Email overload? Try Priority Inbox

(Editor's note: This is a cross post from the Official Google Blog).

People tell us all that time that they’re getting more and more mail and often feel overwhelmed by it all. We know what you mean—here at Google we run on email. Our inboxes are slammed with hundreds, sometimes thousands of messages a day—mail from colleagues, from lists, about appointments and automated mail that’s often not important. It’s time-consuming to figure out what needs to be read and what needs a reply. Today, we’re happy to introduce Priority Inbox (in beta)—an experimental new way of taking on information overload in Gmail.

Gmail has always been pretty good at filtering junk mail into the “spam” folder. But today, in addition to spam, people get a lot of mail that isn't outright junk but isn't very important—bologna, or “bacn.” So we've evolved Gmail's filter to address this problem and extended it to not only classify outright spam, but also to help users separate this "bologna" from the important stuff. In a way, Priority Inbox is like your personal assistant, helping you focus on the messages that matter without requiring you to set up complex rules.



Priority Inbox splits your inbox into three sections: “Important and unread,” “Starred” and “Everything else”:



As messages come in, Gmail automatically flags some of them as important. Gmail uses a variety of signals to predict which messages are important, including the people you email most (if you email Bob a lot, a message from Bob is probably important) and which messages you open and reply to (these are likely more important than the ones you skip over). And as you use Gmail, it will get better at categorising messages for you. You can help it get better by clicking the buttons at the top of the inbox to correctly mark a conversation as important or not important. (You can even set up filters to always mark certain things important or unimportant, or rearrange and customise the three inbox sections.)

After lots of internal testing here at Google, as well as with Gmail and Google Apps users at home and at work, we’re ready for more people to try it out. Priority Inbox will be rolling out to all Gmail users, including those of you who use Google Apps, over the next week or so. Once you see the “New! Priority Inbox" link in the top right corner of your Gmail account (or the new Priority Inbox tab in Gmail Settings), take a look.

Posted by Doug Aberdeen, Software Engineer

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Introducing Blogger Stats


Posted by Noah Fiedel and Wiktor Gworek, Software Engineers

Just in time for our eleventh birthday, we are excited to introduce Stats for Blogger. First launched to Blogger in Draft back in July, Blogger Stats is a cool real-time stats service that's fully integrated with Blogger; you don't need to do anything to enable it for your blog. You can find the new Stats tab on your blog’s dashboard—go ahead and take it for a spin!



Feature Highlights

Stats is an important piece of the blogging puzzle, as it allows you to track your blog's traffic and find out exactly what your audience is looking for. As such, integrated, real-time stats has been one of the most frequently requested features from our users. You can find more information about Blogger Stats in our earlier announcement; meanwhile, here are some quick highlights for you.
  • Real-time tracking. Each time your blog is viewed, you can see the change on your stats almost immediately
  • Insights about your audience. Top search keywords, countries, browsers, and more
  • Great user interface. Beautiful, easy-to-read graphs and charts

Updates

After our initial launch to Blogger in Draft, we had some very helpful feedback and suggestions from you. Based on them, we’ve made improvements including the following:
  • Self-view exclusion. Some of you wanted Blogger Stats to exclude your own pageviews, and now there’s an option for that: On Stats | Overview, click on the “Don’t track your own pageviews” link (it’s on the right side, under the pageview summary) and select the “Don’t track my pageviews” option. We’re also now excluding traffic coming from Blogger admin pages and post Preview, providing more accurate pageview data.
  • More effective bot traffic filtering. We’ve made several improvements to detect “bots” (the non-human visitors, such as crawlers) including extending our list of known “bots” to provide more accurate pageviews from real visitors.
  • Internationalization. Blogger Stats is now available in more than 40 languages.

We hope you like  Blogger Stats. By the way, there must be something good about August—not only is it our birth month, we’ve gone from four Admin Dashboard tabs to six, just this month alone! (The other new tab we’ve added this month was the Comments tab, which was another highly requested feature.) We still have some more ground to cover, but just wanted to say we’re working really hard to deliver the features you’ve wanted to see on Blogger. Looking forward to seeing you all at the upcoming Meetup!

