Filter File Types from Google Video's Results

Filter File Types from Google Video's Results:

Google Video added a new option to the advanced search page: you can now filter videos that weren't uploaded to video sharing sites. If the search results include many videos that have one of these formats: ASF, AVI, FLV, M4V, MPV, MP4, MPG or WMV, you can exclude them by unchecking the corresponding box.

Unfortunately, Google Video doesn't provide an option to restrict the results to one or more of these formats, like you can do at Yahoo Video Search.

Voice and Video Chat in Gmail

Voice and Video Chat in Gmail

As anticipated in the post about Gmail SMS, video chat is the next big that will be added to Gmail. Justin Uberti says that video chat will be added today, along with voice chat.

"We've tried to make this an easy-to-use, seamless experience, with high-quality audio and video. And we've built this product using Internet standards, such as XMPP, RTP, and the newly-standardized H.264/SVC video codec."



To try the new features go to http://mail.google.com/videochat and install the required plug-in (it works in Windows XP/Vista, Intel-based Mac, using IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari 3+). After restarting the browser, open Gmail, select a contact from the chat section and see if there's an option named "Video & more". If you can't find this option, your friend didn't install the plug-in yet.


Instead of developing new versions of the Google Talk desktop application, Google decided to focus on its most popular communication channel and add the missing features. Too bad that you need to install yet another plug-in...

Google Uses OCR to Index Scanned PDF Files

Google Uses OCR to Index Scanned PDF Files:

Google started to index to full text of "scanned" PDF files using a technique called OCR (optical character recognition). "Every day, people all over the world post scanned documents online -- everything from official government reports to obscure academic papers. These files usually contain images of text, rather than the text themselves. But all of these documents have one thing in common: someone somewhere thought they were they were valuable enough to share with the world," says Evin Levey.

The great thing about the new feature is that you won't notice it unless you look for it, but it improves the quality of Google's search results. Google doesn't mention how many of the 300 million indexed PDF files were converted into text, but you can see some examples if you search for: [repairing aluminium wiring], [Steady success in a volatile world] and click on "View as HTML".


Google sponsors an open-source OCR software called OCRopus and it's likely that Google used it for indexing PDF files from the web. "OCRopus is a state-of-the-art document analysis and OCR system, featuring pluggable layout analysis, pluggable character recognition, statistical natural language modeling, and multi-lingual capabilities. (...) It's initially intended for high-throughput, high-volume document conversion efforts. We expect that it will also be an excellent OCR system for many other applications."

SMS in Gmail Chat

SMS in Gmail Chat:

Gmail is about to introduce a new feature that will let you send SMS messages to your contacts from the US, announces InformationWeek. Google explains how it works:

You can send SMS messages to your contacts' mobile phones using Gmail Chat. To do so from Gmail:

1. Enter your contact's name in the 'Search or invite friends' box in Chat, and select Send SMS from the box of options that appears to the right of your contact's name. Or, if you already have a Chat window open for this contact, just click Video & more, and select Send SMS.
2. In the dialog box, enter a phone number in the 'Send SMS messages to this number' field. For now, this feature works only on United States phone numbers. If you're outside the US, you can still use it, but you won't see the SMS option in Chat until you enable it manually in the Chat settings page.
3. Click Save.
4. A Chat window appears. Just type your message as you would normally. When you hit Enter, the message will be sent to the phone number you entered.

If your contact replies, the text message response will appear as a reply in Chat. These conversations are stored in your Chat history just like regular chats (but keep in mind that you can’t go off the record while communicating via SMS).

The nice thing about Gmail SMS is that each user gets a virtual phone number that facilitates replying to messages. "To write back, reply to the message as you would any other text message, and your message appears as a Chat message in your friend's Gmail account. If you don't want to receive any SMS messages from Gmail, reply with the command STOP. If you'd like to block the person who sent you the message, but still be able to get Gmail SMS messages from other contacts, reply with the command BLOCK," informs Gmail's help center.

You probably noticed the reference to a new Gmail option called "Video & more", which suggests that Gmail could add video chat. I don't see the new feature, but InformationWeek mentions that it will be slowly rolled out to all Gmail users and it will only be enabled by default if you are in the US.

Yahoo Mail added a similar feature last year: "From my Yahoo! Mail window (and using my comfortably full-sized keyboard), I can type a note to my son, letting him know I'm on my way to his soccer practice, and send it straight to his phone. And he can send a text message right back to my email, letting me know where to meet him. The intuitive, chat-like interface makes it super easy, even if you're a novice at text messaging."


Even more than Yahoo Mail, Gmail wants to integrate all your communication channels, so it allows you to pull messages from other email accounts, chat with Google Talk and AIM users. The integration with GrandCentral is also bound to happen.

