More Countries, More sellers, and More buyers

(Editor's note: This is a cross-post from the Official Android developer blog)

Since we’ve launched Android and Android Market, we have seen the population of Android users and devices expand into many countries. This widespread adoption has brought with it growing interest in Android Market’s support for the buying and selling of paid applications in these additional countries.

We have been hard at work on this and it is my pleasure to announce that effective today, developers from 20 more countries can now sell paid apps on Android Market. Additionally, over the next 2 weeks, users in 18 additional countries will be able to purchase paid apps from Android Market.

Support for paid application sales is now expanded to developers in 29 countries, with today’s additions of Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Hong Kong, Ireland, Israel, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Russia, Singapore, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland and Taiwan.

In addition, Android Market users from 32 countries will be able to buy apps, with the addition of Argentina, Brazil, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Israel, Mexico, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Singapore, Sweden, and Taiwan. No action is necessary if you have targeted your paid apps to be available to “All Locations” and would like to launch in these additional countries. If you have not selected “All Locations” and would like to target these additional countries, or if you have selected “All Locations” and do not want to launch your apps in these additional buyer countries, please visit the Android Market publisher site to make the necessary adjustments.

We remain committed to continuing to improve the buyer and seller experiences on Android Market. Among other initiatives, we look forward to bringing the Android Market paid apps ecosystem to even more countries in the coming months. Please stay tuned.

Posted by Eric Chu, Android Developer Ecosystem

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Veni, Vidi, Verba Verti

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

Ut munimenta linguarum convellamus et scientiam mundi patentem utilemque faciamus, instrumenta convertendi multarum nationum linguas creavimus. Hodie nuntiamus primum instrumentum convertendi linguam qua nulli nativi nunc utuntur: Latinam. Cum pauci cotidie Latine loquantur, quotannis amplius centum milia discipuli Australiani Domesticam Latinam Probationem suscipiunt. Praeterea plures ex omnibus mundi populis Latinae student.

Hoc instrumentum convertendi Latinam rare usurum ut convertat nuntios electronicos vel epigrammata effigierum YouTubis intellegamus. Multi autem vetusti libri de philosophia, de physicis, et de mathematica lingua Latina scripti sunt. Libri enim vero multi milia in Libris Googlis sunt qui praeclaros locos Latinos habent.

Convertere instrumentis computatoriis ex Latina difficile est et intellegamus grammatica nostra non sine culpa esse. Autem Latina singularis est quia plurimi libri lingua Latina iampridem scripti erant et pauci novi posthac erunt. Multi in alias linguas conversi sunt et his conversis utamur ut nostra instrumenta convertendi edoceamus. Cum hoc instrumentum facile convertat libros similes his ex quibus edidicit, nostra virtus convertendi libros celebratos (ut Commentarios de Bello Gallico Caesaris) iam bona est.

Proximo tempore locum Latinum invenies vel auxilio tibi opus eris cum litteris Latinis, conare hunc.

Jakob Uszkoreit, Ingeniarius Programmandi

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New for the Google Display Network: Show ads related to demographic categories

In March 2009, we announced a beta of interest-based advertising, which included remarketing and interest category marketing, to help Google Display Network advertisers reach people who are most likely to be interested in their products and services.

The early results show that interest-based advertising is helping to deliver better ads and product offers for users, more effective campaigns for advertisers, and higher returns for website publishers. Remarketing was recently launched to all advertisers, and the number of advertisers using interest category marketing has continued to grow.

As part of our efforts to keep improving the product and to give users more control over the ads that they receive, we are adding some new categories that will enable us to show ads that relate to demographic categories, such as age and gender. This works exactly the same way as interest category marketing works today - we associate categories with particular browsers, based on the sites and pages visited on the Google Display Network. To infer demographic categories, Google looks at the types of Google Display Network sites visited, and compares that information with aggregated survey data on site visitation. For example, if someone frequently visits sites that have a majority of female visitors, we may associate her browser's cookie with the “female” demographic category. Then, advertisers may choose to show more ads that are relevant to women to those people as they browse sites across the Google Display Network, the same way advertisers can choose to show ads related to other categories, such as sports or gardening.

