Bring the political process to life in your classroom

8/19/2008 10:37:00 AM

It's back-to-school season in the U.S. and social studies teachers everywhere are excited about the November elections and all of the ways that politics has evolved since even just four years ago. Technology is advancing. Internet fundraising has brought all kinds of new small donors into the political process, social networking is helping campaigns and citizens organize themselves in new ways, and YouTube, which didn't even exist four years ago, has swept the political dialogue.

With technology producing such dramatic changes in American politics, we want to make sure it's easy for teachers to bring some of the best Internet tools into the classroom to help students get engaged. Working with the National Student/Parent Mock Election, we've pulled together a site called Elections Tools for Teachers where you can find descriptions and suggested learning activities for tools like YouTube, Google Maps, Elections Video Search and Power Readers, which we announced here yesterday.

We want students to walk away from their engagement in this election with a sense of excitement about our democratic process and with the belief that their voices matter. As Gloria Kirshner, president of the Mock Election has said, "In the classrooms of today are the Presidents, Senators, Congress members and, most important, the voters of tomorrow. Whether we are sending these children to the White House or to the polls, we hope to send them with a deep understanding of 'government of the people, by the people, and for the people.'"

Please let us know if you find Elections Tools for Teachers helpful in your teaching, and we hope you'll enroll your students in this year's National Mock Election on October 30th.

Posted by Galen Panger & Cristin Frodella, Google Educators Team

Google in Tamil

8/18/2008 02:55:00 PM

The global nature of our mission is reflected in the phrases the "world's information" and "universally accessible." To this end, you may have recently read about our 40-language initiative and the story of a community coming together to develop Google search in the Maori language.

Following on this theme, we'd like to highlight a few new products that enable a better online experience for Tamil speakers around the world.

First, we just released Google News in Tamil. Like other Google News editions, we gather stories from the various Tamil news sources on the web and present an automatically- generated summary with links to the most important stories in each section.

We recognize that it can sometimes be hard to enter Tamil text with existing keyboards. Our transliteration technology enables the conversion from English text to phonetically equivalent text in Indian languages. For example, using transliteration, you could type "vanakkam" and we would convert it to Tamil script as வணக்கம். We have embedded this technology in several Google products to make it easier to enter text in Tamil.

Google search in Tamil enables users to start typing in English and automatically get query suggestions in Tamil. If you wanted to enter the query "ponniyin selvan" in Tamil, just start typing it in English - e.g. "ponni" and we will show the Tamil suggestions:


Tamil transliteration in Blogger is designed for bloggers publishing content in Tamil when using the English keyboard for text entry. It's our hope that this will make Tamil content more popular and more easily available online.

Tamil transliteration in orkut makes it easier to communicate with friends and family by exchanging scraps in Tamil.

We hope that each of these products will help to bring the benefits of the Internet to the millions of Tamil speakers in India and elsewhere.

Posted by Vinodh Kumar R and Naren Manappa, Software Engineers

Follow what Obama, McCain and leading political commentators are reading

8/18/2008 10:01:00 AM

We're reading a lot about the candidates and the media this election season. But what are they reading? At google.com/powerreaders now you can track the news sites and blogs Barack Obama and John McCain read (from Drudge to The Daily Show) and follow articles catching the eyes of leading political journalists. Both the McCain and Obama presidential campaigns and leading political journalists are using Google Reader to keep up with their favorite new sites and blogs as well as share articles that interest them. You can follow shared articles and blog posts, or you can add participants' reading lists or shared news feeds to your own Reader account.

We're pleased to include the following contributors in our launch:

• Obama and McCain campaigns
• Mike Allen, POLITICO
• Chuck DeFeo, Townhall
• John Dickerson, Slate
• Mark Halperin, TIME
• Arianna Huffington, Huffington Post
• Ruth Marcus, Washington Post
• Jon Meacham, Newsweek
• Patrick Ruffini, The Next Right

Visit google.com/powerreaders to stay up to date on what the political gurus are reading -- so you too can become one by November.

Posted by Robby Stein, Associate Product Marketing Manager

Time to "Free the Airwaves"

8/18/2008 05:59:00 AM

For quite some time we've been talking about the potential of the unused airwaves between broadcast TV channels ("white spaces") to provide affordable, high-speed wireless Internet connectivity nationwide. For this to happen, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) must allow unlicensed use of this spectrum.

If you care about the future of the Internet, now is the time to take action. The FCC has completed its field testing and is expected to make a ruling in the coming months. With this in mind, today we're launching Free The Airwaves, a new effort to bring users together around this important issue.

