Blogger-HAT Lite

Docs research panel beats Zemanta gadget

2012-05-16T14:39:00.001-07:00

Google Docs now has a research pane available while you're writing. Basically this is a quick way to access google-search results.

To use it:

Select a word
Right-click the word
Choose Research from the tools menu.

Or just select the word and hit the key-combo ( Ctrl+Alt+R on Windows or Cmd+Alt+R on Mac) if you think mice are evil time-wasters.

This is a far better than the Zemanta gadget that was offered to Blogger users back in 2010; research is done only on the words you want researched, not everything that you're writing. My experience was that the latter approach slowed my machine down horribly, and mostly added no value because it just distracted me from what I wanted to write. Other people seemed to feel the same way, and for a while How to disable Zemanata in blogger was popular reading.

Personally, I'm not sure research-pane will be enough to convince me to write my posts in Docs and load them to Blogger from there: a lot of my research is about "how does Blogger handle this", which I can only find out my testing it. But it will be a very handy tool for bloggers in some niches.

A couple of things to be aware of: the pane offers you imagees that you can "drag into your document", and it add footnotes saying where the image has come from. But the last time I loooked, documents loaded from Docs to Blogger didn't maintain footnotes. And even so, if the image is copyright, you can't get permission to use it in your blog just by linking to the source.

Spam links can be invisibly embedded in comments

2012-05-11T15:09:00.001-07:00

The pseudonymous John of Gordon's Tech reports that spammers have found a way to put links into comments so that they don't look like links when we're doing moderation.

Now he mentions it, I've been seeing a lot of comments lately that are something like

"Nice info, thanks for sharing. Facebook developers"

all in plain text. And the "signature" has often been something that's even less relevant than this.

I had been thinking that they were naive, and didn't know how to put links into comments, so was deleting them rather than marking as spam. Time to change the comments moderation policy, I think, down the spam-shute they go.

Result-sorting and better filter queries in Google Custom Search Engines

2012-05-10T11:12:00.001-07:00

Google's have added result-sorting and compact queries for filtering-by-attribute options to their Custom Search Engines (ref: Adding a custom search engine to your blog).

These are most relevant for people who use a CSE over their own blog/site, rather than over other sites which they don't control the markup.

Sorting:

If you have specificd PageMaps, rich-snippets or meta-tags for your posts, you can add them as an option that is available to people who use your custom-search-engine. Do this in CSE by

Enable sorting (www.google.com/cse > Control Panel > Basics)
Adding the key.

Compact-queries:

The language that is used to state a qeury against defined attributes now supports "and"-ing values together in a more compact way.

Putting scripts behind Google Docs

2012-05-05T05:08:00.001-07:00

I'd never really thought about whether there was a scripting language with Google Docs spreadsheets (the same way that there's VB scripting with Excel). But really it makes sense for there to be Javascript there. (I have no idea if it's a new-ish feature, or has been there all along.)

This article from Blogger Xpertise not only got me thinking about the possibilities, but also has a useful script for making embeddable custom forms created in Docs a good deal more useful

Google's guide to HTML and CSS styles

2012-05-03T14:19:00.002-07:00

Google have released their own style guide for HTML and CSS code.

It will be interesting to see how much of it they apply in future changes to Blogger templates

But for Bloggers who do a lot of modifications to their own template, there might be some useful tips. I especially like the one about putting CSS rules into alphabetical order for maintainability.

Doing this would mean adding CSS rules manually rather than than through Design > Customize > Advanced > Add CSS

And it will be harder to do a code-compare to see the difference between our customized template and the current standard-issue ones. But storing like-named rules together appeals to me more than just tagging new ones on the end.

Use Image Search to research picture ownership

2012-05-03T14:14:00.000-07:00

If someone shared a cool photo with you on Facebook or Pinterst, you might want to write a blog post about it.

The post will be a lot more interesting if you can actually include the image. But you're not allowed to put copyright material onto your blog without permission - and how do you know if the picture that was shared with your is copyright or not, and who owns it.

Google Image Search may be part of the answer. Find out about it.

It won't tell you if a picture is definitely avaiable or not - but it gives you information from you can make some judgements based on when it first appeared, and what sort of web-sites it has appeared on..

Remember - although you're not allowed to publish copyright material, you will only get "caught" if a copyright owner spots something on your blog and takes action by filing a DMCA report. There are a great many items which are fine to share, even though they're not technically in the public domain, because no one is actively claiming ownership - and image search gives a way of validating ownership claims made by chancers.

