They are among us

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Biz Stone, Blogger Team</span><br /><br />There's no cause for alarm, but we wish to note that millions of people walking around *right now* are carrying little blogging devices. That's what we on the Blogger team call them, anyway. Others might refer to them as "mobile phones." It's all semantics.<br /><br />The point is, <a href="http://go.blogger.com/">we've launched Blogger Mobile</a>. It's nothing fancy, really. All you need to do to use it is send an email or MMS from your phone to go@blogger.com - and that's it. We automatically create your blog, and whatever text or photos (or both) you send in the message becomes your post. Continue posting by sending more messages to go@blogger.com and congratulations: you are a blogger.<br /><br />There's also this part we call "claiming your blog." That means you visit <a href="http://go.blogger.com/">go.blogger.com</a> and enter the token we send to your phone. When you sign in with this token, you get full Blogger access to all of your various settings, plus the ability to switch your posts to an existing blog if you already have one.<br /><br />You may now use a mobile device to create and update your blog while you're <a href="http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=1131">on-the-go</a>. See? Little blogging appliances — they are among us.

They are among us

Posted by Biz Stone, Blogger Team There's no cause for alarm, but we wish to note that millions of people walking around *right now* are...

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Switch!

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Eric Case, Blogger team</span><br /><br />To make the Google Blog a bit easier to manage behind the scenes, we're now publishing it to its new home at Blogspot: <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/">http://googleblog.blogspot.com/</a><br /><br /><a href="http://www.atomenabled.org/everyone/atomenabled/index.php?c=5">Newsreader</a> users shouldn't have to re-subscribe; the Atom feed is being redirected to its <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/atom.xml">new URL</a>. We've also updated the design a bit, and added a <a href="http://www.google.com/search?q=define:blogroll">blogroll</a>. <a href="mailto:gblog@google.com">Let us know</a> what you think.

Switch!

Posted by Eric Case, Blogger team To make the Google Blog a bit easier to manage behind the scenes, we're now publishing it to its new h...

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Time waits for no one

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Marius Eriksen, Software Engineer</span><br /><br />My dentist told me I needed to floss more.<br /><br />That's a big demand for a Googler's busy lifestyle. Where do you find the time to floss - less foosball, shorter lunches, skip out on ultimate frisbee? Hardly!<br /><br />This calls out loud and clear for a way to optimize time. One mundane time-waster we all contend with, for example, is waiting for web pages to load. The tantalizing promise of a web page is only seconds away. But even on broadband, the wait's too short to do something else - and just long enough to be irritating. Let's face it, those seconds add up.<br /><br />As you may have noticed, we're slightly obsessed with speed around here. When you search on Google.com, your results are returned to you within fractions of a second. And now comes <a href="http://webaccelerator.google.com/">Google Web Accelerator</a>. After you download it, we hope you'll enjoy that same Google-fast experience across the rest of the web. After all, seconds add up to minutes.<br /><br /><img alt="web accelerator" src="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/media/web_accelerator.jpg" /><br /><br />Dentists everywhere will be smiling.

Time waits for no one

Posted by Marius Eriksen, Software Engineer My dentist told me I needed to floss more. That's a big demand for a Googler's busy life...

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TV treasure hunt

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Dan Zheng, Google Video team </span><br /><br />Before a recent trip to Hong Kong and Taipei, I'd heard that a major Taipei attraction is the food at night markets. So I did a search on <a href="http://video.google.com/">Google Video</a> for <a href="http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=taipei+night+markets">Taipei night markets</a>, and was pleasantly surprised to see that there's a PBS show called "Burt Wolf: Travels & Traditions." And before my trip it aired an episode on Taiwan. The first segment of the show focused on, yes, night markets. Perfect. After watching it, I knew enough to jostle among the locals and eat incredible treats like dou hua, dumplings, squid stew and oyster omelets.<br /><br />We've been working to bring more video content online since we launched Google Video in late January, and have just added <a href="http://video.google.com/video_about.html">12 </a><a href="http://video.google.com/video_about.html">new channels</a> - among them CNN and the Discovery Channel - giving me way more TV info to unearth.

TV treasure hunt

Posted by Dan Zheng, Google Video team Before a recent trip to Hong Kong and Taipei, I'd heard that a major Taipei attraction is the foo...