As with interest categories, users may view and edit demographic categories or permanently opt out of receiving interest-based ads entirely with the Ads Preferences Manager. The interests and inferred demographics associated with a particular browser are based on the sites on the Google Display Network that are recently visited - and not on user data - so these categories may change over time. As one of a number of companies offering ads based on inferred interests and demographics, we remain committed to providing users the highest level of control and transparency.

Interest category marketing (including the new demographic categories) remains in a limited beta, and we're working to help more advertisers run campaigns over time.

Posted by Karen Stocks, Head of Display for Google Australia

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Stats Gadgets Graduate from Draft

Last month we released two new stats gadgets to the Blogger in Draft testing ground; after hearing your feedback and making a few tweaks, we’re happy to announce that they are both now ready for the main stage. The new-and-improved Popular Posts and Blog’s Stats gadgets can be added to your blog right now from the Gadget Directory by clicking Add a gadget from the Design | Page Elements tab.

Both of these gadgets take advantage of the traffic data that is being collected by Blogger Stats and provide an easy way for you to pass that info on to the readers of your blog.

The Popular Posts gadget will automatically find and display your blog’s posts that have the most pageviews. You can choose whether to display image thumbnails or post snippets in addition to the post title. You can also choose the time window to be used for calculating pageviews and the number of posts you’d like to display.

The Blog’s Stats gadget lets you show off pageview data for your blog, with a handful of configuration options that are easily controlled. You can choose from a variety of styles and display options to suit your blog. We also provide an option to let you select the time window to be used for calculating pageviews.

We hope you enjoy these new gadgets and want to thank you again for your feedback as we fine-tuned them to their current state.

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Who Will Be Named YouTube Australia’s Secret Talent?

Editor's Note: This is a cross-post from the YouTube Australia Blog.



Hundreds entered, only 10 remain! We watched mind-bending magic acts, acrobatic dance, original tunes, classical music, and many, many others to find our top 10. One of our finalists will win a trip to Madrid, Spain, and the title of YouTube Australia’s Secret Talent. Runners up will receive prizes provided by Vodafone.

Who will win? Now it’s up to you to decide. We’ve narrowed the pool down, and are letting YouTube Australia select their favourite. To cast your vote, visit youtube.com/secrettalentsau and let us know who should. Didn’t make the cut? Stay tuned for when we announce our next competition!


Posted by Ernesto Soriano, YouTube Team,

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How Blogger Inspired The Creation Of BlogWorld & New Media Expo

Guest post by Rick Calvert, CEO of BlogWorld & New Media Expo

When the Google Blogger team asked me to write a guest post for the Blogger Blog, I really didn’t know where to start. Today it occurred to me that the story of how I found Blogger might be a good place.

I have been reading and commenting on blogs since the year 2000. I am a news and political junkie so most of the blogs I read were political. Tons of them were hosted right here on Blogger. I was amazed at the original news being reported; the insightful commentary and opinion; the incredibly moving personal stories from Milbloggers and their families and yes the crazy conspiracy theories. This Blogging thing was really incredible. Who were all these smart people?

So many times I wished I could be a blogger, but I wasn’t a techie or a geek and it just seemed like it would be too difficult. Fast forward to 2005; I was in the middle of my two-hour daily commute home on the 91 freeway out of Los Angeles and listening to center right talk radio guy Hugh Hewitt. He said something that got me worked up so I called in. I don’t remember what we talked about but at the end of the conversation he said “you should start a blog.” So that night I went home and Googled “how to start a blog.” Blogger was the first result. So I clicked through and found the message you have all seen and the message that changed my life forever “Create Your Blog Now.” I had no idea how easy it was to start a blog! It only took me five minutes to do something I had been longing to do for nearly five years!

Things started moving very quickly from there—someone actually read my blog. How the heck did they find me? I wondered. Top political bloggers from both sides of the aisle were linking to me. TO ME! Every political pundit I asked to interview said yes! Other bloggers were selling books on their site through Amazon. I thought to myself, I read a lot of books; I should sell the books I like on my blog. A friend helped me sign up as an Amazon Associate and I was off to the races. Then one day an Ad Network contacted me and wanted to sell ads on my blog.