Crop and re-size photos stored in PIcasa, without HTML

2012-05-03T14:08:00.002-07:00

Some very interesting info from David of Blogger Xpertise about controlling the display of photos from Picasa by manipulating the URL. What he's found is nothing that we couldn't do with HTML, but I have a feeling that it might point to some other possibilities using Picasa's URLs. Ref: http://blogxpertise.blogspot.com/2012/05/tip-automatically-cropping-square-and.html

Becoming a Google Trusted Photographer

2012-05-02T13:51:00.000-07:00

Previously I described Google's Trusted Photographer's programme, which could be a nice business opportunity for serious photo-bloggers.

At that time, Google were selling business-owners the idea of using a TP to take photos of your business and upload them to Places/Maps. But they were pretty vague about how to become a TP.

Today, they've given links to far more info about how it works and how to to sign up as a Google trusted photographer.

Designing blogs for mobile devices - liquid design and image-width-maximisation

2012-05-01T14:13:00.001-07:00

Today I read a very interesting article from the Webmaster Central blog about the challenges of designing websites for mobile devices, and a concept called liquid design.

For bloggers who have enabled a mobile template for their blog, the overall site design is handled by Blogger: you can add gadgets to your mobile template easily enough, and if they're in the sidebard then Blogger decides where to show them instead.

But the design inside posts is our own responsibility. I've been pondering this for one of my blogs that definitiely needs a mobile-template view, but which has a number of side-by-side images.

I'm not certain yet, sure, but the article's suggestion to add this CSS rule to my template

img {
max-width: 100%;
}

might just be a very good one for me to apply.

Google Drive will eventually replace Docs - but not yet for most of us.

2012-04-29T05:46:00.002-07:00

If you use Google Docs as a file-hosting option, then the recent announcement of Google Drive probably has you wondering how Docs will be affected: there's a marketing announcement on the Docs Blog, but it has a distinct lack of detail on how it will work.

But this announcement on the to Google Apps blog has more info. Key points:

Initial access is "on an opt-in basis via invite at drive.google.com/start"
It's being released to Google Apps users first: It will be made available to all domains over the next 4-8 weeks.
But [eventually] Google Drive will become the default andwill replace the documents list as the way to access files and documents.

It is introducing many changes and new features to Google Docs, including:

A Google Drive desktop application, available from the Chrome Web Store
A mobile application for your iPhone or iPad
Sync files between all of your devices with Google Drive for your Mac/PC
A different kind of search tool across your own files
In Google document, spreadsheet, or presentation editors, you can add a file to a folder by clicking the folder icon
Collections are called folders
More options on the Settings menu
More views on the left navigation: "My Drive", "Shared with me", "Activity"
My Drive (instead of home) to organize all of your files, folders and Google Docs.

Note that you will not see any of these changes until Drive is available to you. In the meantime, Docs continues to work as it has been working.

If you are a domain administrator, notice that Google Docs has been renamed to "Drive and Docs" in the Google Apps control panel, and that there are new settings in this service.

A new advertising option for Blogger: Google Affiliate Network

2012-04-18T16:08:00.001-07:00

If you are already an AdSense publisher, then today's announcment about Google Affiliate Network: Introducing Google Affiliate Ads for Blogger may be of interest.

Google Affiliate Network (GAN) is a different type of advertising programme: instead of getting paid per click, you get paid per purchase (or whatever other key action the advertiser decides).

So far, it's limited to Blogger users who are based in the USA - presumably because this is where most advertisers are. It's also limited to "select bloggers" - this seems to mean ones whose blog is a good fit with the available advertisers, and the criteria for "a good fit" is as decided by Google. This is unlike regular use of the Google Advertisers network, where you apply to a particular advertiser based on your own assessment of the fit.

After you have signed up for AdSense (and, I guess been approved!):

IF GAN options are available to you
THEN they will be shown when you are editing a post, in a gadget that appears in the right-hand Post Settings area.

This means they will only available from the "new", ie post-Sept-2011 blogger interface.

I guess you will be allowed to copy the HTML code for the GAN advertisement from the post editor, and put it into a regular gadget - since you can put regular GAN adverts into your blog in this way. But this is a detail that should be checked against their terms and conditions: as with AdSense, the additional requirements for GAN are glossed over when you are accessing it via Blogger, but I expect that they will still apply.