Google Gadgets in Gmail

Google Gadgets in Gmail:

People spend a lot of time in email applications, so it makes sense to have links to other applications and useful information next to the email. Some would like to see their bookmarks, others would find useful to have their agenda and the list of to-do items.

Gmail Labs lets you add two gadgets in the left sidebar: Google Calendar and Google Docs, so you can add events, see your agenda and open recently-edited documents. There's also an experimental feature that lets you add any gadget by entering the address of its XML file, but I couldn't find gadgets that work and look well.

"We realize this isn't very user friendly right now; it's a sandbox mainly aimed at developers who want to play around with gadgets in Gmail. We're not tied to the left-nav as a primary way to extend Gmail -- in fact we think it is relatively limited and doesn't offer scalable real estate. There are also some downsides to the iframe-style Gadgets we're using today -- they can sometimes slow down the page. We're fanatical about speed, so we'll be keeping a close eye on performance," says Dan Pupius.

To make room for the gadgets, you could try these experimental features from Gmail Labs: Right-side chat, Right-side labels (move Gmail Chat and the list of labels in a right sidebar) and Navbar drag and drop (reorder containers).

{ Thanks, roody. }

New Default Groups for Google Contacts

New Default Groups for Google Contacts:

Gmail added three new built-in contact groups. "Friends, Family, and Co-workers are groups to help you organize your contacts. You can move contacts in and out of these groups at any time. Various Google products let you share information with people in these groups. In addition, you can create a Google profile to help people in these groups keep in touch with you. They will be able to easily find your profile from various Google products."

iGoogle is one of the services that will use these groups for managing your shared activities. One size doesn't fit all, so separating your contacts could simplify the way you share and receive information.


If you don't like the new groups, the bad news is that you can't delete them. Try to ignore them, but keep in mind that they'll be useful at some point.

Google has three other default contact groups: My Contacts (manually-added contacts), Suggested Contacts (email addresses collected from your conversations) and Most Contacted (20 frequently-used email addresses). Google no longer automatically adds email addresses to My Contacts. "Only contacts that you've edited, imported or added to a group will remain in My Contacts. This will provide everyone with a clean slate and, we hope, a better point for syncing contacts with mobile devices."

{ Thanks, Roody. }

Link Within a YouTube Video

Link Within a YouTube Video:

Two weeks ago, I posted how to embed a YouTube and make it start from a certain point. Now you can do the same thing for YouTube's watch pages: just append #t=XXmYYs to a YouTube URL, where XX is the number of minutes and YY is the number of seconds. For example:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBNDYggyesc#t=24m30s.


Google Video has a similar way to link within a video: add #XXmYYs to a URL. YouTube implemented another feature from Google Video: when you mention a time value in a comment, YouTube automatically creates a link that takes you to that sequence.

It seems that YouTube gradually adds all the features from Google Video: captions, MP4 downloads (not yet linked from the interface), theater view, but Google Video doesn't receive too much attention. I wonder if Google will disable the video uploading feature from Google Video and migrate all the existing videos to YouTube.

{ via TechCrunch }

Search from YouTube's Player

Search from YouTube's Player:

At the end of a video, YouTube's embedded player displays a list of related videos. If they're not very relevant or you have a specific video in mind that you want to see, use the new search box and type a query. To see more results, click on the right arrow.

Unfortunately, you can't go back to the list of results after selecting a video and the related videos displayed at the bottom aren't updated, but this is yet another step towards a more interactive player.


Here's a video where you can see the new feature in action (wait until the video ends or click on the up arrow button and select the only option that's available):


In other YouTube news, the homepage is more customizable: you can select how many videos are displayed in each module and change the layout to list view or grid. There are two new modules that show statistical information about your uploaded videos: Insight Map and Insight Chart.

{ Thanks, Phil. }

Gmail Emoticons :-)

Gmail Emoticons :-)

Here's a Gmail feature I wouldn't have noticed without a post from Gmail's blog: emoticons. If you use the rich-text mode when composing messages, you can now include small images that reflect your intentions.

"The black and white days of text-based emails have had their day. Following the evolutionary path blazed by colored labels, we present, in all their technicolor glory, emoticons in your mail," says Darren Lewis from Google.


Google also added a new set of emoticons in Gmail Chat and it's strange to see that you can add much more emoticons in an email than in an IM conversation.

Gmail Mobile App 2.0

Gmail Mobile App 2.0:

Google released version 2.0 of Gmail's mobile application for Java-enabled phones. The new version has been initially released for Blackberry phones, but you can now use it on any phone that supports Java.