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It's an honor

<span class="byline-author">Posted by <a href="http://www.lk.cs.ucla.edu/">Len Kleinrock</a><br />Professor, Computer Science Department, UCLA</span><br /><br />Dear Sergey and Larry, I want to extend my personal congratulations to you both on <a href="http://www.amacad.org/news/new2005.aspx">your election</a> to the esteemed American Academy of Arts and Sciences. It is a most well-deserved honor that recognizes your accomplishments and vision both technological and societal. I am proud to have you join us in the <a href="http://www.amacad.org/">AAAS</a>, which has among its members the most accomplished individuals since the Academy was formed in 1780 by some of our nation's founding fathers. Welcome, and congratulations again.

It's an honor

Posted by Len Kleinrock Professor, Computer Science Department, UCLA Dear Sergey and Larry, I want to extend my personal congratulations to ...

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Finally feeling like a local

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Tom Stocky, Product Marketing Manager </span><br /><br />I just moved to the Bay Area a few months ago, so when friends come from out of town, they're pretty underwhelmed with my abilities as a tour guide.<br /><br />But not last weekend. My visitors wanted to have brunch somewhere with "a great view." So I plugged [<a href="http://local.google.com/local?sc=1&hl=en&amp;amp;q=brunch+%22great+view%22&near=san+francisco%2C+ca">brunch "great view"</a>] into <a href="http://local.google.com/">Google Local</a>, and was pleasantly surprised with the results. Not only was brunch delicious, but we had that "great view" my friends were looking for. Best of all, now they actually think I know my way around the city. (At least until they see this.)<br /><br />What's cool about Google Local is that you can go beyond standard categories like restaurant or hotel to search more specifically for things like [brick oven pizza] or [inexpensive hotel]. Very handy, especially if you're a budding tour guide like me.

Finally feeling like a local

Posted by Tom Stocky, Product Marketing Manager I just moved to the Bay Area a few months ago, so when friends come from out of town, they...

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I, Googlebot

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Ben Rathbone, Hardware Operations</span><br /><br />Data centers are not the most visually stimulating environments, and Google's are no exception. After all, they house computers, and the walls, ceilings, and floors are invariably stark white, or some minor monochromatic variation. So imagine this dream scenario for me: I'm a painter, apart from my day job as a data center technician, which keeps me busy swapping out parts and running cable. And we'd just set up a new Google data center in an undisclosed location.<br /><br /><i>Hardware Ops colleague 1</i>: "So, we basically own this space and can do anything we want, right?"<br /><br /><i>HO 2</i>: "Yup."<br /><br /><i>HO 1</i>: "We should get a big old Google banner in here, or paint one on the wall. Even cooler, we should paint a mural. Hey, Ben, you like to paint, why don't you do something?"<br /><br />Though I didn't take this challenge too seriously at first, I couldn't help playing around with some ideas. If you've been in a data center, you know there is a lot of wire, and racks with stacks of servers in them. I had some experience running websites and had seen evidence of the Googlebot hitting my own websites. Some kind of robot icon could be a neat starting point. Then I pondered the question: what does Google do? The grossly simplified answer that I came up with is Google connects the world with the Internet.<br /><br />It all snapped into place: the idea of a robot, connecting a world with the Internet, with wires, that connect to big cabinets of computers. It was not hard then to make the leap to representing the internet as a world, or globe, made up of pages. So I drew up a design and the manager said, "That's great. Go for it."<br /><br /><img alt="mural1" src="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/media/mural1.jpg" /><br /><br />Then, while everyone was away for the annual ski trip, I started by taking the basic drawing, drawing a grid over it, and translating the units of the grid to the wall.<br /><br /><img alt="mural2" src="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/media/mural2.jpg" /><br /><br />I did the initial drawing with charcoal pencil, which was easy to remove with an eraser. I used a regular carpenter's level, held up to the wall, to get all the lines straight. Once I had the drawing down, I used masking tape to stencil out certain shapes. This allowed me to rapidly paint into those shapes, and when I pulled off the tape, I got very clean and straight lines.<br /><br /><img alt="mural3" src="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/media/mural3.jpg" /><br /><br />The whole thing took 70 hours of work. It's 8' high x 22' long.<br /><br /><img alt="mural4" src="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/media/mural4.jpg" /><br /><br />Now our data center isn't so stark anymore - and I'm looking for another empty wall.

I, Googlebot

Posted by Ben Rathbone, Hardware Operations Data centers are not the most visually stimulating environments, and Google's are no excepti...

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