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Hector’s World and Google work together to promote digital citizenship for kids

We’re pleased to have joined together with Hector’s World™ to support the development of a new online resource, the Hector’s World “Tech Cave”, which provides tools for kids to teach themselves and their communities about how technology works. We announced the new resources last week at Mission Heights School in Auckland, New Zealand, and got lots of great feedback from the kids and grandparents present.


Hector’s World is a free online teaching and learning resource created in New Zealand and used in schools and early childhood centres across Australia and New Zealand to teach ‘digital citizenship’ – the smart, safe and responsible use of technology. It offers knowledge and skills in a fun, interactive environment in order to help children become confident and respectful digital citizens, encouraging them to think critically and make wise choices as they make their way in the online world.

The new Tech Cave section of www.hectorsworld.com explains how different aspects of technology work, from the internet to mobile phones and GPS systems, providing kids with the tools they need to use technology effectively and safely. The first two Tech Cave modules, on the internet and web search, have been created with the support of Google, as part of our work to promote safer online experiences.

We’re a very proud supporter of Hector’s World, which is internationally recognised for its innovative approach and emphasis on empowering children, while supporting the teachers and parents charged with their care. In 2009, we worked with the Hector’s World team to launch their YouTube channel, and in turn they have contributed content to our YouTube Safety Centre.

The launch of the Tech Cave will help to ensure even more kids are well positioned to take advantage of the benefits of the internet in a smart, safe and responsible way.

To find out more about Hector’s World and the Tech Cave see www.hectorsworld.com or www.youtube.co.nz/hectorsworldnz.



Posted Ishtar Vij, Google public policy team

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Calling Sydney bloggers: come and meet the team!

Blogs and user generated content account for the majority of information on the net -- Blogger alone has more than 300 million active readers. As a community, we bloggers are heterogeneous: there are as many types of blogs as there are people, and as many different subjects as there are ideas. We are all, however, united by a common goal: we want to express ourselves and in so doing, change the world.

This year, Blogger celebrates 11 years of helping us do just that: putting the power of internet expression in the hands of anyone with a connection, and fostering communities around ideas and common goals. At their best, bloggers enable effective and very passionate social networks, foster education, enable political, artistic, and cultural debate, and generate conversation and involvement that result in positive impact to the world. Simply put, bloggers care. We care enough to say something with every post.

We’re celebrating Blogger’s 11th birthday with a veritable fiesta of Meetups all around the world.

We have a growing Blogger engineering team at the Google Sydney office, and we’d love to meet local bloggers in this area, hear about your experiences blogging, desires for the future, and get candid feedback on the things that are (and aren't!) working for you. We'd also like all of you to meet each other, and get to know this group of Aussies united by a common passion.

We hope you can come along to our very own 'Blogger Fiesta' meetup in the Google Sydney office on August 31st at 6:30pm. And, yes, since this is a Birthday party, please be assured cake will be served. We're looking forward to meeting you!

Posted by Mike Jones, engineer, Google Sydney

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Improvements to Realtime Search


The blogosphere is a dynamic environment that changes almost as quickly as the world that we live in. And as access to information becomes more widespread and more immediate, the blogosphere is steadily closing that gap. That’s why the Blogger Team is excited to spread the word about Google’s new improvements to Realtime Search, which provide richer and fresher results than ever before.

From the new Realtime Search homepage, you can search live updates, recently-published blog posts, and news from around the web in brand new ways. Now you can restrict your search to include just updates from a specific geographic region or just nearby you. You can also check out complete conversations from Twitter. You can also now set up custom alerts for Realtime updates to be sent directly to your inbox once a day or week, or as soon as the happen for instant blog post fodder.

For more information about Realtime’s new features, please visit www.google.com/landing/realtime.

