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Happy 10th birthday, Blogger
September 2, 2009
Much has changed since Blogger was released in August of 1999. Writing about Blogger's founding in his book
Say Everything
, Scott Rosenberg describes the effect of Blogger simply: "It cleared the obstacles from the path between brain and Web page." As the phenomenon of blogging has grown and evolved over the past ten years, so too has Blogger, adapting to a world of fast-paced communication and allowing millions to tell their stories. When Google acquired Blogger in February of 2003, about 250,000 people visited Blogger per month. Today, that number is more than 300 million.
In our
announcement
about the Blogger acquisition, we said (somewhat ironically, not in a blog post — the Official Google Blog was still more than
a year away
): "Blogs are a global self-publishing phenomenon that connect Internet users with dynamic, diverse points of view while also enabling comment and participation." We're proud that Blogger
continues to be a force for free expression worldwide
and that it is growing quickly despite its maturity. In the past two years alone, the number of people contributing to a blog has more than doubled, and every second of every day, a new blog is created on Blogger.
To commemorate Blogger's 10th birthday, we've been releasing
birthday presents
as our way of saying thanks to the millions of users who have made Blogger what it is today. So far, we have released 5 presents and today we're announcing 2 more, courtesy of two Blogger partners:
Socialvibe
: When Socialvibe approached us about finding a way to empower the Blogger community to help raise funds for charities, we couldn't pass up the opportunity to leverage Blogger's reach to do some good. Starting this week, Blogger users can show their support for charities and raise funds by adding a gadget to their blog. The Socialvibe team has challenged us to raise $50,000 for charity by the end of the year, and we're pretty confident we can beat that.
InfoThinker
: If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch and a Blogger blog, you're in luck. The team at
InfoThinker
(makers of the iPhone app BlogPress) was eager to help celebrate Blogger's birthday. Earlier this week they submitted a free version of BlogPress that works only on Blogger to the iPhone App Store. Blogging on the go has never been so easy! Keep an eye out for the app.
Here is the
full list of presents
. We have more in store over the next couple weeks, and we're just as excited about a number of developments planned for later in the year. With thanks to Blogger founders
Meg
,
Paul
and
Ev
without whom we wouldn't have a 10th birthday to celebrate, and to the millions of people around the world who rely on Blogger to tell their story every day, here's to our next decade.
Posted by Rick Klau, Product Manager
Google Translate now speaks 51 languages
August 31, 2009
We spend a lot of time thinking about how information travels around the globe. After all, there are Googlers living and working in
dozens of countries
— and we're pretty sure our products are used in many more. So we're familiar with the need to translate information across borders, and we've been working hard to build the technology to enable you to do just that. Today, we're excited to announce that we've added nine new languages to
Google Translate
:
Afrikaans
,
Belarusian
,
Icelandic
,
Irish
,
Macedonian
,
Malay
,
Swahili
,
Welsh
and
Yiddish
. That means that Google Translate now supports 51 languages and 2550 language pairs — including all
23 official EU languages
.
The translation quality of these newest languages is still a little rough, but it will improve over time — and we're continuously working to improve quality for all languages supported by Google Translate. We're also working to integrate Google Translate into some of our other products; you can already translate
emails
within Gmail,
webpages
using Google Toolbar,
RSS feeds
in Google Reader and most recently,
documents
within Google Docs. For more information about Google Translate and these latest additions, check out our post on the
Research Blog
.
Posted by Jeff Chin, Product Manager
Translate documents: sharing across languages and generations
August 27, 2009
My cousin is in first grade and sometimes she writes short stories for class. I try to share the stories with her grandparents, but because Japanese is their first language and they don't speak English very well, it's been tough. Today we're releasing a feature for
Google Docs
to make this kind of multi-lingual sharing easier — you can now automatically translate documents into
42 different languages
.
So for my cousin's latest story, I helped her type it up in Google Docs and then clicked "Translate document" from the "Tools" menu. In a matter of seconds, Google Docs has translated the whole story into Japanese using
Google Translate's technology
.
You can replace the original document with the translation or make a new translated version. I like keeping an English version for friends here and creating a separate Japanese version for her grandparents. All the formatting and layout is preserved no matter what language it's in — translations aren't perfect, but we are continuously working on improving translation quality over time. We hope this new feature helps you more easily share information without worrying about language barriers.
Posted by Rita Chen, Associate Product Manager Intern, Google Docs
Five years of introducing students to open source
August 26, 2009
We've just concluded our fifth
Google Summer of Code
, our
flagship global program
to introduce college and university students to open source development. Once again, the results this year have been impressive. Nearly 2,000 mentors from 64 countries participated in the program. They worked to bring 1,000 students from 69 countries into the communities of
150 free and open source projects
. We're particularly excited this year to have introduced several students to open source development that has a direct impact on social causes, from
microfinance software
to
global educational initiatives
to
making government data more transparent and accessible
. Three months and hundreds of thousands of lines of code later, 85 percent of our student participants have successfully completed their projects. We'll be publishing more extensive program statistics and wrap up reports in the coming weeks on the
Google Open Source Blog
, so stay tuned there for more news about Google Summer of Code.
