Google Web Fonts has a new user interface which is a lot more user friendly than before. If you haven’t seen, check it out.
Google Web Fonts is a project by Google to provide webmasters and designers with high quality, free, open source fonts for website usage. What I like the most about this is that, Google has made embedding the fonts very easy. Basically you just point to them for the CSS source, and apply the fonts to your website via standard CSS styles. You can see the example here.
Google Font Directory is a great place to integrate different fonts other than the usual Verdana and Arial to your blog. With the launch of Google Font Viewer, it got a lot easier to change the fonts of your blog to nicer looking fonts. With just a few selections and copy-pasting a CSS code, your blog’s fonts can be different.
I hope font designers will support this project and contribute more free fonts to the directory.
URL: http://code.google.com/webfonts/preview
Personally, it was very disturbing to use Google with Pac-Man sound constantly looping at the background. If you don’t know what I am talking about go to google.com now and see (before it expires).
I think Google’s Doodle Team went too far this time. Should have just sticked to graphic logos and not games.
Btw, Google TV is launched at this week’s I/O Conference. TechCrunch has the details here. What is Google TV for bloggers? Well, it’s another channel for you to reach out to wider audience with your ads, probably your ads can be seen on TV in the near future. And for vbloggers (video bloggers) it probably means more money since people can watch their videos on TV. More banner impressions == more money.
Update: now you can see this page at http://www.google.com/pacman/ anytime.
In case you didn’t know, Google Docs now allows you to upload any types of files to your account, not only word docs, pdfs and spreadsheets like before but virtually any type of files.
It can basically serve you as an alternative backup space for all your important data. Google also makes it very easy to share your files with your friends. And if 1GB space is not enough you can easily add up to 16TB (yes terabyte) additional disk space. For example additional 20GB disk space will only cost you $5 per year, more details on pricing here.
It seems Google really wants to know more about you :) The more info and files you give to them, the happier they will get. But frankly, what would we do without Google and it’s free services?
Website: https://docs.google.com
Implement breadcrumbs navigation in your website and Google will reflect it on its Search Results, instead of the URL path that it normally shows (see below).
And the links in the breadcrumbs actually point to different sections of the website, just like the navigation on actual website. That’s cool.
I didn’t know they did that. Looks very user friendly to me. So, if you can, try implementing breadcrumbs in your online projects.
Breadcrumbs and Usability: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/breadcrumbs.html
Bit.ly, the popular URL shortening service has an extension for Chrome and Firefox browsers, which allows you to see number of clicks on your bit.ly links in a tooltip (see below screenshot from my twitter).
Clicking on “More information” link will take you to the details page for that particular link on bit.ly. I have been using it for a week now and find it very useful.
I have some (25) Google Wave invites. If you need one, just drop a comment on this post and I will send you. It will be sent to the first 25 commenters.
screenshot:
Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google has this to say about the Privacy issue on his interview with CNBC:
If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines — including Google — do retain this information for some time and it’s important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities. watch the video
This statement from Schmidt has caused quite an uproar on the net, Mozilla’s Director of Community Development Asa Dotzler even pointed out that Bing has a better privacy policy than Google and encouraged people to change the default search engine in Firefox to Bing.
This kind of comment from Schmidt definitely won’t go well with their to-be-launched Operating System Google Chrome.
Want to read Google News like a newspaper? Go to newly launched Google News Timeline by Google.
Google News Timeline is a web application that organizes search results chronologically. It allows users to view news and other data sources on a browsable, graphical timeline. Available data sources include recent and historical news, scanned newspapers and magazines, blog posts, sports scores, and information about various types of media, like music albums and movies.
URL: http://newstimeline.googlelabs.com/
Google Analytics is a great service and it’s used by many. One of the features that I like about Google Analytics is – sharing your reports with others.
Sometimes advertisers or potential partners would ask for your blog’s/website’s traffic statistics. And in this time of fraud and forgery, screenshots won’t simply do it (perhaps this might do). They want to see the real, live statistics. So, in this kind of situations G.Analytics’ “share reports” feature is a great solution.
Sharing your reports is easy, can be done in 3 simple steps.
1. Login to your G.Analytics account and go to your overview page of your reports. At the end of the page you will see a link “User Manager”, click it.
Google FriendConnect added a toolbar widget. Now you can display it on top of your blog or at the bottom of it for your members to join and communicate with each other.
Unlike Yahoo’s MyBlogLog, Google FriendConnect is a bit vague in its positioning. I am still not very clear what its real objective is? How about you?
Do you use it on your blog? If yes, how it has benefited your blog? Share with us your experiences and success stories so to speak.
Here is its description on Wikipedia:
Google Friend Connect is an online service by Google that allows users on the internet to connect with their friends on different websites.
Google Friend Connect is an Open Social application offered by Google that started in May 2008. Google Friend Connect main focus is to simplify the connection between social and non-social websites and standardize the handling and presentation of social applications and content. It uses a blend of open standards, such as OpenID for signin, oAuth to control data, and Open Social for applications.
Google Friend Connect is free but requires approval of the website using it. It requires no knowledge of web programming and enables any website to offer social applications and content from Facebook, Hi5, Orkut, Plaxo, MySpace, Google Talk and other social networks.
At the time the interface is in English and there’s no option to choose other languages. Google didn’t announce any plans to translate it and most words can’t be translated by the site that implements it.
Examples of use are:
- E-commerce site: Allow users to check whether friends purchased or review the product you are interested in on the product web page.
- News sites: Allow users insert comments and opinions with their real profile.
- Organization Sites: Increase marketing and communication within members of the organization.
- Blogs and Personal Websites: Increase communication within author friends.
Source: Wikipedia
Now after reading that, it makes some sense. Join my FriendConnect by clicking at the toolbar below, let’s get connected!
Website: http://www.google.com/friendconnect/
Google Alerts is great in keeping track of keywords. But it can also be used to monitor your websites if anyone has hacked them (hopefully it won’t be the case), if it does happen Google would send you a notification. Google team blogged about it on their blog saying:
… Try a site: search on your site to see if anything unfamiliar shows up in Google’s results for your site. You can add words to the query that are unlikely to appear in your content, such as commercial terms or adult language. If the query [site:example.com viagra] isn’t supposed to return any pages on your site and it does, that could be a problem. You can even automate these searches with Google Alerts.
Source: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/01/open-redir…
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