On the same day we reported that Twitter, Facebook and RIM were being hauled in front of the UK government again to discuss the recent UK riots, it transpires that three of the UK’s top politicians have all joined Google+.
As the FT reports, Prime Minister and Conservative party leader David Cameron, Liberal Democrats leader and deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg and Labour party leader Ed Milliband all signed up to Google’s social network today. And here’s what they each had to say in their inaugural posts: David Cameron:
“Proud to see British politicians leading the way when it comes to embracing new methods of engaging people online, from e-petitions to the latest developments in social media.”
Nick Clegg:
“The Liberal Democrats are always open to new and innovative ways of communicating with voters, so creating this Google+ account was an easy and logical step.”
Ed Milliband:
“Welcome to my page on Google+. I have said since I became leader that I am determined for Labour to look outwards, not just inwards. So I am looking forward to using this site to keep in touch with people who follow me here. Let me know what you think.”
It’s not clear whether each politician personally signed up to the social networking service, though it’s probably safe to assume that each account was set up on their behalf by their respective parties.
Google+ launched back in June, and it reached 10m users within 16 days, and it’s thought it has over 25m registered members today.
With the leaders of the three major UK political parties jumping on Google+ at the same time, Google will avoid criticism that it’s a little too close to the Conservative party – Eric Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman, is an economic advisor to David Cameron, whilst the search giant’s communications head Rachel Whetstone is married to Steve Hilton, who just happens to be Cameron’s director of strategy.
Given that Google hasn’t yet opened its social network to brands or organizations in the same way as Facebook has with its Pages for celebrities and businesses, these are very much ‘personal’ profile pages, though only time will tell how much personal input the respective politicians put into their pages. Indeed, it will be interesting to see how active each leader will be on Google+, or whether their initial interest in the social network will dwindle over time.
Everyone says it’s hard to measure social good success. Well, non-profit consultancy Convio begs to differ. The firm recently put out an infographic showing that the Internet is the fastest-growing channel for non-profits.
The graphic compares money raised, awareness gained and a variety of other factors across a three-year period. Since 2008, non-profits have cracked the $1 billion mark for online fundraising. In 2010, the average online gift jumped up to $91.94.
There’s clearly a long way to go for online fundraising and social good when compared to the huge sums still collected through traditional fundraising and offline giving, but the upward trend certainly bodes well for digital philanthropy.
What do you think of America’s growing support of online giving? Let us know in the comments.
Google announced on Tuesday that it was launching its YouTube Partner Program in India, to allow regular contributors to the video-sharing website to display ads with their videos, according to a report by IndiaInfoline.
The YouTube Partner Program enables people who make regular and popular uploads to the site to generate revenue from their videos with the help of ads overlaid on top of their videos and displayed alongside them. All of the uploaded content has to be the original creation of any YouTube user in order for them to be eligible for the Partner Program.
The program currently boast of over 20,000 content creators across the globe and pays out millions of dollars per month in advertising revenue to its members. The company has already been inducting handpicked Indian members, such as Yoboho New Media and Jai Hind TV, to the Partner Program since last December and is now opening it all Indian users who might be eligible.
Google Earth and Google maps have made higher resolution maps available for several parts of Kerala. Near-3D views are available for areas north of Vanchiyoor and Government Ayurveda College for the Thiruvananthapuram city. On the West Coast of Thiruvananthapuram, they cover areas from Vettukadu to Puthenthope. On the East of Thiruvananthapuram, they reach out up to Nettayam and cover such places as Menamkulam, Chempazhanthy, Mannanthala and Karakulam.
The three-dimensional views area also available for several parts of Kollam district, including Kollam city and Kottarakkara. Higher resolution maps have also been introduced for areas surrounding Kozhikode airport, Ponnani, Kottayam, Cherthala and Mararikulam. Kochi and Kannur are also mapped in detail. These high resolution images are integrated with lower resolution maps for rest of Kerala.
Google Map Maker team recently announced a Regional Expert Reviewer program, giving distinguished mappers increased reviewing capabilities within their State, country, or region of expertise around the world. Experts are enlisted on the basis of voluntary contributions to mapping areas familiar to them over a period. This is expected to be helpful to local map makers using Google map maker for map editing, C.N. Ramachandran Nair, a reviewer, told The Hindu here on Wednesday.
Dr. Nair said that the government could use the maps for purposes such as Irrigation development and locating schools and even for overseeing building tax assessments.
Back when Google‘s logo still had an exclamation point, its founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin encountered a practical problem. On one hand, they had plans to attend the Burning Man Festival. On the other, they weren’t entirely confident that the site would not crash in their absence. And if it did, there wasn’t anyone at the office to answer the phone while the pair camped out in the desert.
The first Google Doodle — which showed Burning Man’s iconic stick figure popping out of the Google logo — was, in essence, an “out of office” message.
Throughout the next several years, Google started occasionally adding decorations to its logo for holidays like Thanksgiving and Halloween. Sergey Brin filed a patent for those decorations, which he called “systems and methods for enticing users to access a web site,” in 2000. It was granted in 2011.
“Google Doodles” are now an established part of Internet culture. We, Internet users, are delighted to find creative takes on holidays we forgot about, outraged when an event’s Doodle depiction seems off. We played theGoogle logo guitar so much that Google created a dedicated website for it.
For a long period of time, all Google Doodles were created by a former intern and current employee named Dennis Hwang. The process has since been taken to another level. Here’s what goes into the beloved (and at times bemoaned) Doodles.
The “Google Doodlers”
Jennifer Hom is part of a team of artists (officially “a handful” — more specifically, many fewer than 10), who coordinate and create Google’s Doodles. Their art backgrounds are diverse. One was a feature film animator, another illustrated comic books. Hom recently graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design.
