Google Australia opens the doors to our new office

It was a big day for us here at Google Australia - the Governor-General, Ms Quentin Bryce AC, officially opened our new Google Australia headquarters at a ceremony in Sydney. Around 350 Aussie Googlers will be based in the 6-Star Green Star-designed Workplace6 building in Pyrmont.



Our new office contains a number of Australian-themed areas, including offices with picnic benches, fish tanks, Australian flora, the beach-themed "Cafe Esky" and a games room named "The Rissole". It's in an architectural style that can best be described as "Googley".





The new headquarters represent a milestone in the history of Google in Australia, which started with a single employee selling Google AdWords from her lounge! So we marked the occasion by announcing some new services in conjunction with local organisations ... we're working with Fairfax Media to digitise archival copies of newspapers, including the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, dating back to the late 1800s and early 1900s. This means that Australians can now get free access to Australia's rich journalistic heritage through Google News and Google Search.

We also announced that public transit information for Sydney's light rail and monorail network (Metro Transport)and Canberra's bus network (ACTION buses) will be available in Google Maps later in June. Users of Google Maps in these areas will be able to easily access public transport schedules, routes, and plan trips using local public transport options.


We've put together a video showing our move to the new office and some of the hard work that went into setting it up ... plus a very special finishing touch that we asked the Governor-General to sign to officially declare our office open. Enjoy!



Posted by Alan Noble and Karim Temsamani, Google Australia

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Went Walkabout. Brought back Google Wave.

Today we gave developers attending the Google I/O event in San Francisco an early preview of Google Wave, ahead of public launch (and it received a standing ovation).

Google Wave was developed by the Sydney-based Google team that created Google Maps, used by millions of people worldwide. Led by Lars and Jens Rasmussen and operating as a remote start-up within Google, under the codename "Walkabout", the Aussie team focused on improving the way communication and collaboration works for users on the web.

They developed Google Wave, equal parts conversation and document, where people can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

Australian developers will be able to learn more at Google Wave API Day, June 19th, taking place at Google's Sydney office.

(Editor's note: The rest of this blog is cross-posted from our Official Google Blog).

Back in early 2004, Google took an interest in a tiny mapping startup called Where 2 Tech, founded by my brother Jens and me. We were excited to join Google and help create what would become Google Maps. But we also started thinking about what might come next for us after maps.

As always, Jens came up with the answer: communication. He pointed out that two of the most spectacular successes in digital communication, email and instant messaging, were originally designed in the '60s to imitate analog formats — email mimicked snail mail, and IM mimicked phone calls. Since then, so many different forms of communication had been invented — blogs, wikis, collaborative documents, etc. — and computers and networks had dramatically improved. So Jens proposed a new communications model that presumed all these advances as a starting point, and I was immediately sold. (Jens insists it took him hours to convince me, but I like my version better.)

We had a blast the next couple years turning Where 2's prototype mapping site into Google Maps. But finally we decided it was time to leave the Maps team and turn Jens' new idea into a project, which we codenamed "Walkabout." We started with a set of tough questions:

• Why do we have to live with divides between different types of communication — email versus chat, or conversations versus documents?
  
• Could a single communications model span all or most of the systems in use on the web today, in one smooth continuum? How simple could we make it?
  
• What if we tried designing a communications system that took advantage of computers' current abilities, rather than imitating non-electronic forms? 

After months holed up in a conference room in the Sydney office, our five-person "startup" team emerged with a prototype. And now, after more than two years of expanding our ideas, our team, and technology, we're very eager to return and see what the world might think. Today we're giving developers an early preview of Google Wave.

A "wave" is equal parts conversation and document, where people can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.


Here's how it works: In Google Wave you create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It's concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content — it allows for both collaboration and communication. You can also use "playback" to rewind the wave and see how it evolved.

As with Android, Google Chrome, and many other Google efforts, we plan to make the code open source as a way to encourage the developer community to get involved. Google Wave is very open and extensible, and we're inviting developers to add all kinds of cool stuff before our public launch. Google Wave has three layers: the product, the platform, and the protocol:

• The Google Wave product (available as a developer preview) is the web application people will use to access and edit waves. It's an HTML 5 app, built on Google Web Toolkit. It includes a rich text editor and other functions like desktop drag-and-drop (which, for example, lets you drag a set of photos right into a wave). 
  