We'd like to congratulate all of our student participants for their hard work and tremendous achievements this summer. We're excited to hear that many of our students have planned out the next few months of their coding work with their chosen open source project. Finally, our sincerest thanks to all of our mentors for volunteering their time and expertise to help these students more actively engage with open source development.
Posted by Leslie Hawthorn, Program Manager, Open Source Team
More books in more places: public domain EPUB downloads on Google Books
August 26, 2009
Try doing a search for [
Hamlet
] on Google Books. The first few results you'll get are "Full View" books — which means you can read the full text. And, because the book is in the public domain, you can also download a copy of
Hamlet
in PDF form.
Starting today, you'll be able to download these and over one million public domain books from
Google Books
in an additional format. We're excited to now offer downloads in EPUB format, a free and open industry standard for electronic books. It's supported by a wide variety of applications, so once you download a book, you'll be able to read it on any device or through any reading application that supports the format. That means that people will be able to access public domain works that we've digitized from libraries around the world in more ways, including some that haven't even been built or imagined yet.
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 began digitizing these books because we thought it was important for people to be able to find and read them, and we want them to be able to do so anywhere — not just when they happen to be at a computer. This feature takes us one step closer towards realizing that goal by helping support open standards that enable people to access these books in more places, on more devices and through more applications.
To find out more, check out our post on the
Google Books blog
.
Posted by Brandon Badger, Product Manager
Finding great stuff to read with Google Reader
August 25, 2009
I only followed a handful of blogs when I first started using
Google Reader
, but was always on the lookout for more great stuff to read. Over time, I discovered that my friends followed lots of interesting sites, and my reading list grew from 4 to 34 sites and blogs as I incorporated their recommendations.
Since then, Reader has launched several
sharing features
that make it easier to find and subscribe to feeds that your friends like, and we thought that recommendations could make finding good stuff to read even easier. This time, instead of asking our friends, we approached leaders across a variety of fields and asked them what they read online. We received lots of great responses, which we've collected into our second edition of
Power Readers
. In this edition, we've expanded from
Power Readers in Politics
to include journalists, techies, fashion critics, foodies and more. We hope this will be a good place to find great things to read, whether you already have an extensive reading list or are totally new to Google Reader.
Plus, now we can answer some questions that have interested us for years: Where does
Arianna Huffington
go to get different perspectives on the news? When
Paul Krugman
surfs the web, what are his favorite economics sites? What blogs do tech, foodie and fashion bloggers read? Visit
www.google.com/powerreaders
to explore and subscribe to any of their reading lists, or to any individual items that they recommend.
A big thanks to all of the contributors who shared their reading lists with us.
Posted by Zach Yeskel, Product Marketing Manager
In the future, everyone will monetize their 15 minutes
August 25, 2009
(Cross-posted from the
YouTube Biz Blog
)
We
first launched
the YouTube Partnership Program (YPP) to help some of our more popular users make money from their videos on YouTube. While we've focused on accepting prolific users who regularly produce videos that reach a wide audience — like
Fred
and
ValsArtDiary
— we've occasionally extended the program to include some of the site's more unforgettable videos, such as the
Battle of Kruger
,
David after dentist
and
Otters holding hands
. These individual video partnerships recognize the role popular "one-off" videos play on YouTube, and have helped many people earn thousands of dollars a month as their videos went viral and endured over time.
We decided it was time to spread the wealth. Today we're excited to announce that we're extending the YouTube Partnership Program to include individual popular videos on our site. Now, when you upload a video to YouTube that accumulates lots of views, we may invite you to monetize that video and start earning revenue from it. To determine whether a particular video is eligible for monetization, we look at factors like the number of views, the video's virality and compliance with the YouTube Terms of Service. If your video is eligible for monetization, you will receive an email and see an "Enable Revenue Sharing" message next to your video on the watch page, as well as in other places in your account:
Once you've chosen to enable revenue sharing, YouTube will sell advertising against your video and pay you a revenue share into your
Google AdSense
account each month. (If you don't have an AdSense account, you'll have the opportunity to create one.) Individual video partnerships will not be eligible for many of the benefits of user partnerships, like enhanced channel features or the ability to monetize other videos in your account, so we encourage you to
apply to be a member
of the YPP. We'll consider your individual video partnerships when reviewing your YPP application. For now individual video partnerships are available only in the United States, but we hope to roll these out internationally soon.
It's taken us some time to build out the YouTube Partnership Program, our content management tools and other infrastructure to handle expanding the YPP to so many individual users and videos. Now that we're ready to share these opportunities with a wider audience, we're excited to see how individual video partnerships will help even more people make money from their success on YouTube.
Posted by Shenaz Zack, Product Manager
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