Tyler

A number of public officials and the founders of Google assembled at Grand Central Terminal on Tuesday to announce the start of New York’s version of Google Transit, an online feature that they said would transform the experience of navigating New York City’s transit system, the nation’s busiest.

“It is a very complicated transit system, and it just got less complicated today with the advent of Google Maps for transit,” Gov. David A. Paterson said, noting that the subway system opened with 9.1 miles of lines in 1904, and that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority now serves a territory of 5,000 square miles.

The array of public officials present reflected Google’s economic might, particularly at a time when Wall Street’s convulsions have left the city and state economy reeling. Not only did the governor and leaders of the transportation authority attend the Grand Central news conference, but so, too, did Deputy Mayor Edward Skyler, representing the Bloomberg administration, and officials of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and of New Jersey Transit.

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In case you missed the news, Twitter announced a new election page that will help its users filter all the election tweets across its network so users can find what they’re looking for as soon as possible. Twitter claims it decided to launch the service after seeing a spike in the number of tweets surrounding the election and the candidates.

The page is different than your run-of-the-mill Twitter page and it does a fine job of finding what you want, when you want. But it highlights an important point that shouldn’t be overlooked: Twitter needs more of these pages.

One of the most appealing aspects of Present.ly, a Twitter clone for the enterprise, is its ability to offer groups. In other words, if you own a company and you only want management to correspond on Present.ly without letting the other employees see what they’re saying, it’s quick and easy to set that up. But in the world of Twitter, you can’t create groups among your friends.

But what if you could create a group of like-minded individuals with interests much like your own on Twitter, regardless of whether or not they’re your friends? It would not only appeal to the majority of users who are trying to meet new people who are “in” to the same things, but it will help Twitter finally address some of its users’ desires.

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by Mike Rosen-Molina, 12:13PM

Whenever news breaks, the first people on the ground, before reporters arrive, are ordinary folks with cameras. Citizen journalists have played an important role in getting us the first glimpses of developing news, from the London transit bombings to the Southeast Asian tsunami to the Virginia Tech massacre. With the advent of YouTube as a hub for video-sharing, there’s finally a venue outside the mainstream media where amateur journalists can distribute their videos to a wide audience.

While professional journalists have used the service to distribute documentaries, the nature of citizen reporting on YouTube still remains very time-and-location specific, more a matter of catching an event, something fleeting and out of context, than of telling the story behind it. Last week, YouTube announced Project: Report, a journalism contest that aims to change that.

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This is a guest post written by Marion Freijsen and Adrie Reinders, authors of “The N Factor: How Efficient Networking Can Change the Dynamics of Your Business,” as a part of the Authors@Mashable series. Please join Marion and Adrie for a live Q&A today, Thursday, September 25th at 3:00 PM ET on Mashable.

It’s a Small World
Our world has gotten smaller. Not in the way that the huge house you played in with your friends when you were six years old seems small when you return to it at 30. More in the sense that these days, every business that starts up is no longer just competing with the company in the next village, but more likely with a company on the other side of the world. We all have access to the Internet, we can fly places and as such, the borders have stretched further and further.

Recently I was sitting at breakfast and next to me was a table full of people. They were having fun, which I think is great, but they were so absorbed in their own little world and talking at such an embarrassing volume that it was hard to have a quiet, peaceful conversation with the person sitting next to me. You all have these examples no doubt. Maybe a person next to you with a mobile phone that talks so loudly that you can’t hear yourself think. Or an attendant in a store or hotel who is paying more attention to his colleagues whilst serving you, then to you, the paying customer. I could go on and on – and I am sure you can think of hundreds more examples.

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Google Moderator launched this evening, a simple tool that helps groups determine which questions should be asked at all hands meetings, conferences, Q&A sessions, etc. The idea is that there are always lots of good questions to ask in a limited period of time, but it’s hard to know which questions the attendees are most interested in hearing discussed. Moderator lets users add questions and vote on the questions of others, so the cream rises to the top.

Moderator was built by Taliver Heath as a side project and resides on Google App Engine. He describes the product on the Google App Engine blog:

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YouTube on Thursday announced that it’s going to do its part to fight global poverty by launching “In My Name,” a global effort to raise awareness around eight time-bound, measurable goals that the United Nations set back in 2000 to combat global poverty. Known as Millennium Development Goals, the ideas outlined during that session were promises made to the poor to hold world leaders accountable for not doing enough for those that have fallen below the poverty line and force leaders to do more to help them.

YouTube is teaming up with Will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas, and nonprofit organizations Oxfam, GCAP, Save the Children, and Comic Relief to get the word out that poverty throughout the world needs to be eradicated.

For its part, YouTube has launched a new channel on its site where users can upload a video stating their name, home country, and simple message to their respective government about the need to meet the poverty goals. The company will accept videos until November 1. Once that date has passed, YouTube will create a mash-up of the most powerful submissions from around the world and broadcast it directly to the United Nations General Assembly.

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IBM opened up cloud computing centers in four countries on Wednesday to let enterprises, universities and governments test Web-based services and applications.

The new cloud computing centers are in Bangalore, India; Hanoi, Vietnam; Sao Paulo, Brazil; and Seoul, South Korea. The company now has 13 cloud computing centers worldwide.

Cloud computing is a relatively new technology, and issues such as usage models need to be studied, said Ponani Gopalakrishnan, vice president of IBM’s India Software Lab.

The cloud computing model allows businesses and consumers to remotely access computers over the Internet to access services, IBM said. Using shared infrastructure like a cloud computing center allows businesses to manage and provision IT infrastructure dynamically depending on the requirements of business, Gopalakrishnan said.

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Yahoo announced on Wednesday the details about its system to buy and sell display advertising online, with the hope that the company can dominate the display ad market in the same way Google steers the search market.

The new platform, called APT, will allow both publishers and advertisers to manage display advertising across the Web sites of several hundred newspapers across the country, along with Yahoo sites and large sites like eBay and WebMD.

At an event at Advertising Week in New York, executives said that the 800 or so members of Yahoo’s newspaper consortium would be using the system, formerly known as AMP, by the end of the year.

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