• Google Wave can also be considered a platform with a rich set of open APIs that allow developers to embed waves in other web services, and to build new extensions that work inside waves.
  
• The Google Wave protocol is the underlying format for storing and the means of sharing waves, and includes the "live" concurrency control, which allows edits to be reflected instantly across users and services. The protocol is designed for open federation, such that anyone's Wave services can interoperate with each other and with the Google Wave service. To encourage adoption of the protocol, we intend to open source the code behind Google Wave. 
  

So, this leaves one big question we need your help answering: What else can we do with this?

If you're a developer and you'd like to roll up your sleeves and start working on Google Wave with us, you can read more on the Google Wave Developer blog about the Google Wave APIs, and check out the Google Code blog to learn more about the Google Wave Federation Protocol.

If you'd like to be notified when we launch Google Wave as a public product, you can sign up at http://wave.google.com/. We don't have a specific timeframe for public release, but we're planning to continue working on Google Wave for a number of months more as a developer preview. We're excited to see what feedback we get from our early tinkerers, and we'll undoubtedly make lots of changes to the Google Wave product, platform, and protocol as we go.

We look forward to seeing what you come up with!

Posted by Lars Rasmussen, Software Engineering Manager

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More Search Options and Updates from our Searchology Event

(Editor's note: This is partially cross-posted from our Official Google Blog).

Today we hosted our second Searchology event, to update our users, partners, and customers on the progress we have made in search and tell them about new features. Our first Searchology was two years ago, when we were excited to launch Universal Search, a feature that blended results of different types (web pages, images, videos, books, etc.) on the results page. Since then Universal Search has grown quite a bit, adding new types of results, expanding to new countries, and triggering on ten times as many queries as it did when we launched it.

But as people get more sophisticated at search they are coming to us to solve more complex problems. To stay on top of this, we have spent a lot of time looking at how we can better understand the wide range of information that's on the web and quickly connect people to just the nuggets they need at that moment. We want to help our users find more useful information, and do more useful things with it.

Our first announcement today is a new set of features that we call Search Options, which are a collection of tools that let you slice and dice your results and generate different views to find what you need faster and easier. Search Options helps solve a problem that can be vexing: what query should I ask?

Let's say you are looking for forum discussions about a specific product, but are most interested in ones that have taken place more recently. That's not an easy query to formulate, but with Search Options you can search for the product's name, apply the option to filter out anything but forum sites, and then apply an option to only see results from the past week.

The Search Options panel also gives you the ability to view your results in new ways. One view gives you more information about each result, including images as well as text, while others let you explore and iterate your search in different ways. It's available from the search results page, by clicking 'Show options'.

Check out a video tour here:


We think of the Search Options panel as a tool belt that gives you new ways to interact with Google Search, and we plan to fill it with more innovative and useful features in the future.

We also announced today an update to Sky Map: an Android app that lets you view a labelled map of the sky that adjusts to both your location and the movements of your mobile device. The app uses GPS and Compass data, as well as the Date/Time, to determine what celestial objects the device is facing at a given moment. If it is pointed towards Venus, for example, you'll see a labelled map of the sky with Venus and the objects surrounding it on your screen. We hope lots of Australians make use of the wonderful clear skies of the southern hemisphere to try this app out.



Posted by Jack Menzel, Group Product Manager, and Annie Baxter, Google Australia

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Google Analytics Seminars for Success

Google Analytics is a free service that helps you learn more about where your visitors come from and how they interact with your site. It helps you write better ads, strengthen your marketing initiatives, and get the most out of your website. 

Now, for the first time in Australia, website owners and operators can attend the Google Analytics Seminars for Success, to be held in Sydney and Melbourne in May and June 2009. The seminars are run by online marketing consultancy Mangold Sengers, and will provide intensive professional development for individuals and teams from all types and sizes of organisations.