What's great about Gmail Mobile 2.0? It works offline: you can preload messages from the inbox and from all your labels to read them when you are offline. You can also compose messages when you don't have an Internet connection and Gmail sends them when you are online.

The application notifies you when there is new mail in the inbox, so you don't have to constantly click on Refresh. It's now possible to save the credentials for more than one Gmail account and switch between the accounts directly from the menu. What's more, Gmail Mobile 2.0 supports Google Apps accounts, which previously required a separate application.

Some cool things to try:
* scroll using the left or the right key of your phone
* the updated interface for contacts which has more powerful search

To install the new version, go to m.google.com/mail from your mobile phone's browser. From what I noticed, this version is less responsive than Gmail Mobile 1.5 and it uses more data.

G1 Promoted on Google's Homepage

G1 Promoted on Google's Homepage:

Is this the first time when Google promotes on the homepage a gadget? Some users from the US spotted an interesting line below Google's search box: "New! G1 is available now. Learn about the phone."


The landing page links to t-mobileg1.com and features Google's homepage on Android's WebKit-based browser and a Street View image from New York.


G1 is more than just the first Android-powered phone, it's a true Google phone. It comes preloaded with everything that's necessary to enjoy Google's services on a mobile phone: it's easy to search on the web using Google, YouTube and Google Maps are ubiquitous, your contacts, emails and calendar events are synchronized to a Google account.

Ten years after making the web searchable, Google brings the web into your pocket. A web that's more personal and more relevant to your life.

Gmail Autoresponder

Gmail Autoresponder

If you've ever sent an email to Google's support addresses, most likely you received an automatic reply vaguely related to your message. Using a new feature from Gmail Labs, you can create your own canned messages and use them as automatic replies.

"If you're sick of typing out the same reply every time someone emails you with a common question, now you can compose your reply once and save the message text with the "Canned responses" button. Later, you can open that same message and send it again and again," explains Chad Perry.

After enabling "Canned Responses" in the settings page for Gmail Labs, you'll see a new drop-down when composing a message. The "canned responses" option can be used to save a new message or to load an existing autoreply. It's interesting that Gmail saves the messages as hidden drafts: you can find them if you search for label:drafts, but they're not visible in the Drafts view.



The best thing about the new feature is that Gmail added a new action for filters: "send canned response". If you receive many messages about the same issue and you have a standard response, create a filter that includes some relevant keywords and select an existing canned response. This should come in handy if iGoogle users continue to ask how to go back to the previous version of Google's personalized homepage.


{ Thanks, {roody}. }

Google Earth for iPhone

Google Earth for iPhone

The first desktop application ported by Google to a mobile phone is Google Earth. iPhone and iPod Touch users can download for free from the App Store the best way to explore satellite imagery in 3D.

"Not only is having Google Earth on your iPhone convenient, but the touch interface is a very natural way to interact with the Earth. Just swipe your finger across the screen and you fly to the other side of the globe; tilt your phone and your view tilts as well. You can pinch to zoom in or out, or just double tap with one finger to zoom in and two fingers to zoom out," says Google LatLong Blog.


CNet writes that iPhone's multitouch makes the experience much more intuitive than in the desktop version of Google Earth. Like Google Maps for Mobile, the application can detect your location using information from GPS, Wi-Fi networks, and mobile phone towers. You can explore interesting places and discover more about them using the integrated layers: Wikipedia and Panoramio photos.




The cool applications that were only available from your computer start to be ported to mobile phones. In the future, the most exciting applications will be first launched for mobile phones.

Gmail Modes

Gmail Modes:

If you can't access Gmail, try some of these URLs:

Safe mode - http://mail.google.com/mail/?labs=0. It disables the experimental features from Gmail Labs, just in case some of them are buggy. You can remove some of the features from Gmail's settings page.

Secure mode - https://mail.google.com/. It encrypts the traffic between your computer and Gmail's servers. Use it from public computers, Wi-Fi networks or to bypass some proxies and web accelerators. There's a Gmail setting that redirects the standard version to the secure mode ("Always use https").

Older version - http://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=1. This version has been replaced in October 2007 by a rearchitectured Gmail, but the old version is a little bit faster.

Basic mode - http://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=html. It's the version that doesn't use JavaScript, so it loads faster and it works well with older browsers. Unfortunately, many Gmail features are missing (contacts autocomplete, chat, spell checker, rich formatting) and each click loads a new page. If you like this version, click on "Set basic HTML as default view" at the top of the page.

