicly available they want to them to be.

Google on Thursday wrote in a blog post that “in about two weeks, we will be launching a change for published docs. The change will allow published docs that are linked to from a public Web site to be crawled and indexed, which means they can appear in search results you see on Google.com and other search engines…This is a very exciting change, as your published docs linked to from public Web sites will reach a much wider audience of people.”

via Your Google docs: Soon in search results? | Webware – CNET.

Daniel Ek: Spotify will kill file-sharing, be a European home-run

It’s true to say, without a hint of hyperbole, that 25 year old Daniel Ek’s Spotify has taken the global music industry by storm, including Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. Even in markets it hasn’t launched in yet including the US, Spotify is generating a lot of attention and is now valued at €170 million. Music lovers have discovered ways to circumvent regional limitations on the software and are already using the service heralded by some as the future of the music industry. And that suits the music industry just fine, especially since they’ve invested in it. At a Glasshouse event at the Royal College of Physicians in London last night, an assembled throng of the tech business community listened to Ek’s thoughts.

“Despite making every mistake in the book in my previous companies,” says Daniel Ek, “with Spotify things seem to be working out. It’s true that we underestimated how long it would take the labels to come in, though: we started the company in 2006, but didn’t launch a product until 2008 because it took so long to get the labels on board.”

via Daniel Ek: Spotify will kill file-sharing, be a European home-run.

Inside Google Books: Books Digitized by Google Available via the Espresso Book Machine

I’m a sucker for a cool piece of technology. The Espresso Book Machine, which can print a book in minutes before your eyes, fits the bill. If sentient robots ever succeed in taking over the world, this is how they will print their books.

We founded Google Books on the premise that anyone, anywhere, anytime should have the tools to explore the great works of history and culture. We recently made available over a million free public domain books for viewing and download from our web site. Reading digital books can be an enjoyable experience, but we realize that there are times when readers want a physical copy of a book. To that end, I’m excited to announce that we’re partnering with On Demand Books to allow readers to purchase public domain books digitized by Google from any Espresso Book Machine at bookstores and libraries around the world.

Here’s some video footage of the Espresso machine in action:

via Inside Google Books: Books Digitized by Google Available via the Espresso Book Machine.

Social NetWok for Google Apps

SocialWok lays a social network on top of your email, Calendar, Docs, Sites and so on – something that the Google Apps suite was missing when being used as the main infrastructure for an organisation.

Official Google Blog: Teaching computers to read: Google acquires reCAPTCHA

The image above is a CAPTCHA — you can read it, but computers have a harder time interpreting the letters. We tried to make it hard for computers to recognize because we wanted to give humans the scoop first, but we’re happy to announce to everybody now that Google has acquired reCAPTCHA, a company that provides CAPTCHAs to help protect more than 100,000 websites from spam and fraud.

Since computers have trouble reading squiggly words like these, CAPTCHAs are designed to allow humans in but prevent malicious programs from scalping tickets or obtain millions of email accounts for spamming. But there’s a twist — the words in many of the CAPTCHAs provided by reCAPTCHA come from scanned archival newspapers and old books. Computers find it hard to recognize these words because the ink and paper have degraded over time, but by typing them in as a CAPTCHA, crowds teach computers to read the scanned text.

via Official Google Blog: Teaching computers to read: Google acquires reCAPTCHA.

Apps.gov brings cloud computing to the Federal government | CTOvision.com

The Federal government embraced cloud computing today with the launch of the GSA operated Apps.gov which promises to bring efficient cloud computing services and infrastructure to the U.S. government agencies. As noted on the Apps.gov website:

“Cloud computing plays a key role in the President’s initiative to modernize Information Technology IT by identifying enterprise -wide common services and solutions and adopting a new cloud-computing business model. The Federal CIO Council under the guidance of the Office of Management and Budget OMB and the Federal Chief Information Officer CIO, Vivek Kundra, established the Cloud Computing Initiative to fulfill the President’s objectives for cloud computing.”

via Apps.gov brings cloud computing to the Federal government | CTOvision.com.

Translation Technology Can Open Your Eyes to a Global Social Web – The Steve Rubel Lifestream

As more of us around the world join the web, a lot content is going to start to be produced in non-English languages. This hasn’t been a factor for a lot of us, but I suspect it will as we begin to discover content-rich resources and individuals we want to interact with.

Case in point. Recently I started reading a German blog that covers technology. It has a lot rich content, like for example the latest build of a portable version of Google Chrome – but it’s all in German.

via Translation Technology Can Open Your Eyes to a Global Social Web – The Steve Rubel Lifestream.

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.

RSSCloud Vs. PubSubHubbub: Why The Fat Pings Win – washingtonpost.com

[TechCrunch/Washington Post Reports] In the past few months, a lot of attention has been given to the rise of the real-time web. The problem is that the web wasn’t designed with real-time in mind. There is a huge need for the tech community to get behind new protocols that will power this fundamental shift in how web applications work. Today I want to take a look at two of the leading protocols that enable real-time notifications on the web. While there are older protocols that enable real-time notifications like XEP-0060, PubSubHubbub (PuSH) and rssCloud are two new protocols which show a lot of promise of gaining adoption.

Both PuSH and rssCloud address a fundamental flaw in the way web applications work today. Currently, getting updates on the web requires constant polling. Subscribers are forced to act like nagging children asking, “Are we there yet?” Subscribers must constantly ping the publisher to ask if there are new updates even if the answer is “no” 99% of the time. This is terribly inefficient, wastes resources, and makes it incredibly hard to find new content in as soon as it appears. Both protocols flip the current model on its head so that updates are event driven rather than request driven. By that I mean that both protocols eliminate the need for polling by essentially telling subscribers, “Don’t ask us if there’s anything new. We’ll tell you.”

via RSSCloud Vs. PubSubHubbub: Why The Fat Pings Win – washingtonpost.com.