MELBOURNE DATES
Day 1: Thursday 14 May 2009
Day 2: Friday 15 May 2009
Time: 9:30 am to 5:00 pm
Location: Melbourne Business School,
200 Leicester Street, Carlton
Cost: $349.00 per day (inc. GST)

SYDNEY DATES
Day 1: Thursday 4 June 2009
Day 2: Friday 5 June 2009
Time: 9:30 am to 5:00 pm
Location: UNSW CBD Campus, Level
6, 1 O’Connell Street, Sydney
Cost: $349.00 per day (inc. GST)

For more information go to http://www.mangoldsengers.com/google-seminars

Posted by Shyam Govardhan, Customer Solutions Engineer

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Thanks for the feedback so far!

Two weeks ago we asked for your feedback about what you'd like to see on Blogger, and you've responded overwhelmingly! Since we opened the Product Ideas forum, we've received over 60,000 votes from 2500 users on 1500 different suggestions. We're very interested in the ideas we've seen so far, and hope that you keep them coming until the form closes on Friday, May 14th.

In the meantime though, we've noticed a few things on the Feature Request list that already have solutions, and we'd like to pass that information along to you:

• Importing blogs from Wordpress
  

While we don't offer this feature directly within the Blogger UI, a handy little service called Wordpress2Blogger (which is hosted on App Engine) will help you convert your Wordpress blog into a Blogger blog. Then from your dashboard, click "Import" to import the converted file.

• Feeds for labels

This can be done easily using the following URL structure:

http://BLOGNAME.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/LABELNAME
Example: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/mobile

• Feeds for Comments

This feed is also available now, with the following URL:

http://BLOGNAME.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default
Example: http://adsense.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default

• ShareThis widget for Blogger
  

The ShareThis widget can be added easily from their website, which supports Blogger blogs.

• Multi-selects on posts to add labels in bulk
  

The Edit Posts list already support multi-selecting, so feel free to bulk-label to your heart's desire :-)

• "Democratic" Blog of Note voting process

That's what the Blog of Note section of the Product Ideas page is for! We'll be posting many more of your suggested Blogs of Note, so please do keep an eye out.

Again, we really do appreciate all the great feedback and suggestions we've seen so far. We hope that you will continue to add more to the Product Ideas page over the next week, and make sure to get all of your votes in before the forum closes Friday, May 14th.

Update 5/15: The forum is now closed. Thanks for all the feedback!

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FTP vs. Custom Domains

Bloggers who rely on our FTP service to publish their blog to their own domain had a rough week last week. In fact, it's been a bumpy month or two. Let's start with the most important comment on this state of affairs: this sucks, and we're sorry.

(Note: this is a lengthy post, and goes into a fair amount of technical detail. If you don't use FTP to upload your blog, you can skip this post. --Rick Klau, Blogger Product Manager)

If you use FTP today, I'd like to start a conversation about whether this is the right approach for your blog. I've been talking with bloggers over the last couple weeks on this subject, and have found most users, when presented with the option of hosting their blog using Blogger's Custom Domain option instead of FTP, find Custom Domains to be a far superior option. That's not to say there aren't compelling reasons to stick with FTP, so I'm not interested at this point in trying to convince everyone to switch over to Custom Domains. But I do think it is preferable for most of you still using FTP, and hopefully this post will help lay out why.

Advantages of Custom Domains Over FTP

First off, what is a Custom Domain? If you own a domain, we can host your blog at your domain instead of hosting at yourblog.blogspot.com. Unlike FTP, where you transfer the blog's files to a webserver hosted elsewhere, Google actually hosts the blog on our servers. So why would you want to start using a Custom Domain over FTP? When Blogger released Custom Domains a couple years ago, we pointed out a couple obvious advantages:

1) Simple setup.
2) Faster publishing. You no longer wait for files to transfer to your remote host; as soon as you click publish, the post is available and all archive pages are updated.
3) Drag and drop template editing. Blogger's newer templates offer you a lot more in terms of customization, and make designing your page a much simpler process.
4) Access control. You can restrict access to your blog when we host it; there's no way to do this natively within Blogger (though your webhost may offer a way to do this separately).