Mobile mode - http://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=mobile or http://m.gmail.com. This is a simplified Gmail interface for mobile phones that has even less feature than the basic mode. Use it if no other Gmail mode works for you.

iPhone mode - http://mail.google.com/mail/x/gdlakb-/gp/. A more user-friendly mobile version for iPhone and other mobile phones that use WebKit-based browsers.

iGoogle gadget - http://www.google.com/ig/gmailmax. This is the canvas view for the updated Gmail gadget which can be found in the new iGoogle. Some people found that this interface bypasses most corporate filters that prevent them from accessing Gmail at work.

"No browser checking" mode - http://mail.google.com/mail?nocheckbrowser. If you use a cutting-edge new browser and Gmail serves you the basic HTML mode, try this URL to bypass browser detection.

YouTube Toolbar for Playlists

YouTube Toolbar for Playlists:
YouTube shows a small toolbar at the bottom of the page that lets you manage the videos from a playlist, more like the controls from a media player. The toolbar has options for pausing and muting the active video, buttons for playing the next video from the playlist and for automatically playing videos. All of these options were already available in the sidebar, but the new toolbar makes them more visible and it follows you in any YouTube page.

The excellent music sites The Hype Machine and thesixtyone have similar toolbars, but I'm not sure if the concept works well for videos. I can only see the new feature in Firefox, so I assume this is yet another experimental feature.

Google Suggest, Enabled by Default:

Google Suggest, Enabled by Default:
As anticipated, Google Suggest will be finally available at google.com. "Today we're excited because Google Suggest will be graduating from Labs and available by default on the Google.com homepage. Over the next week, we'll be rolling this out so that more and more of you will start seeing a list of query suggestions when you start typing into the search box," says Jennifer Liu from Google.

Launched in 2004 as part of the Labs, Google Suggest is an innovative feature that auto-completes a query using a dynamic list of popular queries. "As you type into the search box, Google Suggest guesses what you're typing and offers suggestions in real time. This is similar to Google's Did you mean? feature that offers alternative spellings for your query after you search, except that it works in real time. For example, if you type bass, Google Suggest might offer a list of refinements that include bass fishing or bass guitar. Similarly, if you type in only part of a word, like prog, Google Suggest might offer you refinements like programming, programming languages, progesterone, or progressive. You can choose one by scrolling up or down the list with the arrow keys or mouse."

The feature has been added to many Google services: Google Toolbar, YouTube, Google homepages for high-end mobile phones and for languages that use a non-Latin alphabet. Firefox users already have Google Suggest in the search box.

Other search engines tested similar features. After Ask.com introduced search suggestions last year, Yahoo refined the idea and launched the best interface for suggestions: Search Assist. Unlike Google Suggest, Yahoo's interface is more subtle and it's not limited to prefix-based suggestions.

Google Blog suggests three reasons why auto-complete can be useful: it helps you formulate queries, the feature shows alternative spellings for your query and it saves keystrokes. Despite the advantages, some users will find it annoying because it disables the auto-complete feature from their browsers and it might interfere with their typing. To permanently disable Google Suggest, you'll find an option at the bottom of the preferences page.

YouTube Uploader Powered by Gears

YouTube Uploader Powered by Gears:
You can now upload videos larger than 100 MB to YouTube without installing a dedicated software. YouTube started to use Gears to upload videos.

The latest version of Gears introduces some new features that make manipulating large files so much easier.

Gears now makes uploading large and multiple files on the web much easier,
giving you the primitives to roll a resumable uploader, which means hopefully we
can see custom desktop uploaders go away soon. (...) Another cool new feature is
the Blob API. Unlike strings, blobs let you reference arbitrary binary data — a
first for JavaScript! Therefore, blobs can more naturally represent things like
files and images, and they can be passed around efficiently. (...) We have also
extended the Desktop API with a new method, openFiles(), which allows users to
select multiple files of a particular content type, and then returns them as
blobs for easy uploading or worker processing.

The multi-video uploader is useful if you want to upload more than one video from a single video and if some of your videos have more than 100 MB. "Each video can be up to 10 minutes in length and up to 1GB in size. These videos will be available in My Videos after they have finished processing. It may take 30 minutes or more for extremely large files to appear on your My Videos page."
{ Thanks, Hebbet. }

Google Translate OneBox

Google Translate OneBox:
Google has a new OneBox for quick translations. You can just search for "translate", followed by a word or an expression and the optional "into English". For example, you can search for [translate désormais] and Google shows the entry from an automatically-generated bilingual dictionary.

Unfortunately, you can't use the search box as a shortcut for Google Translate because full texts aren't yet translated. The bilingual dictionary is only available for the following language pairs: English <-> French/Italian/Spanish/Portuguese/German/Russian/Chinese/Korean/Hindi. It's interesting that Google shows results from Google Image Search next to the translations.