Test HTML rich-text post snippets before publishing them

2012-04-17T15:48:00.000-07:00

Rich snippets. are a tool that Google uses to give website-managers some control over how their sites appear in search-results (while enhancing the quality of search results, of course).

Blogger users are website-managers - the process that we follow to add meta-tags to our blogs is similar to what other web-developers, who don't have simplified software like Blogger, have to do.

Google have added a HTLM rich-text testing facility to their Webmaster-tools: this lets you see if you've got rich-snippet code (eg XX) right before hitting publish - because of course the effect on Google is one thing that you cannot test in a private pre-publication blog.

Blogger developer documentation has moved

2012-03-26T15:39:00.002-07:00

Blogger have announced that the documentation for people who write tools using the Blogger APIs has moved to https://developers.google.com/blogger/

This iinformation is what you need to know to create and share you own gadgets. It is also very useful for blogger-helpers who want to understand the data / schemas that Blogger uses, in order to work out hacks for the rest of us to use to control the look and feel of our blogs.

The blogger developer forum is another very handy place too.

AdSense for Domains is discontinued

2012-03-11T15:33:00.000-07:00

AdSense have decided to stop offering AdSense for Domains - a product that let domain owners show AdSense ads when someone tried to visit a URL that's not currently pointing to any website. (Because, of
course, they cannot use regular AdSense for Content ads on URL like this because the Terms and Conditions say it can only be shown on websites that actually have "real" content.)

There hasn't beean a public announcement (that I've seen), but AdSense publishers who are currently using AdSense for Domains have been getting individual emails about the change, which has these timeframes:

March 21: Cannot put AdSense on any new Hosted domains
April 18: Existing hosted domains will become inactive and AdSense advertising won't be displayed when someone looks at them.
June 27: Hosted domains will no longer be available in AdSense accounts (Meaning we need to have downloaded any necessary information about them before then).

They also say that: "going forward, undeveloped domains will only be served through our existing AdSense for Domains distribution network" - but I haven't yet been able to work out exactly what this means.

To continue monetizing existing undeveloped domains, we need to migrate them to a new domain parking provider - so I'm looking for recommendations for these at present.

There is a Migration Guide: to help people move existing Domains monetized through AdSense to other places here: http://www.google.com/appserve/mkt/5pn7W99IR8ElM3.

For more information see the Help Center: http://www.google.com/appserve/mkt/DhXnVfFp9Ihuw4.

Sharing Google Analytics reports with other people

2012-03-09T10:55:00.000-08:00

Google Analytics has added a Share button to

Custom Reports: (Actions menu on the table that lists your reports)
The dashboard: (top-left corner)
Advanced Segments: (Admin tab > Advanced Segments)

This a way to let you share reports etc that you've designed: it works by giving you an URL that you can email or publish in a blog-post.

When someone clicks on this URL, they go into Analytics, and a custom report - which is just like yours at the time you clicked Share and created the URL - is added to their own dashboard.

Effectively, what the other person sees is:

your report structure
showing their data

Analytics is hugely powerful, with far more features than your average blogger needs. Some blogger-helpers don't recommend it, just because it's so large (a bit like using Microsoft Word to edit a text file).

But it has a number of advantages over Blogger's built in Stats (including counts not being reset to zero every time that you edit and publish a post with an updated date/time - which is the way I give one of my blogs a home page).

It seems to me that this share-your-analytics-design feature opens up a large opportunity for people who really understand how Analytics works to help the rest of us find actionable information about what's happening on our blogs. Do you know any Analytics gurus worth following?

Blogger Help Forum (English) is moving

2012-03-06T11:58:00.005-08:00

The English-language Blogger Help Forum (BHF) is moving to a new Google Product Forum, based Google Groups, from 9 March 2012 (that's this Friday).

There's nothing about the change in Blogger Buzz, but they've posted a long announcement in the current BHF, and linked to a Getting Started Guide which shows the base features of Google Product Forums, and an example working GPF-based forum (the one for Google Plus).