To help you to learn more about the tremendous promise of these airwaves, people from around the country have filmed video testimonials. Matthew Rantanen of Tribal Digital Village explained how freeing the airwaves would bring new opportunities to the Southern California Native American community, currently underserved by today's broadband providers. Wally Bowen of the Mountain Area Information Network discussed the potential of these airwaves to bring broadband access to rural communities. Many others have also weighed in, and we hope you will too.

At its core, Free The Airwaves is a call to action for everyday users. You don't need to be a telecommunications expert to understand that freeing the "white spaces" has the potential to transform wireless Internet as we know it. When you visit the site, you'll be invited to film a video response explaining what increased Internet access could mean for you, to sign a petition to the FCC, to contact your elected officials, to spread the word, and more.

When it comes to opening these airwaves, we believe the public interest is clear. But we also want to be transparent about our involvement: Google has a clear business interest in expanding access to the web. There's no doubt that if these airwaves are opened up to unlicensed use, more people will be using the Internet. That's certainly good for Google (not to mention many of our industry peers) but we also think that it's good for consumers.

That said, we can't pretend to speak for you. To learn more about what's at stake and to get involved, check out FreeTheAirwaves.com. We hope that once you've explored the facts for yourself, you'll want to make your voice heard.

Posted by Minnie Ingersoll, Product Manager, Alternative Access Team

Model your campus in Mexico using SketchUp

8/13/2008 12:55:00 PM

Back in February we told you about the 2008 Model Your Campus Competition, a call for students to submit 3D models of their college campuses created with Google SketchUp. We got submissions from campuses around the world, and Mexico stood out with submissions from 13 different campuses. At that time we also ran a parallel contest with a top Mexican school, ITESM (The Technology Institute of Monterrey), and offered a separate prize for the best models submitted by ITESM students. The students come from all over Mexico, so there is a truly national mix of competitors. In total, ITESM participants designed 111 buildings, representing 22 ITESM campuses. All of the submissions will live in a collection within the Google 3D Warehouse, an online storage space for all your 3D needs. From intergalactic space vehicles to cucumbers, the 3D Warehouse is flush with downloadable models made by the SketchUp community.

Last week we announced the winners of the contest: David Gómez-Urquiza Madero y Ricardo Pfeiffer Hurtado, both students of Mechatronics at ITESM's Santa Fe Campus. Since a digital Earth needs some digital buildings, we're thrilled that ITESM students have submitted their designs to create a more livable Google Earth-the winning models will be included in the 3D Buildings Layers of Google Earth. The school leadership plan on encouraging students to construct detailed 3D models of all 33 ITESM campuses, and the contest will return for another run next year. Here's to the winners!

one of the models

the winning team

Posted by Ana Paula Blanco, Head of Mexico Communications and Public Affairs

Where is Georgia on Google Maps?

8/12/2008 05:49:00 PM

Cross-posted from the Google LatLong Blog.

The recent conflict in Georgia has raised some questions about how Google Maps has handled mapping in that part of the world. The most obvious question is, why doesn't Google Maps show any cities or roads for Georgia, or its neighbors Armenia and Azerbaijan? The answer is we never launched coverage in those countries because we simply weren't satisfied with the map data we had available. We're constantly searching for the best map data we can find, and sometimes will delay launching coverage in a country if we think we can get more comprehensive data. Some of our customers have asked if we removed map data from any of these countries in response to the recent hostilities in that region and I can assure you that is not the case. Data for these countries were never on Google Maps in the first place.

But this has generated a lot of feedback that we are listening to and learning from. We're hearing from our users that they would rather see even very basic coverage of a country than see nothing at all. That certainly makes sense, and so we have started preparing data for the handful of countries that are still blank on Google Maps. Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, as well as other significant regions of the world will benefit from this effort.

In the meantime, much of this data, including cities in Georgia and other surrounding countries, can be found in Google Earth.

Posted by Dave Barth, Product Manager

Keeping tabs on spam and viruses

8/12/2008 01:14:00 PM

The Google Apps Security & Compliance team, which provides email and web security for more than 40,000 companies, regularly tracks trends in spam, viruses, and other threats, and we almost always find something interesting. Check out some of our latest findings -- including details on some specific attacks that you should keep an eye out for -- on the Enterprise blog.

And if you're interested in learning more about what you can do to keep your business safe from web and email threats, be sure to tune into our webinar on Friday, August 15, at 10:00 am PT.