{ Merci, TomHTML. }

Google Calendar Agenda in Gmail

Google Calendar Agenda in Gmail:
GmailAgenda is a Greasemonkey script that shows your Google Calendar agenda as a sidebar in Gmail. The script uses Google Calendar's embedded view and it includes an option to add events to the main calendar. The sidebar can't be minimized, so it remains visible even when you don't need it.

An alternative way to keep an eye on the Google Calendar agenda is to add the iGoogle gadget in the sidebar, as explained in this post. The advantages are that you don't need the Greasemonkey extension, the sidebar is visible even when you don't visit Gmail and it can be closed.

Google Launches AdSense for Feeds

Google Launches AdSense for Feeds:
I noticed a new option in my AdSense account: AdSense for feeds, a program that displays contextual and placement-targeted ads in FeedBurner feeds. FeedBurner announced in May that AdSense for Feeds will be available to a small number of publishers and now it seems that everyone can use it.

FeedBurner has recently closed FAN, its advertising network. "No new applications for FAN publishers are being accepted and we expect the broad variety of options provided through AdSense (including the new AdSense for Feeds product, powered with FeedBurner feeds) will give publishers valuable new revenue-earning potential," says a FeedBurner/Google employee.

The new AdSense for Feeds option lets you create a new ad unit that has a format automatically selected from 468x60 and 300x250. "Generally, the 300x250 size will display when there's more content and when your feed is being viewed in a device with a larger display," explains Google. You can choose if you want image ads, the ad frequency, the position (top or bottom of the post), the colors and a channel that tracks the ad performance.

For the moment, there's no connection between your AdSense account and the FeedBurner account, so Google automatically adds the FeedBurner service to your AdSense account. Unfortunately, your feeds are still connected to the old FeedBurner account and you need to migrate them first. The migration process is manual: just send an email at adsense-support-aff@google.com and mention your FeedBurner username and the AdSense account email address.

From AdSense, you can easily burn a new feed by entering the address of your blog and selecting some tracking options. The feeds can be managed at the new FeedBurner site, but there's no visible change other than the integration with Google Accounts and the new URLs for feeds: http://feedproxy.google.com/NAME.

Here's an ad from a feed of a FeedBurner/Google employee:

I doubt that these ads are an effective way to monetize feeds, since people use feed readers to get timely updates from a lot of sites and spend less time for each item. Besides, feed readers are mostly used by tech-savvy readers that are less likely to click on ads.

At some point, I may experiment with some infrequent ads in Google Operating System's feed and I'll post my findings.

Photo Albums in Google Docs

Photo Albums in Google Docs:
Google Docs will expand beyond documents. After adding support for storing PDFs, Google Docs will provide ways to create photo albums. It's not very clear if you'll be able to access the photos stored in Picasa Web Albums or create different photo albums, but GDrive is certainly here and its name is Google Docs.

The first screenshot has been created using information from Google's code, which already includes an icon of the photo section. The other screenshots show an empty list of photo albums and a new image search feature.



I suspect Google Docs will become the place where you can upload, share and manage any kinds of files. It's also likely that all the files that are uploaded to other Google services will be accessible in Google Docs in much the same way as the photos uploaded to Blogger blogs can be found in Picasa Web Albums.

Update: Radu noticed that if you go to docs.google.com/#photos and type the first letters from the titles of your Picasa Web Albums, Google shows the full titles as suggestions. It seems that it only works for public albums.

Easier Way to Create Forms in Google Docs

Easier Way to Create Forms in Google Docs:
You can now create forms directly from the New menu of Google Docs homepage.

After selecting the Form option, Google opens a wizard that lets you add questions, email or embed the form.

The form saves all the changes automatically and you can now reorder the questions using drag-and-drop.

What I don't like is that Google doesn't link to the spreadsheet which includes the form, so you have to find the spreadsheet by going back to the documents list. The relation between forms and spreadsheet is confusing and it would be nice to detach the forms from spreadsheets and use the forms as one of the many possible data sources, along with feeds, CSV files published on the web, financial data etc.

Export Files from Google Page Creator

Export Files from Google Page Creator:
You probably heard that Google intends to close Google Page Creator and migrate the users to Google Sites, a service that seems to be targeted to a different audience and that lacks many features available in Page Creator. Google Sites will add some of the missing features by the time Google closes Page Creator, but those who want to move to a different service or maybe to buy a domain can already export the files.


Requirement #1. There are three kinds of files that are trapped inside Page Creator: uploaded files and web pages created using the editor which can be public or unpublished. The following exporting tool can only work for uploaded files and the public web pages. If you have pages that are unpublished and you want to export them, click on "Publish all changes" in the sidebar. You can undo this action later.

