Tuesday, June 23, 2009


All For Good : From Google!


While many organizations are doing great work to enable community service locally, it's not simple to search across opportunities from a variety of places to find what's right for you. We have some experience finding relevant information from among many scattered sources, and when we learned that President Obama and the First Lady were making community service a top priority even before taking office, we thought we could help make a difference.

With our mission in mind, a group of "20%" engineers, designers, and program managers from Google and other tech companies began work on All for Good, a new service to help you find volunteer events in your community, and share those events with your friends.

All for Good provides a single search interface for volunteer activities across many major volunteering sites and organizations like United Way, VolunteerMatch, HandsOn Network andReach Out and Read. By building on top of the amazing efforts of existing volunteer organizations like these, we hope to amplify their efforts.


And in the spirit of open data, All for Good has a data API that anyone can use to search the same data displayed on the All for Good site. All for Good was developed entirely using App Engine and Google Base, with the full code repository hosted on Google Code Hosting. We'll be inviting developers to contribute to the open source application soon, so stay tuned.

Just as releasing the Maps API led to an surge of independent and creative uses of geographic information, we've built All for Good as a platform to encourage innovation in volunteerism, as much as an end product in itself. We hope software developers will use the API or code to build their own volunteering applications, some even better than the All for Good site!

And if you want to volunteer your video-creating skills to make a difference, check outYouTube Video Volunteers, a new platform designed to make connections between non-profits with video needs and skilled video makers who can help broadcast their causes through video.

All for Good is a new kind of collaboration between the private, public and nonprofits sectors to build free and open technology to empower citizens. Similar to the Open Social Foundation, we helped create a new organization called Our Good Works to make sure that the API, the platform, and social innovation that they inspire are supported for the long term. The leadership includes Reid Hoffman, Chris DiBona, Arianna Huffington and Craig Newmark on the board, and the organization aims to build support volunteerism services like All for Good.

Today the First Lady is in San Francisco calling on Americans to improve our communities by rolling up our sleeves and putting our time and talent towards doing good. You can learn more at serve.gov, where we're proud to power search.

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[18 May 2006 on Google Blog] Google's "20 percent time" in action


I love what I do (I work for Google's Partner Solutions Organization, writing internal programs and tools to help better manage our partner relationships--check out our job listings), but Google's "20 percent time" recently came in handy. The 20 percent time is a well-known part of our philosophy here, enabling engineers to spend one day a week working on projects that aren't necessarily in our job descriptions. You can use the time to develop something new, or if you see something that's broken, you can use the time to fix it. And this is how I recently worked up a new feature for Google Reader.

I really like the keyboard shortcuts in Gmail, and they work in Reader too. But when using Reader, I found myself wanting to skip whole sections of stories, and I was wearing out my "N" key (which moves the browser down one item). There are buttons on the screen to scroll up and down a whole page at a time, but I thought it would be nice to have a keyboard shortcut too. I could have hacked something together with Greasemonkey or a Firefox extension, but that would've only helped me and the three other people who read my blog.

So I fired off an email to the Reader team, hoping that they'd be able to add a keyboard shortcut. The team got back to me right away, and they told me how easy it would be to add the shortcut myself. They were right--it was easy, because the internal documentation was good and the code was really easy to work with. Once my change had been reviewed, it went live.

And I have to admit--every time I use the new shortcut ("shift" and "N"), I get a little thrill at how easily I was able to get my idea implemented.

Sunday, June 21, 2009


Google Analytics - Product Overview





Features

"Enterprise-class" shouldn't mean "experts only." Google Analytics has made it easy for non-specialists and specialists alike, across your organization, to practice performance focused marketing.

Advertising ROI

Integrated with AdWords and AdSense

Learn which AdWords keywords are most profitable and which site content generates the most revenue.

Complete campaign tracking capabilities

Track email campaigns, banner ads, offline ads and more.

Ecommerce reporting

Trace transactions to campaigns and keywords, get loyalty and latency metrics, and identify your best revenue sources.

Cross Channel and Multimedia Tracking

Internal Site Search

Understand visitor intent, find out what your customers are really looking for and speed up time to conversion.

Benchmarking

Find out whether your site usage metrics underperform or outperform those of your industry. Opt-in benchmarking compares your key metrics against aggregate performance metrics while preserving the confidentiality of your data.

Flash, video and social network application tracking

Track usage of your Ajax, Flash, social networking and Web 2.0 applications.

Customized Reporting

Advanced Segmentation

Isolate and analyze subsets of your traffic. Select from predefined custom segments such as "Paid Traffic" and "Visits with Conversions" or create new custom segments with a flexible, easy-to-use segment builder. Apply segments to current or historical data and compare segment performance side by side in reports. Watch video.

Custom Reports

Create, save, and edit custom reports that present the information you want to see organized in the way you want to see it. A drag and drop interface lets you select the metrics you want and define multiple levels of sub-reports. Once created, each custom report is available for as long as you want it.Watch video.

Dashboards

No more digging through reports. Put all the information you need on a custom Dashboard that you can email to others.

API and developer platform

Customize Google Analytics with the APIs onGoogle Code.

Date range slider

Compare time periods and select date ranges without losing sight of long term trends.

Multiline graphing

Plot mulitiple data points on a single graph for a faster analysis.

Data Export

Share report data by exporting into Excel, CSV and tab delimited files.

Sharing and Communicating

Email reports

Schedule or send ad-hoc personalized report emails that contain exactly the information you want to share.

Sophisticated administrator and user controls

Control how sensitive data is shared and which reports are available to users on your account.