I had so many questions. How much money could I make blogging? How do I add things like widgets and blog rolls to my blog? Can I do audio and video posts? So I started looking for the “Blogging Tradeshow.” Being a tradeshow and conference organizer for the last 15 years I knew there was a tradeshow for every industry. I was stunned when I realized no such conference existed. I asked my blogger friends if they would ever attend the “Blogging Tradeshow.” They all said yes. I asked my tradeshow friends if they thought it was a good idea. They all said yes.

And so BlogWorld & New Media Expo was born in November of 2006. We held our first event in November of 2007 with 1,600 attendees! This October 14-16 at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas we will host the fourth annual BlogWorld & New Media Expo. Over 4,000 bloggers, podcasters, YouTubers, internet radio, and TV broadcasters will be attending and things have come full circle.

We are thrilled that for the first time the blog platform that changed my life, Blogger, will be exhibiting at BlogWorld. We have had folks from Blogger speak at the conference every year, and this year Product Manager Chang Kim will be speaking on “The Future of Blogging Platforms.” And now for the first time all of you can visit the Blogger booth (# 308) and ask your own questions. Or just stop by to say hi and meet the Blogger team, or like me stop by and give them a huge THANK YOU for changing your life.

By the way if you still need to register for the show, as a member of the Blogger community you can use this special code for 20% off of any registration package at BlogWorld 2010: BLOGGER20

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Tools to visualise access to information

Editor's Note: This is a cross-post from the Official Google Blog.

When Google’s services are blocked or filtered, we can’t serve our users effectively. That’s why we act every day to maximise free expression and access to information. To promote transparency around this flow of information, we’ve built an interactive online Transparency Report with tools that allow people to see where governments are demanding that we remove content and where Google services are being blocked. We believe that this kind of transparency can be a deterrent to censorship.

Like all companies, Google’s services occasionally experience traffic disruptions. Our new traffic tracking tool helps us and others track whether these interruptions are related to mechanical outages or are government-induced. Each traffic graph shows historic traffic patterns for a given country and service. Graphs are updated as data is collected, then normalized and scaled in units of 0 to 100. This new tool—which is global and includes China—will replace the Mainland China service availability chart, which showed product access for China alone. By showing outages, the traffic graphs visualise disruptions in the free flow of information, whether it's a government blocking information or a cable being cut. For example, the graphs show that YouTube has been inaccessible in Iran since June 12, 2009, following the disputed presidential election.

In April we also created a website that shows the number of government inquiries for information about users and requests for Google to take down or censor content. Today we’re updating this interactive Government Requests map with data from the first six months of 2010. We’ve also updated our analysis of the trends we saw across the data over the past six months. The new data for 2010 now includes the number of individual items asked to be removed, per country (for example, there may be many URLs per a single request.) You can learn more about trends in the data here. We view this as a concrete step that, we hope, will encourage both companies and governments to be similarly transparent.

Free expression is one of our core values. We believe that more information means more choice, more freedom and ultimately more power for the individual. Free expression is, of course, also at the heart of Google’s business. Our products are specifically designed to help people create, communicate, share opinions and find information across the globe. We hope this step toward greater transparency—and these tools—will help in ongoing discussions about the free flow of information.

Posted by David Drummond, SVP, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer

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Get more from AdWords, win cool prizes

We’re so excited to announce the first AdWords Train & Gain challenge.

You’ve asked us for recommendations of things you should be doing with your AdWords account, so we’ve put together a series of simple steps to help you become more successful with your online advertising.

The AdWords Train & Gain challenge starts October 4th. You’re invited to participate. Simply sign up, and you’ll receive a weekly list of simple steps for improving your AdWords account. Then, sign in to your account twice a week, and take the suggested actions on how to better manage your account. At the end of four weeks, you’ll have learned a lot of different ways that you could improve your AdWords account. And if you completed all the steps, you could win an Android Phone. Or even a free consultation with an AdWords expert in Google’s Sydney office.

Sign up for AdWords Train & Gain

Here’s a sneak peak of what you’ll be focusing on.

• Improve ad texts: Write ads that highlight your most competitive features: Low price, special services, free delivery, etc.
• Use negative keywords: Specify which search terms you don’t want your ad to appear on. This will help you keep costs down because it prevents clicks from people looking for things you don’t offer.
• Start tracking sales/leads: See where your ad spend is working best and focus your money on the efforts that are generating business.