Key facts about the change:

Posts from the current forum will not be moved into to the new forum (since most of them refer to the old Blogger interface).
You will need to join Google Groups to use it.
All user levels will reset to Level 1 (presuming not TCs though) - but if they look to make more TCs, your post-history in the old BHF will be checked.
The only way to get a picture with your profile in the new forum is to have it linked to your Google + account. (I tested with an account that's not +'d, these do basic Google profiles that don't include pictures).
The existing BHF will be archived, so the current content can still be found.
(Not sure what "archived" means - probably that write-access to it will be turned off, but read-only access will be continued).
All help-links inside Blogger will go to the new forum, once it's live.
The new forum will be at: https://groups.google.com/a/googleproductforums.com/forum/#!forum/blogger

One fantastic feature of the new forum is the keyboard shortcuts, eg "space" to move down a page. (Bringing back fond memories of the first use-net reader I ever met, back in the days of Vax VMS :-)

Getting blog videos indexed, with schema.org

2012-02-22T15:35:00.000-08:00

You can put videos into blog post using an icon on the post-editor toolbar - they are one type of file that you don't need to host elsewhere.

If you do this, Google will (eventually) index the contents of your blog post, based on the text in the post, and the file-names of the file(s)you've used.

But the spiders behind search haven't quite got the hang of speech and image recognition yet: as with images, you need to explicity tell them about your content.

Webmaster Central have announced a new way of doing this called schema-markup.org. This asks people who provide videos to show them in their websites using code like this:

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/VideoObject"> <h2>Video: <span itemprop="name">Title</span></h2> <meta itemprop="duration" content="T1M33S" /> <meta itemprop="thumbnailURL" content="thumbnail.jpg" /> <meta itemprop="embedURL" content="http://www.example.com/videoplayer.swf?video=123" /> <object ...> <embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" ...> </object> <span itemprop="description">Video description</span></div>

Sidebar
The code originally given in Google's post was missing the / at the start of the closing </div> statement. I suspect they'll fix it soon - but it's why you may get a message like

"your HTML cannot be accepted: Tag is not closed: DIV"

Fix it by simply changing the second <div> to </div>.

Unfortunately the suggested won't work for Blogger users, because the Post-editor doesn't let us use meta-tags. You can put the code into your post if you want, but they will be stripped out when the post is published or viewed in Compose mode.

But there are some options you can use to tell search engines about your video conent:

1) Edit your template, add a conditional statement that is only applied to the post that contains the video, and put the schema.org code (without the H2 and Object statement, of course) into the <head> section. Something like this:

<b:if cond='data:blog.url == "http://url of your post"'>
PUT THE SCHEMA.ORG META-TAG STATEMENTS IN HERE
</b:if>

Disclaimer: I haven't tried ths myself. But it strikes me that it should work, give the way we deal with other meta-tags when necessary. However "should" is an "interesting" word. Maybe it won't work, if the tags are not in the same <div> as the video.

2) Put the description of the video into the blog-post - just work it into the text naturally.

3) Use a title statement to give the video some hover text LINK (I guess this works for videos - haven't tried it) or alt-text.

For both of the last two, remember that indexing of text on your blog will link to your blog-post, not to the video, so it may not get the "videos are cool" factor that seems to influence search results. But they are both easy things to do.

4) Load your video to Youtube (or Vimeo or wherever), and put the content description into the fields there, along with links to your blog, of course.

This will have the vids-are-cool effect, but the search traffic will go to the host site, and may not ever get to your blog - to get any search-traffic benefit, you need to to have good links to your blog in their the video-site information, or good promotion of it in the video itself.

5) Or maybe the Video Sitemaps or mRSS feeds approach that Google's article LINK also mentioned work well-enough for Blogger-users. (Sorry, I have no time to investigate either of these - am keen to get comments from anyone knows more about them though.)

AdSense has a new ad-size

2012-02-19T10:16:00.001-08:00

AdSense has introduced some new ad-unit sizes.

The mobile banner is 320px wide by 50px high, and designed for mobile applications. However if you get your ad-code from AdSense (rather than using Blogger's AdSense gadget), it's available to put onto any type of site. I've put an example of it, and a regular 468x60 banner to show the comparison, at the bottom of the page on this site.

There are also some new widths for link-units: these are available from Blogger's add-a-gadget wizard too - but as always, if you use this you have only limited formatting control, ie cannot use AdSense color palates and cannot centre the text.

I think that Google are doing some experiments with mobile-ad units (ones with big buttons, and a slightly different look) at the moment: I saw some when I used a smartphone to look at a non-mobile-enabled site the other day. Since then, I've enabled the site for mobile access ('cos I discovered that a quarter of the visitors were using mobile devices) - but now when I look at it, the ads inside posts are not mobile, and there are none at the top of bottom (where they were before). So - no conclusions about what we should be doing at the moment, but I suspect that the best-practise here might be changing.