Requirement #2. Another prerequisite for the exporting tool is a software that downloads all the files linked from a page. For Internet Explorer, try the excellent download manager FlashGet (I use the classic version). For Firefox, there's an extension called DownThemAll that has some of the features from FlashGet. In both cases, you'll have to restart the browser before continuing. As usually, Opera users don't need third-party software for advanced features: there's a sidebar panel that shows all the links from a page.

Requirement #3. If you read this in a feed reader, visit the site to view the exporting form.


How to export the files.
All sites from Google Page Creator have a sitemap that lists all the public files from a site: it's available at SITENAME.googlepages.com/sitemap.xml. Just go to your site's homepage and add /sitemap.xml in the address bar. To copy the content of the XML file in the box below, you could right-click, select "view source" and copy the code (for Firefox, Opera) or open the file http://SITENAME.googlepages.com/sitemap.xml in Notepad.

After clicking on "Obtain URLs", you should see a pop-up window that lists all the files from your Page Creator site. Right-click inside the page and select "Download all by Flashget" or "DownThemAll!", depending on your browser. Make sure to check "All files" in DownThemAll and to choose a folder where the files will be copied. In Opera, press F4, click on the "Links" panel, select all the links using Ctrl-A and click on "Save to Download Folder".


Unfortunately, there's still some manual editing you need to do for the pages created using the editor: replace <img src="name.gif/name-full.jpg" style="border: 0pt none ;">

and similar code with <img src="name.gif" style="border: 0pt none ;">.

Two free alternatives to Page Creator are Weebly and Synthasite. Wall Street Journal has an article that explains how to buy a domain and host a site without paying too much.


{ Inspired by Peter Dawson. }

Automate File Upload in Google Docs

Automate File Upload in Google Docs:
Google Docs has an option to upload files from web addresses, but it's not very convenient if you want to load many documents or you want to add a link for uploading a document. Here's the direct link that can be used to open a document from the web in Google Docs:

http://docs.google.com/?action=updoc&formsubmitted=true&uploadURL=DOCUMENTURL

This works for documents (.doc/.txt/.html/.rtf/.odt), spreadsheets (.xls/.csv/.ods), presentations (.ppt) and PDF files.

In Windows, you can easily create a batch file that automates the upload of multiple files to Google Docs, assuming that the browser is open and you are already logged in to a Google Account. For example, the following text can be copied in Notepad and saved as a .bat file. After executing the .bat, the two PDF files will upload to Google Docs in separate Firefox tabs.

start /d "%PROGRAMFILES%\Mozilla Firefox" firefox http://docs.google.com/?action=updoc&formsubmitted=true&uploadURL=http://www.fireworksafety.com/pdfs/FireworkSafetyTest.pdf

start /d "%PROGRAMFILES%\Mozilla Firefox" firefox http://docs.google.com/?action=updoc&formsubmitted=true&uploadURL=www.fs.fed.us/fire/safety/wct/2002/brochure_2002.pdf

A similar option is available in Google Toolbar for Firefox, which lets you open documents from the web in Google Docs.

Google Calendar Agenda in Gmail

Google Calendar Agenda in Gmail:
GmailAgenda is a Greasemonkey script that shows your Google Calendar agenda as a sidebar in Gmail. The script uses Google Calendar's embedded view and it includes an option to add events to the main calendar. The sidebar can't be minimized, so it remains visible even when you don't need it.

An alternative way to keep an eye on the Google Calendar agenda is to add the iGoogle gadget in the sidebar, as explained in this post. The advantages are that you don't need the Greasemonkey extension, the sidebar is visible even when you don't visit Gmail and it can be closed.

Cuil, a New Search Engine

Cuil, a New Search Engine:
Cuil, the start-up founded by Tom Costello and two former Google employees: Anna Patterson and Russell Power, unveiled a search engine that claims to have more than 120 billion pages in the index. According to Cuil, that's "three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft."

At Google, Anna Patterson designed TeraGoogle, a system that is able to index a large number of documents, while Russell Power worked on web ranking and automatic spam detection.

"Cuil's goal is to solve the two great problems of search: how to index the whole Internet - not just part of it - and how to analyze and sort out its pages so you get relevant results." Cuil thinks that today's search engines can't index all the information that is available on the web (more than one trillion pages, according to Google). Even Google admits that it's selective: "many [web pages] are similar to each other, or represent auto-generated content that isn't very useful to searchers".

Regarding ranking, Cuil combines metrics that measure popularity with information about the context of each web page. "Cuil prefers to find all the pages with your keyword or phrase and then analyze the rest of the content on those pages. During this analysis we discover that your keywords have different meanings in different contexts. Once we've established the context of the pages, we're in a much better position to help you in your search."