We hope you’ll sign up for AdWords Train & Gain, so you can see for yourself: it really doesn’t take a lot of time to make a big difference for your business.

Also, if you’re ever looking to learn more about your AdWords account, you’ll also want to check out our brand new AdWords Small Business Centre. The site is a central AdWords learning hub for small and medium businesses. It allows you to explore beginner, intermediate or advanced AdWords topics and connects you to the latest AdWords news and best practices, all easy-to-find in one place.

Posted by Rich Flanagan, Google AdWords Team

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Four Australian finalists announced in YouTube Play

Back in June, YouTube and the Guggenheim Museum in New York organised a historic, international contest called YouTube Play searching for the world’s most creative art videos. We received more than 23,000 entries, and today, the YouTube Play channel will reopen featuring videos from the shortlisted artists, covering animation, motion graphics, documentary work and music videos.



We’re especially excited to showcase here the four Australian finalists, whose work is truly inspired, and ranges from Darcy Prendergast’s evocative stop motion glow sticks and Yanni Kronenberg & Lucinda Schreiber’s stunning chalkboard animation, to Keith Loutit’s time lapse film techniques and Nick Bertke’s feet-tapping electronica piece, ‘Gardyn’.



These finalists will have their videos on show at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York on October 21, 2010 with simultaneous presentations at the Guggenheim museums in Berlin, Bilbao, and Venice.







“Autumn Story” by Yanni Kronenberg and Lucinda Schreiber.

Yanni Kronenberg is a freelance photographer and director and Lucinda Schreiber is an award-winning Sydney-based illustrator, animator and director.







“Bathtub IV”, Keith Loutit.

Known as the pioneer of the tilt-shift / time-lapse technique, Loutit is a Sydney-based photographer and short filmmaker who first recognised how time and focus combine to support the powerful illusion of miniaturisation in film.







“Gardyn”, Pogo (Nick Bertke)

Pogo is an electronic music artist living in Perth. He is known for his work recording small sounds from a film or a specific scene, and sequencing the sounds together to form a new piece of music. In “Gardyn”, Pogo uses syllables of his mother's voice and the sounds of her backyard to create a beautiful video and soundtrack.

“Lucky”, Darcy Prendergast

Darcy Prendergast is a director that founded Dee Pee Studios, an award-winning Melbourne-based clay animation house. Darcy utilises a glow stick or coloured torch to draw an image in the sky that is captured into a video frame. This film took over 6 months to shoot.



The next stage for these finalists is to have their work judged by YouTube Play’s jury — including iconic performance artist Laurie Anderson, Japanese fine artist Takashi Murakami, music group Animal Collective, and The Wrestler director Darren Aronofsky — who will pick the top 20 videos for the Guggenheim exhibit.



Posted by Ernesto Soriano, YouTube Team

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Display advertising: “WATCH THIS SPACE”

During the Mother’s Day shopping season this year, the online electronics retailer Kogan ran a special promotion for their LCD TVs, digital photo frames, and digital video cameras. They created a display ad campaign on the Google Display Network (comprising over a million partner websites, as well as Google sites like YouTube) and used a technology called remarketing to show ads to Australians who had previously visited their site as they later browsed the Web. The campaign, which ran for a month, was extremely effective. Kogan’s ads achieved click-through rates at three times the industry average for traditional banner ads. The campaign was also one of Kogan’s most successful in terms of revenue and driving sales.

We’re now proud to see thousands of great display advertising stories like this every month around the world—from advertisers large and small. In Australia alone, 17 of the top 20 advertisers as ranked by Nielsen have run display campaigns with Google. Great things happen when the science of search meets the art of display - like the world’s first round YouTube videos or a competition to discover the secret talents of Australians. And it’s just the beginning.

Starting today, we’re going to be talking about our vision for display advertising - and where we think the industry is headed - with a campaign called “WATCH THIS SPACE.” As part of this, you might see ads across the web, in print, and maybe even when you’re strolling around the CBD in Sydney. Our goal with this campaign is to highlight some of the exciting changes taking place in the display industry today and to start a conversation with agencies and marketers.