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Blogger's 11th Birthday Fiesta is Almost Here

Posted by Seth Shamban, Blogger Consumer Operations

It’s only five days away, and we hope that you’re as excited as we are about the 200+ Meetups that are happening around the world. We’re looking forward to your meetups, and seeing your photos, videos, and tweets from the event.

We don’t want to leave the best parties empty-handed, so starting tomorrow we will be sending out some Blogger birthday presents to some of the largest Meetups around the world. We can only send presents to Meetups that have organizers, though, and there’s still lots of fiestas that are organizer-less. It’s super easy and any one can do it, so if you volunteer you may be able to secure presents for your local Meetup.

For those of you who haven’t yet joined one of our Meetups, there’s still time! As a reminder, here’s the important details for the event:


If you have any questions about the Blogger Fiesta Meetups, head over to our official invitation.

We look forward to our first ever global meetups on the 31st!


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Announcing Student Voice 2010 results

Australia’s next generation of voters have spoken in Student Voice 2010 - and have elected the Gillard Labor government to be returned to power for another term. It was a close call however. Labor won by three seats and the Coalition won the popular vote with the highest share of individual votes amongst the 5000 15-17 year-old Australian students who took part.

Of the 72 electorates across Australia where the student vote was captured, Labor won 28 lower house seats, the Coalition 25 seats, the Greens 15 seats, with Christian Democrat Party, Independent, Family First and One Nation all winning one seat each. The ALP was strongest in NSW and Victoria where it won 21 out of 28 seats, while the Coalition took 15 of the 25 seats in the resource-rich states of Queensland and Western Australia, including the marginal seat of Hasluck with the Liberal candidate gaining 56% of votes.

The Greens were strongest in Victoria and stormed into retiring Labor MP Lindsay Tanner’s seat of Melbourne - winning more than half the student votes in that electorate.

In the Senate, there was a big swing to the Greens, with Australian students voting for 16 Green Senators, matching the ALP, and only marginally behind that of the Coalition.

Google developed Student Voice as an education opportunity for young Australians to experience a fundamental democratic process, vote and make their voice heard. We adopted standards and processes from the Australian Electoral Commission to ensure that the experience was as real as possible. More than five thousand school students voted for lower and upper house candidates via online ballot in classrooms, playgrounds and libraries. You can see a more detailed breakdown of results here at google.com.au/studentvoice2010.

The next generation of voters will go online to find political information, contact government and vote. Student Voice 2010 is an exercise in democracy and we hope it inspires students to engage and make their voices heard. Here are some fun snaps which schools sent through.

Ignatius Park College, Townsville


Westminister School, South Australia

Posted by Alan Noble, Engineering Director Google Australia and New Zealand

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Eureka Prize Winner for Innovation in Computer Science 2010

This evening Professor Peter Stuckey from the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at the University of Melbourne was announced as the winner of the inaugural Google Australia Eureka Prize for Innovation in Computer Science. Robotics pioneer, Prof Rodney Brooks, presented the prize.

Professor Stuckey was awarded the prize for his development of Lazy Clause generation, a software method for combinatorial optimisation which solves mathematical challenges of resource allocation significantly faster than any other existing method. Professor Stuckey’s innovation will have great benefit for solving big problems in society at lower cost from the classic Travelling Salesman Problem (every CS grad will remember this one - given a list of cities and the distance between every combination of cities, the task is to find the shortest possible tour for a salesman wishing to visit each city only once) through to train timetables, water usage allocation, and hospital staff rosters.

Professor Stuckey was joined at tonight’s Eureka Prize dinner by finalists who submitted excellent entries:
  • Associate Professor David Moss, University of Sydney, for his invention of a laser optical source with multiple wavelengths that can be used to transmit information optically over existing silicon (CMOS) integrated circuits.
  • The Cloudbus Project from the University of Melbourne, which has developed architectural principles and software technologies that enable high-performance, scalable, and energy-efficient Cloud computing.
I would like to thank all the people and teams who entered the prize and to congratulate Professor Stuckey for his work.