Google Knoweledge Graph will change how Google searches for our blogs

2012-02-14T11:35:00.000-08:00

You may have seen references to Google Knoweledge Graph, and how it has the potential to revolutionize search.

The first few posts I saw were big on hype, but with very little substance. However this article from Mashable explains things a lot more.

Of course we don't know what the effect of this change in Google's approach will have on Bloggers - especially those who rely on search results to get people to visit their blogs. But here are a couple of predictions:

1) SEO, as we know it, will be less and less important.

Writing for human (ish!) beings will be ever-more important.

No prizes for this one: SEO's changing all the time. But I think that the change will be dramatic. Once Google's algorithms know that a blog is a type of website, and that it's something that ordinary people want to put gadgets onto, and that gadgets are just small bits of code that do something useful, then searches like "how do I to put a list of favourtie posts into my blog" are more likely to return posts that tell you how to use the link-list gadget.

2) Good grammar will matter more

The beauty of keyword searches is that they just spot relevant words, or clusters of words.

Today,it doesn't matter if you say

" This few wrong SEO tricks will down the visibility of your blog in search engine result page."

(thanks for the phrase, Tips and Tricks for Bloggers)

Because, all other things being equal, that sentence will be found by someone who who searches for the keywords that are used.

But with a semantic-network in the picture, the way that the sentences in our blogs are put together is likely to matter. Searching, for example, for

"what eats, roots and leaves" vs
"what eats roots and leaves"

is likely to return a vastly different set of results. (Or it would if that wasn't such a hackneyed example that probably half of the English grammar websites in the world use it already.)

Blogger is a long way behind in providing tools to help us write better English (or French or Dutch or Portugese or Spanish or Greek or whatever) - they've only given us a spell-checker in the last year or two, whereas even Microsoft Word has offered basic grammar checking, in English at least, for ages. Perhaps converting from MS word to Blogger via Word will become more important than before.

Why this post:
Normally, I only post about changes that have already happened, which I think may affect Blogger-users right now. This is an exception, because I believe we need to be thinking about how the knowledge in our blogs is structured and presented to that it makes semantic sense. And we need to do this thinking now, not sometime down the track when Google is presenting semantic search results. (And besides, I really liked the Mashable post).

Customizable styles in Google Docs

2012-02-08T16:27:00.000-08:00

Google Docs now have Customizable styles in documents.

This is a feature that MS Word has had for a long time, which makes a huge productivity difference to anyone who is writing long documents.

Basically, instead of formattting each sub-heading individually (eg making it bold, 12 pt and underlined), you just say once what the rules for that "heading2" is (eg bold, 12 pt and underlined), and then apply "heading2" to any text that you want to look like this. The time-saving comes when make a change. For example, when you realise that underlining is for typewriters, instead of having to change each sub-heading individually, you just change heading2 to be (say) bold and 14 point - and all the same change is made to every place where you've used "heading2".

I don't know the the addition of Styles to Docs means they will be added to Blogger's Post-editor anytime soon. But it may affect loading Word documents to Blogger via Google Docs. I haven't tested yet, so don't know if Word's styles will be kept when the document is converted - but I'd hope that they would, given that it's a very mature feature in Word.

The interesting part will come when you either copy-and-paste or publish from Docs to Blogger: is the formatting itself transferred over, or just the style name?

My guess, without testing, is that for copy-and-paste, it might just be the style name. If that's right, then to make the Word-to-Docs-to-Blogger conversion work, you will need to add CSS rules to your blog, using the same style names used in Docs.

And if you have a lot of email subscribers, remember mind that the messages they receive do not have your blog's stylesheet applied to them. (I experimented with various header style options in BloggerHAT, but eventually gave us and followed the example of other big-time bloggers and applied the formatting manually, for just this reason: no matter what I tried, my email-subscription messages looked bad,)

(BTW: If you know a way to apply a stylesheet to emails sent by Feedburner, or even by Blogger, then I'd love to hear about it.)

Country-specific Blogspot URL may affect your earnings - and other things too

2012-02-01T14:29:00.000-08:00

This week, Blogger announced they are redirecting blogspot.com blogs to country specific URLs.

This means that when someone in India looks at http://blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.com/, they will actually be directed to http://blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.in - and similarly for other countries, so far I know it's been applied to Australia and New Zealand too.