The most striking new idea is the way search results are formatted. Instead of the ten blue links displayed linearly, Cuil makes better use of the space by using columns. The search engine also shows thumbnails next to some of the results, but they don't always represent images included in the adjacent web page. Another interesting idea is the explorative category section that shows related Wikipedia categories and topics. Cuil has an excellent auto-complete feature and it displays a list of related searches using an design pattern that suggests exploration.

It's probably not fair to compare Cuil with Google, but when Google was launched, users could see substantially better results. Cuil returns results that are either similar to Google's results or substantially worse. In some cases, the site doesn't return any result for your queries, probably because of the huge traffic from the launch day.

Cuil has problems with relevancy, spam, robots.txt (the site indexes albums from Picasa Web) and the number of search results for almost every query is smaller than the number of Google results. This is especially obvious for queries that return a small number of results:

[louis monier altavista research labs]:
- Google: 609 results
- Cuil: 8 results

[teragoogle]
- Google: 634 results
- Cuil: 42 results

All in all, Cuil is the best search engine launched this year, but it doesn't offer convincing reasons to switch from Google. If Cuil focuses on developing technologies that allow faster indexing of web pages, it's probably the perfect match for existing search engines with less frequently updated indexes like Live Search or Ask.com.

Google Calendar Adds CalDAV Support

Google Calendar Adds CalDAV Support:
After many months of testing, Google Calendar finally adds CalDAV support. "CalDAV is an open protocol that allows calendar access via WebDAV. CalDAV models calendar events as HTTP resources in iCalendar format, and models calendars containing events as WebDAV collections. This allows you to publish and subscribe to calendars, share them collaboratively, sync between multiple users and sync between multiple devices."

For now, the only application supported by Google Calendar is Apple's iCal. "With CalDAV support in Google Calendar, you'll be able to view and edit your Google Calendar events directly in iCal. Any changes you make in iCal will automatically appear in Google Calendar the next time you sign in (and vice versa). If you use iCal while offline, changes you make will be saved and updated in Google Calendar when you get back online."

Rick Vugteveen tested the new feature and found that the 2 way synchronization works well, but there are some problems. "The largest issue that I had is that I needed to create a new CalDav server account for every calendar in Google Calendar. Not only did this make further setup cumbersome, it degraded the iCal UI as a 1-1 relationship between each folder (server) and calendar is created. Normal re-ordering and organization of calendars does not work with this setup so be careful with the order you enter your calendars. This multiple server setup also removed the ability to move events between different calendars within iCal."

This page provides instructions for adding your calendars in iCal and you should also read the known issues.

Google Calendar also provides basic applications for synchronizing data with Blackberry devices and Outlook, but there are many third-party applications that use Google's API to add more advanced functionality: Spanning Sync (iCal - $25/year), BusySync (iCal - $25), Calgoo (iCal/Outlook - free), SyncMyCal (Outlook - $25), gSyncit (Outlook - $10), GCALDaemon (cross-platform/open source), Plaxo (cross-platform/free), GCalSync (Java mobile app - open source), GooSync (SyncML service/mobile app - £20/year), GMobileSync (Windows Mobile - open source), OggSync (Windows Mobile/Outlook - $30/year).

iGoogle Redirects

iGoogle Redirects:
Google would be more than happy if all its users switched from the clean Google homepage to iGoogle. The personalized homepage works best if you have a Google account, it's a way to promote other Google services and to find information about your interests that could be used to personalize search results. At the earnings call from last week, Sergey Brin said that the artist themes launched in April made "hundreds of thousands of people to sign up for iGoogle".

Besides adding new themes to promote the service, Google uses some other tricks to increase iGoogle's usage. If you click on the iGoogle link from the homepage, Google sets a cookie preference so that every time you go to Google.com, you are redirected to iGoogle.

When you add a gadget from a web page to iGoogle, there's a vague setting enabled by default: "See this gadget when you visit Google.com", which also sets a cookie preference that redirects you to iGoogle.

The cookie preference is reverted when you click on "Classic Home" in iGoogle, but the effect of that extra click is not obvious.

"iGoogle is a more personal way to use Google.com. Customize your page anyway you like, by adding your favorite themes and gadgets from across the web." That's how Google describes the personalized homepage of today, the social network of tomorrow.

For those who use both the classic homepage and iGoogle, but would rather see the classic homepage when they go to Google.com, the only solution is to type in the address bar http://www.google.com/ig or http://www.igoogle.com/ instead of clicking the iGoogle link.

Google redirects people that visit Google.com to different pages, based on their locations or devices, but it would be nice to explicitly define the preferences. Windows doesn't change the default browser to Internet Explorer just because you accidentally clicked on the IE icon.