Visualizing Data

Motion Charts

Motion Charts add sophisticated multi-dimensional analysis to most Google Analytics reports. Select metrics for the x-axis, y-axis, bubble size, and bubble color and view how these metrics interact over time. Choose the metrics you want to compare and expose data relationships that would be difficult to see in traditional reports. Watch video.

Geo Targeting

Identify your most lucrative geographic markets.

Funnels

Visualize your conversion funnel. Fix leaks by seeing which pages result in lost opportunities and where your would-be customers go.

Spark lines

Thumbnail size graphics save you clicks and summarize the data in your report.

Score cards

See summary metrics in the context of historical or site average data.

Google Integration and Reliability

1st party cookie

Google Analytics has always exclusively used 1st party cookies to ensure reliable tracking and protect visitor privacy.

Google data center and collection methodology

Google Analytics runs on the same globally renowned infrastructure that powers Google, maximizing data integrity and privacy.

Part of a larger family of related Google products

Google Analytics is part of a suite of industry-leading advertising and analysis tools including AdWords and Website Optimizer.

Friday, June 19, 2009


Google Translates - You can now translate from Persian [NEW]


Today, we added Persian (Farsi) to Google Translate. This means you can now translate any text from Persian into English and from English into Persian — whether it's a news story, a website, a blog, an email, a tweet or a Facebook message. The service is available free at http://translate.google.com.

We feel that launching Persian is particularly important now, given ongoing events in Iran. LikeYouTube and other services, Google Translate is one more tool that Persian speakers can use to communicate directly to the world, and vice versa — increasing everyone's access to information.

As with all machine translation, it's not perfect yet. And we're launching this service quickly, so it may perform slowly at times. We'll keep a close watch and if it breaks, we'll restore service as quickly as we can.

We've optimized this service for translation between Persian and English. But we're working hard to improve Persian translation for the additional 40 languages available via Google Translate. If you see something you think is incorrectly translated, we invite you to click on the "contribute a better translation" link and we'll learn from your correction.

The web provides many new channels of communication that enable us to see events unfold in real-time around the world. We hope that Google Translate helps make all that information accessible to you — no matter what language you speak. So please visit Google Translateand try it out.

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The Web Evolves to Reflect the Developments in Iran


Almost exactly twenty years ago, the Tiananmen Square uprising made history, and the protesters used a then-hot gizmo called the fax machine to coordinate their efforts. This week, something extraordinary is going on in Iran–and whatever happens, it's clear that social networks and other Web tools will be remembered for the role they played.

Fax machines were hunks of plastic that remained unchanged throughout the drama in Beijing. The Web, however, can adjust itself on the fly to reflect the situation. Or rather the people who make Web services can. Facebook has just launched a version with a Persian interface, based on contributions from more than 400 Persian speakers. Iranians were already using Facebook; now they can use a version in their native tongue.

Similarly, Google has rolled out a version of Google Translate that can translate from Persion to English and vice versa. I'm not sure about how Google goes about adding new languages to the machine-translation service, but it was able to add Persian this quickly from a standing start, I'm impressed.

Meanwhile, Twitter continues to play an important communications role within and outside of Iran, and I hope that each and every people who's ever sneered at it as amounting to nothing more than boring people sharing what they had for breakfast will reflect on its use by the Iranian protesters. If you're gonna by snarky about a medium at its worst, it's only fair to celebrate it as it helps make history, no?

( Refered From technologizer.com )

Thursday, June 18, 2009


New in Google Apps : Free webinar

Around the world, schools and universities continuously face the difficult challenge of reducing costs while improving the quality of education they provide. This challenge becomes even more critical in turbulent economic times. Not to mention the fact that this next generation of students – the "millennials" – brings a different set of expectations to campus. For example, they expect the ability to work together without sitting in the same room, they want to take their data with them wherever they go, they want to chat (over voice and video) with friends and family, and they expect instantaneous and unwavering access to the Internet.

By harnessing the power of technology, we think we can offer the education community the means to meet these expectations. 
Google Apps Education Edition is a free suite of hosted tools including mail, calendar, document, and site creation that helps campuses save money while providing a rich set of technology tools that will enable schools to better meet the demands of savvy students. Millions of students, staff, and faculty are using Google Apps today, with more signing up every day. A big welcome to some of the schools we've recently welcomed to the Google Apps family, including:

  • Allegheny College
  • Beloit College
  • Boise State University (for faculty and staff)
  • Clemson University
  • Cornell University
  • Georgetown University
  • Pittsburgh State University
  • Southern Illinois University Carbondale
  • Temple University
  • Truman State University
  • University of Alaska
  • University of California at Davis
  • University of Minnesota
  • University of Sunderland
  • Wagner College
To share info about these latest innovations, we'd like to invite you to a free live customer webinar on Thursday, June 25 at 10:00 a.m. PDT. In this session you'll hear directly from Arizona State University, the first school to deploy Google Apps Education Edition, back in 2006. Key administrators will talk about their decision to go with Google Apps, the results they've seen so far, and their future plans for Apps. Whether you're a student, work at a school, or went to school, we hope you'll join us to hear about how Google Apps can help institutions like ASU save money and IT resources, plus make students' lives easier with a set of tools for working together.

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Free Google Apps for Education Webinar on June 25

Google Apps are the often the first words out of my mouth when someone asks where to start on the road to technology integration. In fact, that's the reason why Google Docs was listed first in Twelve Essentials for Technology Integration. If you haven't tried Google Apps yet (I just talked to someone today who hadn't heard of it), you may want attend this free live webinar about Google Apps for education. In the webinar, as announced by Google, attendees will learn how Google Apps for education can save schools money and make students' live easier. The webinar is next Thursday, June 25 at 1pm EST.
( Refered from freetech4teachers.com )