Ideas come from the team, Google’s more than 28,000 employees, users and the news.
“It’s always a surprise,” Hom says. “And we try to pick things that are going to be exciting to our users, whether it was in their childhood or something they learned in school or important events or an important part of their culture.”
Production timelines vary greatly. While the team can theoretically plan for the Fourth of July Doodle all year, current events aren’t current for very long. When NASA found water on the moon in 2009, for instance, Hom’s pitch to Doodle it was accepted around lunchtime — giving her about four hours to conceive and create a Doodle.
Together, the team produced 271 Doodles last year.
Math Nerd Support
Popout
Most artists who want to create a guitar that records and plays back music, an image repelled by a cursor or abuckyball that spins when you roll with the mouse are out of luck. Google Doodlers have access to one of the largest pools of computer engineers on the planet.
While Hom says the Google Doodle team has never taken a Google engineer completely off of his or her full time job to work on a Google Doodle, at least one of them, search team software engineer Kris Hom (no relation to Jennifer Hom), regularly dedicates his 20% time to the cause. Some weeks, it ends up being 30%, 40% or 50% time.
When the buckyball design presented a mathematical challenge, for instance, he emailed other engineers on his team who promptly delivered a handful of successful solutions.
Having math nerds on hand also came in handy with the Pi Day Google Doodle, which was designed to look like a mathematician’s notes.
“For that, we had to consult our math experts that are floating around Google … and just make sure that every single curve and every single note that we put on the Doodle was accurate,” Jennifer Hom says.
International Offices
Google has more than 50 domains in 50 different countries, and it creates Doodles specific to many of them. But for a team based in the United States, it’s hard to remember that Miroslav Krleza’s 118th Birthday is being celebrated in Croatia.
Fortunately, Google’s many international domains come with many international offices. Their staffs contribute culturally appropriate Doodle ideas and check Doodles for cultural suitability before they go live.
Doodle Influence
By one 2009 study’s estimate, Google accounts for a whopping 6% of all Internet traffic. Directing the attention of many Internet users to a given topic, be it by Doodle or otherwise, is no little matter of influence.
“There’s always kind of a responsibility in terms of not offending anyone,” Hom says. “We don’t want to put anything too heavy as a Doodle, anything that’s not uplifting.”
Not offending anyone is a feat that’s hard to accomplish, particularly when experts from every niche are using your page as a web launching point. In 2003, an artist made a small error in the depiction of DNA on Google’s homepage. The reaction was powerful enough that Hom still talks about it today, even though the incident predates her Google Doodle debut.
“I’m really afraid of having a DNA moment,” she says.
Research keeps the math, science and history buffs happy, but sometimes the desire to not offend anyone can be self-defeating. Google’s Doodle for gay pride, a rainbow attached to the search bar, only appeared when a user searched for related terms — drawing criticism that the company had put its pride in the closet.
Why Doodle?
Google is not known for its artistic creativity. It’s known for making algorithms that work really well. So why hire a team to dress up the homepage, occasionally distract engineers and open the company to criticism of its portrayal of events?
“[Google does] a lot of awesome things in terms of technology,” Hom says. “But it’s easy for users to forget that we’re real people, too. So I guess that’s really the purpose of Doodles. … We make mistakes with DNA sometimes also, but we’re here to keep the fun in the company and make sure the users know that we’re alive.”
PopoutEach package gets larger with a mouse-over, and a click on it returns search results pertinent to a specific country or the particular items featured in a scene. This one is from December 24, 2010.
Cloud computing is secure, simple, keeps you productive and saves you money. But the cloud can also save energy. A recent report by the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) and Verdantix estimates that cloud computing has the potential to reduce global carbon emissions by millions of metric tons. And Jonathan Koomey, a consulting professor at Stanford who has led several studies on data center energy use, has written that for many enterprises, the cloud “is significantly more energy efficient than using in-house data centers.”
Because we’re committed to sustainability, we sharpened our pencils and looked at our own services to see how they stack up against the alternatives.
We compared Gmail to the traditional enterprise email solutions it’s replaced for more than 4 million businesses. The results were clear: switching to Gmail can be almost 80 times more energy efficient (PDF) than running in-house email. This is because cloud-based services are typically housed in highly efficient data centers that operate at higher server utilization rates and use hardware and software that’s built specifically for the services they provide—conditions that small businesses are rarely able to create on their own.
An illustration of inefficient server utilization by smaller companies compared to efficient utilization in the cloud.
If you’re more of a romantic than a businessperson, think of it this way: It takes more energy to send a message in a bottle than it does to use Gmail for a year, as long as you count (PDF) the energy used to make the bottle and the wine you drank.
We ran a similar calculation for YouTube and the results are even more striking: the servers needed to play one minute of YouTube consume about 0.0002 kWh of energy. To put that in perspective, it takes about eight seconds for the human body to burn off that same amount. You’d have to watch YouTube for three straight days for our servers to consume the amount of energy required to manufacture, package and ship a single DVD.
In calculating these numbers, we included the energy used by all the Google infrastructure supporting Gmail and YouTube. Of course, your own laptop or phone also consumes energy while you’re accessing Google, so it’s important to choose an efficient model.
There’s still a lot to learn about the global impacts of cloud computing, but one thing we can say with certainty: bit for bit, email for email, and video for video, it’s more efficient in the cloud.
You probably know Google from our products on the Internet, like Google Search, Gmail, Orkut and Google Maps. Soon, we may be visiting a town near you, to give you a first hand experience of what the Internet has to offer you.
he Internet Bus Project is an attempt to educate people about what the Internet is, and how it may be beneficial to their lives, by taking the Internet experience to them through a customised Internet-enabled bus, which will travel to several towns and cities across India.
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