Force Gmail to Always Use Secure Connection

Force Gmail to Always Use Secure Connection:
Gmail rolls out a new option that lets you set the https version as default. If you go to the Settings and select "always use https", Gmail will automatically redirect to the secure version. Until now, you had to manually type https://mail.google.com/ in the address bar, bookmark the address or use a Greasemonkey script.

"If you sign in to Gmail via a non-secure Internet connection, like a public wireless or non-encrypted network, your Google account may be more vulnerable to hijacking. Non-secure networks make it easier for someone to impersonate you and gain full access to your Google account, including any sensitive data it may contain like bank statements or online log-in credentials. We recommend selecting the 'Always use https' option in Gmail any time your network may be non-secure," explains Google.

Read, for example, David Pogue's post about Wi-Fi eavesdropping. "All Jon needed [to read my mail] was a packet sniffing program; such software is free and widely available. (He used a Mac program called Eavesdrop.) It sniffs the airwaves and displays whatever data it finds being transmitted in the public hot spot."

Https is typically used for sites that deal with sensitive data, so you'll see it when you authenticate to sites like Google or Facebook and when you use your mobile banking account, PayPal, Google AdWords and a handful of similar sites. The benefit is that the connection between your browser and the remote servers is encrypted and nobody could capture the sensitive data.

"We use https to protect your password every time you log into Gmail, but we don't use https once you're in your mail unless you ask for it (by visiting https://mail.google.com rather than http://mail.google.com). Why not? Because the downside is that https can make your mail slower. Your computer has to do extra work to decrypt all that data, and encrypted data doesn't travel across the internet as efficiently as unencrypted data," says the Gmail blog.

In addition to the worse performance, Google also mentions that the mobile application could show errors if you don't enable 'Always use secure network connections (slower performance)' in the app's settings section. If you use Firefox, don't forget to disable the Greasemonkey scripts that redirect Gmail to the secure version and to deactivate the similar option from Firefox extensions like Better Gmail and CustomizeGoogle.

The good news is that you don't need a similar setting for other Google applications if you use the navigation bar: Google automatically links to the secure versions of Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Reader and Google Sites. If you don't see the new option in Gmail's settings, you have to wait until Gmail enables it in your account.

Share Your Expertise in Google's Knol

Share Your Expertise in Google's Knol:
Knol is a new Google service created for sharing knowledge. The service has been announced in December 2007 and it's now publicly available.

Knol has much more in common with Squidoo and HubPages than with Wikipedia. The service is centered around authors: each Knol article displays the name of its author and links to a small biography. Google even lets you verify your identity, but this only works if you live on the US.

Knol doesn't intend to become an encyclopedia, so there's no single article about a topic. An author can write about almost any topic, but it's recommended to write authoritative content.

There are three levels of collaboration in Knol:

* open collaboration (any Knol user can edit the article)
* moderate collaboration (any Knol user can suggest changes to the article - enabled by default)
* closed collaboration (only the co-authors can edit the article)

Google uses a rich-text editor borrowed from Page Creator, so it's much easier to edit knols than Wikipedia articles. Users can rate the articles, add comments and write reviews, much like for scholarly works.

By default, articles are licensed as Creative Commons Attribution, but you can change the license in the settings. It's nice to see that Google encourages the use of flexible licenses that allow content reuse.

Like in Blogger, Google provides an option to monetize your articles using Google AdSense, but the ads are displayed in a fixed position. Knol doesn't let you customize the layout of the page and you can't add JavaScript code, objects or iframes.

Search Engine Land says that Knol is a service created by Google's search quality team. "I do believe [Knol] does solve a search problem. The problem we have, unlocking what people know and bringing it online. This is another tool to help release some of this knowledge," explains Cedric Dupont, the product manager for Knol.

While Google has many other services that allow people to share their knowledge (Blogger, Google Docs, Google Sites), Knol encourages experts to make the search results better by sharing what they know. After all, Knol articles are indexed by search engines and Google promises to not give them preferential treatment.

"Your name is behind your knol, and it should reflect your unique point of view. Be succinct, but comprehensive on your topic of choice. Provide references, and display your credentials. Readers will want to know who you are and gain context on the knols you are writing." - these are some of the guidelines for writing good Knol articles.

I think that Google managed to develop a very solid service with a lot of interesting features that encourage originality (a list of web pages with similar content), a sense of ownership (your name is included even in the URL) and information accuracy (peer reviews and suggested edits).

Update. Some example of knols: How to Backpack, Buttermilk Pancakes, Type 1 Diabetes, A Distributed Document Repository.