In light of the recent experiences with FTP, here's two more:

5) Fewer moving parts. As I've dug in over the last few weeks on issues relating to FTP, as often as not the problems were not Blogger-related but were a byproduct of a webhost implementing stricter security on FTP logins (only whitelisting certain IP addresses, for instance, or throttling access for certain users). These are notoriously hard to isolate, particularly when they involve coordinating support with a third party. No one - including us! - enjoys the terrible back and forth of "it's the webhost's issue" "no, it's Blogger's issue" "no, we're pretty sure it's the webhost's issue" when all you want is to be able to post to your blog.
6) Free, scalable hosting. Google knows a thing or two about hosting content around the world, and by relying on Blogger for hosting you're getting the advantage of a robust hosting environment - for free!

Twitter Feedback: Why do you prefer FTP?

Enough generalizations. On Saturday, I asked users on Twitter to tell me why they preferred FTP over Custom Domains. I've listed the first few responses below, along with my thoughts:

• @creuzerm: "I can easily back up my site via my backup scripts over FTP." (@cjewel and @Vin07 made similar points.)


• Blogger users have a one-click backup option from the Blogger dashboard (Click Settings | Basic, then click "Export blog"). Unlike file backups from a remote webhost, Blogger's export (details here) does a full export of all posts, comments, the current layout, and your Blogger settings. At any time, you could recreate the entire blog with a single upload, and restoring the blog on a Custom Domain would take seconds (unlike FTP, which could take hours for larger blogs to transfer all of the necessary files). If you ever wanted to migrate off of Blogger, our conversion utilities will help you convert from Blogger's export file to most other popular blog formats. (Come to think of it, if you haven't backed up your blog lately, why don't you do that right now?)


• @lizcastro: "FTP lets you get rid of the NavBar and better control of your branding."


• There is no difference between control/branding between Custom Domains and FTP. In fact, you get more control over the look and feel of your template, with a more sophisticated, point-and-click interface to adding interactive gadgets - all of which are draggable in the template editor to get the exact placement and layout you want. If you choose to remove the navbar, there are several sites that walk you through the few steps necessary to remove it. We'd prefer you didn't - it helps users find your site, it makes it easier for users to search your blog, and we have several enhancements planned for the navbar this summer. But if you insist on removing it, a search for "remove Blogger navbar" will point you in the right direction. (Obviously, this is not supported and we can't provide support for any modifications you make to your templates.)


• @eccentriclee: "I feel better having access to all files directly." @lizcastro: "FTP allows you more control over uploading things to your own server (or seems to) and uploading images with Blogger is cumbersome."


• As detailed below, I have what I think is the best of both worlds: Blogger manages the hosting of my site (at a subdomain, tins.rklau.com), and I retain access to my webhost for file uploading (at www.rklau.com). Regarding image uploading, when you switch away from FTP, you get our integration with PicasaWeb, where you can host images. This tends to be a much more powerful way of managing uploaded images (all uploaded images are stored in a Picasa album for future reference).


• @nomadness: "FTP lets me keep /blog inside long-established site hierarchy with other content at root."


• This is a valid concern if the custom domain you choose is the same as the domain you currently use for FTP (i.e., you FTP to www.yourdomain.com/blog and want to use www.yourdomain.com for your Custom Domain). In my case, I chose to leave www.rklau.com alone and instead have Blogger manage a subdomain as my Custom Domain. That's not the whole answer, however - there's still the matter of getting people from www.yourdomain.com/blog to blog.yourdomain.com. See "Redirecting..." below.


• @Vin07: "Afraid of posts being lost on switch..."


• I'd suggest a backup to eliminate any risk. But rest assured, no posts are lost in the switch.

There were two responses that are completely valid reasons for sticking with FTP:

• @haitai: "In China, the ghs.google.com always blocked by #GFW, FTP web host isn't." @johnroach: "Blogger sometimes gets blocked by Turkey and so does some internet sites."


• Yep, if a country blocks access to Google domains, and you or your audience is primarily in that country, then you'll want to host on a domain that's not blocked.


• @creuzerm: "I am planning on doing a PHP blog template."


