Gmail Help Center Includes External Data Source

When you seek help from Gmail's Help Center, you would now see "user community" data in search results which includes not only threads from its dedicated Google Groups but also other external sources such as Lifehacker and About.com.

Given the fact that Gmail users increases dramatically after it opens up to the public, the Gmail Team might be receiving overwhelming amount of help tickets and turn to quality external sources which provides quick answers to simple questions.

Google Calendar in iPhone

The Google Calendar Team has developed a tailor-made interface for iPhone users. The 'What's New' page says: Google Calendar now works (and looks) better on your iPhone. Enhanced 'touch-screen' buttons and color-coded events make keeping track of your schedule - and viewing others' calendars - even easier while you're on the go.

YouTube Launches Nonprofit Program

The "YouTube Nonprofit Program" enables non-profit organizations to set up outreach programs on YouTube. By joining the program, organizations benefits from:

• Premium branding capabilities and increased uploading capacity
• Rotation of your videos in the "Promoted Videos" areas throughout the site
• The option to embed a Google Checkout "Donate" button — and to fundraise without transaction costs.

Here's an example for the Google Checkout "Donate" button next to a video from Asia Society:
Here are some tips on setting up a video fund-raising campaign from the YouTube Blog:

Sign Up | YouTube Blog

Happy Birthday, Google!

It's Google's 9th birthday! I wonder what Google's birthday wish is :P

Strange YouTube Video Description in Google

Pay attention to the description of the video! It reads '8 clicks from http://tstkeith.blogspot.com/2007/05/ ...'. Pretty obvious it is some referral statistics from YouTube. This suggests that YouTube has been putting its referral statistics in public allowing (extremely powerful) search engines like Google to access this information. I tried some other keywords but it doesn't seem to trigger the same "description". Could you find other keywords that produces the same (strange) video description? Or do you have other opinions about this phenomena?

Google Paid Storage

Google is offering paid storage for Picasa Web Album and Gmail and would extend the program to other services such as Google Docs & Spreadsheet soon. The paid storage could be shared among different services. The cheapest plan start at $20/year for 6GB.

Personally, this idea is pretty disappointing as I am expecting Google to offer unlimited storage to its users in the near future but it seems they are not interested in offering free yet ad monetized storage anymore. Gmail's keen competitor, Yahoo Mail, is offering unlimited storage now and I thought this was the trend. Well, don't imagine you can backup everything on your computer in GDrive, you might only get another gigabyte only. Sigh.

Manage your storage usage | Purchase extra storage

P.S. I would be Off to Iceland until 27 August so this would be the last post before I leave.

Google Business Referral Representative

Google Maps allows business owners to add and edit their businesses helping them to connect with potential customers in their communities. However, Google thinks that relying merely on business owners is not efficient enough to 'organize the worlds information and make it universally accessible'. Therefore, they would like to pay US residents to help them add in more listings by being a Google Business Referral Representative. The details of the program is listed in form of a FAQ below.

What do you have to do?
You would have to visit local businesses to collect information (such as hours of operation, types of payment accepted, etc.) for Google Maps, and tell them about Google Maps and Google AdWords. You'll also take a few digital photos of the business that will appear on the Google Maps listing along with the business information.

How much will I be paid?
You can earn up to $10 for each approved and verified referral. $2 when a business referral is approved by Google; and $8 when an approved business verifies that the information you submitted is accurate.

Who is eligible to join the program?
You must be authorized to work as a contractor in the U.S., be at least 18 years of age, and be able to complete an IRS Form W-9.

When would you get paid?
If you earn at least $25 a month, you'll receive a monthly check.

Does that mean I'm a Googler?
Sorry, but no. Google Business Referral Representatives are independent contractors to Google, not employees.

Get Started | FAQ

Use Google Maps to Track Flood in UK

The newly released mapplets feature in Google Maps has created a platform for BBC Berkshire to create a flood map showing latest flood warning information, locations of emergency centers, photos, video and audio reports from correspondents across Berkshire. Read more about the flood map in BBC Berkshire.

In 2005, when Katrina stroke New Orleans, Google Earth provided satellite images of the flood. This time with mapplets, however, individual users (in this case BBC) can make use of the interactive mapping tools and take the initiative to generate flood maps.

Launch Flood Map

Blogger Adds Robots.txt

If you use Google Sitemaps for your Blogger and you are seeing a sudden increase in the number of links being blocks by robots.txt, don't panic as it is not anything you did wrong. It is all because Blogger is adding robots.txt by default recently. As you can see from the codes below, all pages under the /search directory is being disallowed meaning and pages under the /search directory would not appear included in any search result pages of major search engines (e.g. Google, Yahoo and Live.com).

User-agent: *
Disallow: /search
Sitemap: http://gspy.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?orderby=updated

This is, in fact, a good news to Blogger users as Google is treating most of these blocked pages as duplicated content and are listing them as 'Supplemental Results'. Furthermore, the more duplicated content you site has, the less Google is weighing your site's content.

A further improvement towards this great feature is to allow Blogger users to customize their own robots.txt so they could prevent undesired content from appearing in search results.

Note: If you are using Blogger and has recently directed your feed to FeedBurner, make sure you change your sitemap URL in Google Sitemaps to http://yourblog.blogspot.com/rss.xml?orderby=updated instead of just http://yourblog.blogspot.com/rss.xml otherwise an error would occur in Google Sitemaps.

Google Ready to Capture the Entire US?

Wow, was my respond when I first saw the above image taken in the Google parking in Mountain View, California. (Followed by an OMG) As you can see, there is an entire fleet of at least 30 brand-new Chevy Cobalt cars, most without license plates, each with a metal frame attached at the top which is highly likely to be a vertical extension for mounting Google's Street View 360° camera.

Here's a closeup:
This should be how the car is going to look when the 11-lens + 360 degree camera is installed:
If you still haven't put up a robot.txt (v2.0) outside your garden, you better do now! :P

[Via Gizmodo]