Google Australia is delighted to sponsor the Eureka Prize for Innovation in Computer Science. We’re passionately committed to promoting innovation in computer science here in Australia and we believe that the impact of computer science creates great benefits for society.


Posted by Alan Noble, Engineering Director Google Australia and New Zealand

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What's your secret talent?

Editor's note: This is a cross post from YouTube Australia blog



Think you’ve got what it takes to be the next big thing? If so, YouTube is your stage. For the first time in Australia, YouTube and Vodafone are teaming up to bring you a head-to-head online talent competition. Maybe you’ve got a knack for dance like last year’s MyMutation contest winner Emma Watkins, or an ear for classical music like Alan Chan. Or maybe you can drop a beat to outshine DJ Cotts and the Fully Sick Rapper.

We’re looking for acts of any shape and size to win flights and accommodation to a mystery music experience in Madrid, Spain, and other fabulous prizes, provided by Vodafone. The audition process is simple -- and all online. Simply upload a video of under 90 seconds to your YouTube account and submit your entry at youtube.com/secrettalentsau. Your videos should only contain original content and must be submitted by September 22 for a chance to win.

Australians will be able to vote on the final ten and we’ll announce the winner of the vote on October 5.

If you’ve got talent, we want to know. What’s your secret talent?

Posted by Ernesto Soriano, Product Marketing Manager, YouTube Australia
Recently watched Beached Az: The Goats

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New Comments System on Blogger

Posted by Saurav Shah and Junho Ryu, Software Engineers

Commenting is one of the most integral parts of blogging: it’s what makes blogging a conversation, not a monologue. That’s why we are pleased to announce two cool new improvements to Blogger’s comments system: much better spam filtering and the ability to view all comments on your blog in one place.


Introducing Comment Spam Filtering

A blog is an open communications system, inviting conversations from all web users. Unfortunately, spammers have been finding their way into these conversations. To fight spam, some of you enabled moderation of all comments or required word verification or login. While somewhat effective, these checks limit real-time conversations around your blog.

To address this, we’ve integrated Google’s spam filtering technologies into the Blogger comment system. Some of you will notice the new “Comments” tab. (Note: We are gradually rolling this out to all users, so some of you may not see the new Comments tab yet.) In the Comments tab, there is a Spam sub-tab that shows all the comments that are likely spam.


The comments in the Spam inbox are not visible to your readers. Here, you can permanently delete spam comments by selecting them and choosing Delete. You can also mark comments as Not Spam that have been incorrectly classified as spam (what we call the “false-positives”). Choose Not Spam and the selected comments will be moved out of the spam list and will be immediately published on your blog.

These feedback actions also help us better identify spam on your blog. We encourage you to occasionally check your Spam inbox to see if any non-spam comments have been marked as spam. Please note that spam filtering currently only applies to new comments.

You can report any issues with our new spam system by clicking on the “Report spam filtering issues” link on the bottom of the Comments | Spam page, or by visiting this Help Forum page.


Comments “Inbox”

We also created a place where you can see all the comments that have been published on your blog. The Comments | Published sub-tab provides a similar view as your email inbox. This view comes in handy when you want to see all of the comments on your blog in one place. With the new comments inbox, it’s easy to find new comments on old posts.



In the Comments | Published sub-tab, you can select comments and mark them as spam or delete them. When you mark a comment as Spam, it will be deleted immediately from your blog. You can also Delete comments for editorial reasons or just Remove Content to leave a record of the comment.

Comment moderation has also moved under the Comments tab and has been extended to allow you to mark comments as Spam.

We hope that adding comment spam filtering and the new “inbox” user interface will be a good starting point toward improving the Blogger commenting system and we look forward to your feedback.

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Thousands of Australians capture their Life in a Day

Nearly 1,500 Aussies picked up a video camera on Saturday, July 24 and captured part of their day for an ambitious new YouTube project.

Life in a Day is a global experiment aiming to create the first ever user-generated feature film, and when entries closed last weekend we found out we’d received 80,000 submissions from people around the world, representing 197 countries and 45 languages.