• If you absolutely need to execute PHP within your template's pages, you'll have to host on a domain where PHP is installed and supported. Of course, there are a ton of gadgets that can add functionality to your site, so you may be able to do what you need without adding custom code. (On the "Layout" tab for a Blogspot or Custom Domain-enabled blog, click "Add a Gadget".)

One note: if you do stick with FTP, we'd strongly recommend checking with your webhost to see if they support SFTP - it's much more secure than FTP.

Redirecting from your FTP blog to your Custom Domain blog

OK. Let's assume that you've read this far, and have decided that you want to give a custom domain a try. If your blog has been around a while, you'll be concerned about links to your soon-to-be old URL.

I started my blog on Blogger in 2001, using Blogger's FTP service to publish to www.rklau.com/tins/. At the time, that was the only way to use Blogger to manage my blog on my own domain. I later switched to Movable Type (retaining the same URL), and then migrated to WordPress in 2005. Back in November, in anticipation of joining the Blogger team, I moved back to Blogger. After chatting with the Blogger team, I knew I wanted to take advantage of many of the new features on Blogger - but because I had a ton of images and files on www.rklau.com that I'd uploaded over the years, I didn't want to map www.rklau.com to Blogger.

My answer? I moved the blog from www.rklau.com/tins/ to tins.rklau.com. I created a CNAME for tins.rklau.com that maps to Google, and now Blogger hosts the blog. All of the old posts with pointers to files and images at www.rklau.com continue to work. I documented how I use WordPress to redirect requests from the old posts to the new ones here. If you're moving from FTP to Custom Domains, then there's one last step - redirection - to ensure that requests to the former URLs find your new URL.

How you implement the redirection depends on what kind of server you're hosting on. If you're on an Apache webserver (most common) then you'll want to use something called htaccess. If you're on an IIS server and you don't manage the server yourself, you will need to talk to the webhost to get the redirect in place.

To create an htaccess file, first create a text file which includes the following lines:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteBase /

RedirectMatch 301 ^/blog/(.*)$ http://blog.yourdomain.com/$1

This assumes your blog is published to /blog, and that your new Custom Domain is blog.yourdomain.com - change those values as appropriate. Now upload this file to your webserver, and name it ".htaccess" (no quotes, but the period preceeding "htaccess" is important) in the root directory. All this does is take incoming requests to files in the /blog directory, and redirect them to blog.yourdomain.com, while keeping the rest of the URL intact. Since Blogger will keep the same permalinks in the migration, this will preserve all inbound link traffic.

To all of you who continue to rely on Blogger as your blogging platform: thank you.

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Going somewhere interesting? Share it with the world!

by Chris Lambert, Software Engineer, Google Mobile

If you ask people why they blog, a lot of the answers you receive will probably center around the idea of starting conversations. I love talking with friends and family about the countries I've visited and the cities I've explored, and personal blogs are a great way to share these stories. However, I have never met someone who felt they had enough time to post all of the updates that they wanted, especially when they are off traveling. Well, wouldn't it be great if anytime you were traveling somewhere new, taking off on a road trip, or just on your way to an exciting place, there was a way for you to automatically publish that information to your blog? We thought so too, and that's why we decided to release the Google public location badge, powered by Google Latitude.

Google Latitude is a feature of Google Maps for mobile that lets you easily share your current location with a select group of your friends and family and, with your permission, it will continuously update in the background. Latitude is also available as an iGoogle gadget. While Latitude has been really popular, a lot of people -- many of them bloggers -- have asked for a way to share their location information on the Web, for all the world to see. Now with the Google public location badge, you can share your Latitude location with everyone on your blog. Check out Danny Sullivan's blog to see how it looks.

To give it a try, visit this website. You will need to be a Latitude user to enable the badge. We made it easy to customize the type of badge that you want on your blog and let you choose between showing either your best available location or just the city that you're currently in. To add the code snippet to your blog, you can either click the "Add to Blogger" button, or copy and paste the code into an HTML/Javascript gadget that you can add from your Layout tab on Blogger.com.

Please be aware that by enabling this badge your location will be available for everyone to see; you cannot decide who gets to see it. If you want to have more privacy, you can select 'city-level location' or choose to 'disable' the badge altogether. If you have any suggestions or run into a snag, let us know in our Help Forum.

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