Through the eyes of a child....Happy Australia Day!

Posted by Ashley Gorringe, Doodle4Google Team

Happy Australia Day! Watch the homepage to see the winning doodle from the Doodle 4 Google initiative. The drawing that you will see on the on the homepage was drawn by Janelle San Juan from School of the Good Shepherd in Victoria. Here's a screengrab:


As you may recall, students were asked to redesign the Google logo in the theme of "My Australia". Here's a link to a fascinating report that we pulled together, which analyses the entries that we received. It's a great snapshot of what Australia means to Australian schoolchildren. Among the various findings:

- The number of submissions featuring animals was the highest of any single theme at 30 per cent of all doodles.

- Flags and maps featured in 25 per cent of entries.

- Flags and maps were particularly popular with students from the ACT and NT.

- AFL was far and away the most popular sport represented, appearing in 40 per cent of all doodles depicting sport.

- Uluru, the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Sydney Opera House were the three dominant landmarks used.

Enjoy Janelle's doodle and have a great long weekend!

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Googlers at linux.conf.au

Posted by Leslie Hawthorn, Program Manager - Open Source

I've spent the past week visiting Australia, enjoying the company of the stellar engineering team at Google here and making preparations for linux.conf.au 2008. Several Googlers will be giving talks and we'll be hosting two conference social functions. You can find full details on the Google Code Blog.

If you'll be in Melbourne for the conference next week, we certainly hope to see you there!

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Three new languages and a whole new direction for Blogger

We are excited to announce that Blogger is now available in three more languages: Arabic, Hebrew, and Persian!

Blogger in Hebrew, Arabic, and Persian

Supporting these languages is a huge milestone for us because — unlike the other 37 languages Blogger is translated into — Arabic, Persian, and Hebrew are written from right to left. As you can see from the above screenshot, we had to flip the whole interface around.

Besides localizing the Blogger interface into these three languages, we have right-to-left templates and have added new toolbar buttons for bi-directional text editing in the post editor.

The effort was worth it, however, and we’re tremendously happy to be a part of the growing Arabic-, Hebrew-, and Persian-language blogging communities.

Changing your language preferences and settings
To see the Blogger interface in one of these languages, just use the menu on your Dashboard. You can also choose your language on Blogger’s homepage and via the “Language” link in the footer of most pages.

From then on, all new blogs you create will default to using your new language choice.

If you need to change the language of an existing blog, just go to Settings > Formatting and select a new language there. Your blog language affects date formatting and other blog text, and, with today’s release of Blogger, your blog’s comments form as well.

Right-to-left templates
For Arabic, Persian, and Hebrew blogs, we will also rearrange your template to read more logically from right to left. So, a blog that once looked like this:


will now look like this:


Please note that your template won’t change if you’ve customized it with Edit HTML; we wouldn’t dare muck with your data! Also, if you’re still using a Classic template you will have to upgrade to Layouts in order to take advantage of bidirectional language templates. Learn how.

Bidirectional text editing
We’ve also added right-to-left and left-to-right buttons to Blogger’s post editor. They’ll appear if your Dashboard language or your blog’s language setting is for a right-to-left language.
Clicking on these buttons will set the paragraph you are currently editing to either right-to-left or left-to-right mode. This way you can write truly bidirectional posts.

Happy rtl-blogging!

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Welcome to 2008 from Google Australia

Posted by Julian Persaud, Head of Business Development

Happy new year!

As our regular blog readers will know, 2007 was an amazing year for all of us at Google Australia, with a huge raft of new products, features and local initiatives, from the launch of Google Maps Australia, to the Doodle4Google initiative, to the first ever Google election site, to the announcement of agreements with major Australian businesses such as Fairfax Digital and News Digital Media.

Already in 2008, we've been busy with a number of announcements. For those of you watching at home:

• We launched a new version of Sky in Google Earth which has many great new features. (You may recall that Sky uses images from the Anglo-Australian Observatory).

• As increasing numbers of small Australian businesses, from local cafes to cosmetic dentists, are using Google AdWords, we’re thrilled to reach an agreement under which ReachLocal will become an AdWords reseller in Australia. This will help Australian SMEs participate in the digital economy.

• Australian advertisers can now take advantage of the expanded Conversion Optimiser feature in AdWords. (Available to customers whose campaigns have enabled AdWords Conversion Tracking and accrued at least 200 conversions in the past 30 days).

Stay tuned to this blog - and all the other official Google blogs on the right hand side of this page - for lots more Google news in 2008.

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