Posted by Amanda Kleha, Google Apps Security & Compliance team

Translations on your iPhone

8/11/2008 09:52:00 AM

Have you ever been traveling and suddenly realized that you didn't know how to ask the taxi driver to take you to your hotel? It's happened to us too, so the mobile team has put together an iPhone interface for Google Translate, our machine translation project. Read more about it on the Google Mobile blog.

Posted by Allen Hutchison and David Singleton, Software Engineers

Reinventing the wheel

8/10/2008 09:20:00 AM

About a month ago, we found out that our team, along with all of Offline Ads, would be moving from our comfortable 4th floor cubicles in New York City all the way up to the comparatively uninhabited 6th floor. It was definitely a change of pace from the Manhattan-esque bustle of our old space to a quieter, more Brooklyn-esque feel. So the question arose: what happens when you drop an entire floor's worth of Googlers into a new office? The answer: a cubicle decorating contest to end all cubicle decorating contests.

It wasn't initially clear what sort of decoration would be fitting for our team (Print Ads Engineering). While the rest of the floor had been caught up in the decorating fervor, it seemed our team was completely lacking enthusiasm. We watched morosely as everyone else paraded their grass hula skirts and mariachi music in our faces. But what could we do? We were more into building things, designing robust programs, and, well, being engineers. We couldn't see how anything in the way of decorating would represent the personality of our team, short of building a giant LED display flashing, "Print Ads Eng."

So we set out on the task to figure out what we could feasibly build. We do happen to have have a large supply of Legos here at Google NY, so that came to mind first. But alas, co-founder Larry Page was already legendary for building a working printer out of Legos. We definitely couldn't top that. An erector set, perhaps? Too much hardware. Finally we settled on K'Nex. So we went online and found the biggest K'Nex set we could: a 6' tall Ferris Wheel of Doom.

With the contest deadline looming, we purchased the set and started building. Little did we know what we were getting ourselves into. We got to the table with over 8500 parts, roughly 40 lbs. of plastic, and only 4 of us. Perhaps we had bitten off a little more than we could chew.

We resolved to have it done by the following Monday, but the fact is we were all busy with actual work. So we came in on the weekend and dragged along a few "contractors" (read: personal friends) whose manual labor was rewarded in snacks. Still, even with all of the extra help, it was a daunting task. The instruction book wasn't always the most helpful, with only pictures of what we had to build and how many. (The box wasn't kidding when it said, "for ages 16 and up.")

The first few pages had pictures with only "x2" or "x3" next to them, but things started getting intense as we got towards the end, seeing "x48," "x96," and even, "x192." Since we are engineers, and aim to maximize efficiency, we formed assembly lines to expedite the repetitive tasks. It was quite a sight. (We also discovered the detriments of assembly lines and repetitive motion injuries, but that's another story altogether.)

By Monday, it was done. Well, all except for one thing: no Google logo. So we built one. We may have had to stray a little from the specifications to fit it in, but all in a good day's work for a few engineers. Upon completion, we put it on display for everyone to see. (In fact, sitting atop two tables, roughly 5 feet above ground, it's pretty hard to miss.) We certainly won't have to worry about anyone questioning our team's enthusiasm anytime soon.

L to R: Ben, Hunter, Tristan, Autumn.

Posted by Tristan Naumann, Ben Cole, Autumn Petros-Good, & Hunter Freyer, Print Ads Interns

Keeping up with the Summer Games

8/07/2008 09:44:00 PM

As we mark the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Summer Games, I can’t help but remember eight years ago, when I competed on the U.S. cycling team. Even though I didn’t walk away with any medals then, training and competing involved a herculean effort - but that pales in comparison to what we’re unveiling today.

I’m happy to present the 2008 Summer Games on Google, a site that features a number of our products to help you stay updated on Summer Games happenings. And it's available in 66 countries and 31 languages, from Australia to Uruguay, and from Arabic to Vietnamese.

We collaborated with a data provider to make it easy for you to keep current on event schedules and get updates on results, as well as track medal counts with an iGoogle gadget. You can also get schedules and results on Google search results. (Check out the results for water polo.) We're also including the newest Summer Games highlights through Google News. The Summer Games Google Maps lets you view medal and event information based on your favorite regions and sports, and there's a 3D video of the various Games venues you can tour:



Also, be sure to check out this cool collection of 3D stadiums and venues in Beijing created with Google SketchUp. Read more about these efforts on the Lat Long Blog. Since we know many of you are on the go this summer, all this information is available for mobile devices, where Google Mobile is available.

We hope these tools make it easy and enjoyable for you to follow all the action at the Summer Games.

Posted by Dylan Casey, Product Manager