This is likely to have affects on other products:

AdSense:

If you have protected your AdSense ID from malicious use (and really, you should if you care about it), then you will find some new entries in your unauthorised sites list: I just went into mine and authorised

blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.com.au
blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.in
blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.co.nz

and I expect to be doing some more as it rolls out further.

If I didn't do this, then any advertising "clicks" from people visiting via country-specific-URLs won't be counted.

(Interestingly, I tried using the authorise link beside the unauthorized links on the Home > Account settings page. It said it worked, but those sites weren't actually added to my authorized list. I had to add them to the Authorized list and click Save myself.)

Analytics:

I'm not sure yet if this has an impact on statistics gathered with Analytics. Maybe not - my overall visitor numbers aren't down, and the Visitors > Map overlay tool shows that I've had 79 visits from India today.

I do have some more checks in mind, but these will take a while to do - comments from anyone who has investigated are very welcome.

3rd party statistics packages:

I don't know for sure, but would be surprised if this doesn't affect the stats gathered by SiteMeter, StatCounter, et al - at least in the short term.

Search

Nitecruzr has explained how Blogger's use of a canonical statement makes sure that the search engines only index our blogs under one address.

The way to check that you've got a canonical statement in your template is to

View the blog itself (ie not the template, and not the posts)
- eg I looked at www.blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.com in my browser, while I was logged off of Blogger.
Look at the source code (in Chrome, I get to it through the "wrench" in the top right corner, then Tools > View Source - or by using Ctrl / u)
Check that this line is showing somewhere:
<link href='http://yourURL.blogspot.com' rel='canonical'/>

If that line isn't in your source code, then the quickest fix is to either change to a newer template, or edit your template and add it just underneath the <head> statement.

That's all I can think of for now ... but I have a hunch there's more. Will post again if I find more issues.

Why you can't ignore Google +

2012-01-28T14:43:00.000-08:00

Just in case you're still hoping you can ignore G+ and it will go away.

It's kinda like that "If Facebook was a country" vid that did the rounds a while ago, but with less numbers and cuter cartoons.

An opportunity for blogger photographers

2012-01-27T14:59:00.000-08:00

Bloggers who are also photographers may want to check out Google's Trusted Photographers programme. The message announcing this to businesses says:

"It’s simple. Visit our new website and search for a Google Trusted Photographer in your area. ... schedule a time and agree on a price that you will pay the photographer for a photoshoot of your business. ... During the hour it should take for the shoot, you can collaborate ... about how best to display and capture your business. ... the photographer will upload the images to Google, and .. you’ll see ... views of your business on [your local Google search site], Google Maps and on your Google Places listing. "

So for a photographer, it looks like the process is:

You get approved as a GTP (does being a long-standing photo blogger help with this?).
Google advertise that you're available
Businesses and organisations that want official photos in Google contact you, and negotiate times/prices.
You visit, take the photos, and do any post-processing
You load them to Google on behalf of your customer.

Google have provided a Service Agreement that you must use - as a commissioned job, the ownership of the copyright of the photos passes to the person or organisation who pays. So you'll need their permission if you want to put the photos onto your blog.

Final thought:
I wonder if there's any way to embed a Google Places listing, including the official photos, in a blog - the same way we can embed a custom map.

How to become a Google Trusted Photographer
I didn't a quick search, but couldn't find definitive answers. I did find some info about what sort of things they are expected to do:

Trusted Photographers are trained to take high quality photos of building interiors, accommodating for common challenges such as low lighting and tight spaces. The photographers are also certified to take pictures using fisheye lenses and rotating camera turrets (mounted on tripods)

And this link, where you can enquire about the program: http://maps.google.com/help/maps/businessphotos/interested-photographer.html

Sources for official news about Google products.

2012-01-26T13:24:00.000-08:00

Today, I found a listing of Google's blogs about their products, and also about operations and policies etc in different countries and regions.

It's not complete (eg the Blogger developers blog isn't listed) - but it was interesting to see a list of the multi-language options for some of the bigger products, and also the various country-sepcific blogs.

I found a few interesting things to add to my RSS subscriptions, and suspect that a few of my readers might like to do the same.

Share and enjoy.

Picnik is ending on 19 April 2012

2012-01-20T14:32:00.000-08:00

The first list of Google application retirements for 2012 includs Picnik, a photo editing tool that was accessible via Picasa-web-albums (and perhaps from other places too) - it was an effective, though slow, way of adding a watermark to pictures.

I'm sure that PWA has a replacement tool for doing this ... don't have time to research what it is right now.