Up and running

Posted by Noel Gordon, Software Engineer (and co-creator of Google Maps)

We were thinking the other day -- how is it that Australians can break the 132-year America's Cup drought, host the world's best Olympics, win Nobel Prizes and Oscars -- and yet not have an official Google Australia Blog?

Too right. So without further ado, consider this oversight fixed.

Welcome to the official Google Australia blog!

We’re proud that Google Australia was one of the first international Google offices and is now a hub for the entire Asia Pacific region. Google Maps started here, but lots of Australians are keen for more information about Google in Australia: Who works here? What do we do all day? Can we bring snakes to the office? Do we use Pigeon Rank or Kookaburra Rank?

We’ll be using this blog to make announcements and share all kinds of information -- details of Google products and technology in Australia, partnerships with Australian businesses, our involvement in the Australian community, and inside info about Google in Australia. We’re going to keep this page offbeat and informal and, hopefully, reader-friendly. A whole assortment of Aussie Googlers will be posting to the blog.

You may find this page to be a handy place to access specific Google Australian sites –- from Google Maps to Google News to jobs and much more. (See the right hand side of this page).

We hope you'll find this blog useful and entertaining. If you have any suggestions or feedback, please send them to AUblogfeedback@google.com.

Read More Here...

Blogs of Note: 1000 and counting!

Today's Notable Blog is our One Thousandth - hurrah! For the curious, this Buzz post delightfully tells of Blogs of Note's history; in Ev's words it's:

"a simple, ongoing, irregularly updated list of blogs [we]'ve happened to come across and found interesting for one reason or another. This reason need not be substantial. It could be [we] liked a particular post. It could be the blog seems to have good writing, or good design, or original content or concept, or [we] just like the name."

Since re-launching Blogs of Note over a year ago, we've done a pretty good job of publishing a new one each day; of course this is entirely thanks to you all for creating such great blogs - keep up the great work!

Lately they've ranged from cooking (breakfast, a single dad's kitchen) to travel/outdoors (Alaska, Dubai, Australia) to music to documentary to international awareness - and that's just in the past 10. For more, check out the 5+ year archive at blogsofnote.blogspot.com, and here's to the next thousand!

Read More Here...

Now you can blog in Hindi

Our friends Anupama and Nitin have posted on the Google blog about the Hindi transliteration feature that they added to Blogger:

Enabling the transliteration option allows you to type out Hindi words using phonetically equivalent English script, and see the words getting transformed into the corresponding Devanagari script. The plus is that you now don't need to learn complicated mappings from English alphabet combinations to Hindi letters. That means you really don't need to worry about WeiRD UpPerCasEing to get the right Hindi spellings.

To get started, enable Hindi transliteration here (or by going to Settings > Basic). We have a help article explaining how it works, and a thread on the Blogger Help Group to talk about it.

Read More Here...

Eight New Languages for Blogger

Here at Blogger we believe that everyone all over the world should be able to express themselves online. When our attempt to translate into “love” (a supposedly universal language) failed, we decided to take the more effective route of translating our interface into rather more literal languages.

Today we've unveiled Blogger translated into: Nederlands, Türkçe, Dansk, Norsk, Svenska, suomi, Русский, and ภาษาไทย. This is in addition to the eleven language choices we already offer, bringing the total to 19!

To change the language in which you use Blogger, go to our Choose a Language page. To change your blog’s language, go to Settings > Formatting.

Read More Here...