Australians filmed themselves walking on the beach in Melbourne, skiing in Thredbo, and answering the questions posed by Life in a Day director Kevin Macdonald: “What do you love? What do you fear? What makes you laugh? What’s in your pocket?”



The next step? Over the coming months, the most compelling and distinctive footage received will be edited into a feature-length film, produced by Ridley Scott (of Gladiator fame) and directed by Kevin Macdonald (director of the Last King of Scotland).

A gallery of submitted footage will go live on YouTube’s Life in a Day channel in early September, and the final film will screen at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2011 and be available on YouTube. We can’t wait to see the result, and whether any Australians will be co-credited as directors when the film is released.

Posted by Ernesto Soriano, YouTube team

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Blogger’s 11th Birthday Party

Posted by Seth Shamban, Blogger Consumer Operations

Last year, Blogger turned ten. We were excited to present you with a (small-but-mighty) bounty of gifts, a token to commemorate all of your contributions over the years.

Now we’re a year older (and would like to think a bit wiser), have some great features under our belt and are ready for another celebration with you, our closest friends. For Blogger’s 11th birthday, we’re hosting the first ever Blogger global birthday party!

We’ll keep it simple—we set the date, you set the parties and Meetup Everywhere will help facilitate (free of charge!). Through the wonder of Meetup Everywhere, you’ll be able to find other bloggers in your area and either join a celebration that has already been set up or start a new party local to you. The goal is to get together in-person, chat about blogging and celebrate with friends you may have otherwise only met online. Meetups can be simple, and no party is too small. Plus, we’ll be supplying each party with a download-able pack of party supplies, including makings for party hats, name tags and signs. And who knows, there may even be other treasures and surprises in store.

Your invitation

  • What: Blogger’s 11th birthday celebration!
  • How: Sign up for a Meetup near you or get one going in your town.
  • Where: Anywhere you are.
  • Who: Everyone! You never know who might show up.
  • When: Any time on Tuesday, August 31, 2010
  • RSVP: http://www.meetup.com/bloggerfiesta

How it works

Everything you need is on our BloggerFiesta Meetup site. To find a party near you, do a quick search on the map. To join a scheduled party, click on the I’m Interested button on the party details page. To start a new party, click on Schedule a Meetup near you at the bottom of the BloggerFiesta site.

When you start or join a party, consider volunteering to be the Meetup organizer. Anyone can do it, plus you’ll get fame and glory. That gives you the ability to set the venue and time of the party. Also, don’t neglect the commenting functionality—you can use it to chat and plan with your fellow attendees prior to the party. What you do at the birthday party is completely up to you.

If you want to get started talking about the meet-ups, you can


See you on the 31st! We’ll have our party hats on.

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ICT debate live on YouTube

With less than two weeks until Election Day, what are our political leaders saying about information technology and communications and how will we ensure that Australia keeps pace in a new era of digital communications?

We’re teaming up with the Australian Computer Society, Viocorp and Sky News to bring you a pre-election forum with Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Senator Stephen Conroy; Shadow Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, the Hon Tony Smith MP; and Greens ICT spokesperson, Senator Scott Ludlam.

YouTube will live stream the ICT Policy Forum on (youtube.com/australiavotes) where each participant will outline their party’s stance and key election priorities in the ICT area, as well as strategic visions for the next decade.

In addition to the live stream, the YouTube channel will feature live twitter feeds (#ausvotes, #ITElectionForum), and a playback video of the forum will be available to view from youtube.com/australiavotes following the event. Want to get more engaged with the upcoming election, and find out about important issues for our digital future? Here’s your chance.

The event will begin at 12:55pm AEST, and run through to 2:05 pm AEST on Tuesday 10 August.

Posted by Ernesto Soriano, YouTube Team just watched String Qintet WIN

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Update on Google Wave

Editor's note: This is a cross post from the Official Google Blog

We have always pursued innovative projects because we want to drive breakthroughs in computer science that dramatically improve our users’ lives. Last year at Google I/O, when we launched our developer preview of Google Wave, a web app for real time communication and collaboration, it set a high bar for what was possible in a web browser. We showed character-by-character live typing, and the ability to drag-and-drop files from the desktop, even “playback” the history of changes—all within a browser. Developers in the audience stood and cheered. Some even waved their laptops.

We were equally jazzed about Google Wave internally, even though we weren’t quite sure how users would respond to this radically different kind of communication. The use cases we’ve seen show the power of this technology: sharing images and other media in real time; improving spell-checking by understanding not just an individual word, but also the context of each word; and enabling third-party developers to build new tools like consumer gadgets for travel, or robots to check code.

But despite these wins, and numerous loyal fans, Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects. The central parts of the code, as well as the protocols that have driven many of Wave’s innovations, like drag-and-drop and character-by-character live typing, are already available as open source, so customers and partners can continue the innovation we began. In addition, we will work on tools so that users can easily “liberate” their content from Wave.

Wave has taught us a lot, and we are proud of the team for the ways in which they have pushed the boundaries of computer science. We are excited about what they will develop next as we continue to create innovations with the potential to advance technology and the wider web.

Posted by Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President, Operations & Google Fellow

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New courses added to the AdWords Online Classroom

Since we launched the AdWords Online Classroom in Australia in May, we’ve seen hundreds of small- and medium-business take advantage of these free tutorials to improve their knowledge of online advertising. Whether you’re interested in how to choose the best keywords for your campaigns, how to write the most effective ads, or how to use our advanced analytics and conversion products, there’s something for everyone.

We’ve added several new courses in the last couple of weeks in response to advertiser feedback.
As always, there’s absolutely no cost to sign up, and you can watch the tutorials at any time that it suits your diary. We’ve kept the courses bite-size, usually less than 20 minutes long, to fit with your busy schedule. All you'll need to sign-up is the email address you use to log into AdWords and your 10-digit Customer ID, which you can find at the top-right of your account.

Take this important next step to grow your business today and visit the AdWords Online Classroom.

Posted by Richard Flanagan, Google Australia AdWords

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Viglink: Easier Way to Monetize Links On Your Blog

Guest post by Oliver Roup, VigLink CEO


If you spend as much time working on your blog as we do, you wonder if there's a way to get paid. Many bloggers monetize by selling ads on their site but now there is a way to get paid for your actual content rather than just the ads that go around it.

Any time you write about a product or service, you're connecting your audience to that product. If someone makes a purchase, the seller benefits from your written word—you influenced a purchase. There are thousands of websites that will pay you a fee for any business you bring them through a form of online advertising called affiliate marketing. With affiliate ads, web publishers are compensated for driving online actions.

VigLink is a content monetization company that makes affiliate marketing very easy for bloggers. We offer a simple snippet of code you can install in your blog that automatically and transparently does all the work for you. We've catalogued and signed up for more than 12,500 affiliate programs and we collect all the performance information and deliver you a single integrated payment. In return, VigLink takes 25% of the incremental revenue you earn.

There are no other costs or fees and nothing changes about how your site looks or behaves. Join VigLink and enroll your blog in less than a minute or learn more by watching this two minute video.




Oliver Roup is the CEO and co-founder of VigLink, a content monetization company backed by Google Ventures. 

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Google Election 2010 political panel

I love election time and these days, the Internet makes it so easy to access information about political issues and participate in political debate. Last week, Google Australia was honoured to host three politicians who certainly care deeply about the Internet and communications online.

Senator Kate Lundy, Paul Fletcher MP, Senator Scott Ludlam, and AEC State Manager Doug Orr attended a press conference at Google Australia to launch new Google initiatives to make it easier for Australians to engage and participate in the 2010 election.

You can see videos of this event at youtube.com/australiavotes, including speeches and a lively panel discussion covering filtering, broadband policy, maths education and voting age. The panel were grilled by school students, journalists, and citizen reporters from youtube.com/electionWIRE.



You can find out more about Google’s election initiatives at google.com.au/election2010.

Posted by Alan Noble, Engineering Director, Google Australia

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