We know that the display advertising industry faces a number of technical challenges, and it’s exactly these sorts of problems that we’re excited to work with agencies and marketers to help solve. We think that we can use the technology and expertise that we’ve developed in search and search advertising to improve display advertising for users, advertisers and publishers, right across the web.

Posted by Karen Stocks, Head of Display for Google Australia

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Super Simple: Your Creative Canvas

When it comes to design, sometimes less can be more. This is the mantra behind our newest variant Super Simple, freshly-released to the Template Designer this week. We’ve taken the original Simple variant and stripped it down to the bare essentials, putting your actual blog content front and center on the page.

As with all of our variants, you are free to tweak all of the individual elements and styles to your liking. And if you are looking to design a fancy blog template from scratch, the Super Simple variant is also a great frame to build upon.

You can check out the new variant right now in the Template Designer, under the Simple category. As always, our ears are open to your feedback, so please feel free to let us know what you think.

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Google Doodle Submission

Google 'Doodles' celebrate special occasions and are a tradition here at Google. A talented team of designers at our California headquarters works hard to create art to mark such days as Arthur Boyd's birthday, or the anniversary of the Opera House.

If they ever need help with coming up with a design, they might turn to 14 year-old Timothy McDonald from Western Australia, who recently sent us this fabulous design inspired by our (apparently very addictive) Pacman Doodle.

Timothy created a Doodle commemorating the 30th anniversary of Galaga - thanks for sharing, Timothy! We hope you enjoy seeing it on the Google Australia blog.

Posted by Kate Mason, Google Communications

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10 Days Until Top Talents Revealed

Editor's Note: This is a cross-post from the YouTube Australia Blog.

Think you’ve got what it takes to be named YouTube Australia’s Secret Talent? There are only a few days left to submit your video until our top finalists are featured on YouTube’s stage. 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 perhaps you can drop a beat to outshine DJ Cotts and the Fully Sick Rapper.

We’re still accepting submissions of under 90 seconds in length, containing only original content. Entries close on September 22, so get those videos edited and submit them to youtube.com/secrettalentsau.

Our finalists will be announced on September 25, and then it’s up to you to decide who wins a money-can’t-buy musical experience in Madrid, Spain, and the title of YouTube Australia’s Secret Talent!

Posted by Ernesto Soriano, YouTube Team

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Customize Your Blog’s Background With Your Own Image

Posted by Wongoo Lee, Software Engineer

We know that personalizing your blog is important. Although you can adjust templates, layouts, backgrounds and more with our Template Designer, you wanted more ways to make your blog completely unique.

Now you can use your own image as your blog background. Go to Design | Template Designer | Background, click on Background Image, and you’ll see the new “Upload image” option, which allows you to select and upload your image. There are a variety of options such as alignment, repeat, and scroll for how to display your new image. This feature is another graduate from Blogger in Draft. You can find more information in our original announcement.

Tips from the Blogger team: If you want a full-screen background, we recommend using an image that's 1800 pixels wide and 1600 pixels high, so that the background image can fill the entire screen even for the readers with large monitors. To make sure your blog loads quickly, background images must be small in file size. As the maximum file size you can upload is 300KB, you may need to reduce your photo’s file size using Photoshop, Mac OS X Preview, or one of many free online tools. You can also tile a smaller image, but keep in mind that patterns work better than photographs, which can make your blog look cluttered.

(The good)

(The bad)

This feature is now available on all Blogger blogs and we welcome your suggestions and comments on our Help Forum.

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Google launches Family Safety Centre for Australia

When I was younger, my parents taught me to cross the road safely. I learned to look both ways and to be aware of what was going on around me, and soon I was able to navigate my way first around the local area, and then further afield, on my own.

In many ways, using the Internet is similar to finding your way around the real world. Everyone needs the skills to navigate the online world safely and responsibly. To help people do just that, and to mark the end of National Child Protection Week, today we are launching a new Family Safety Centre for Australia —a one stop shop for families and communities to learn about our safety tools, controls, and best practices online.

The new Safety Centre provides guidelines on how families can help control the things their children see via tools like the SafeSearch lock or YouTube Safety Mode, and protect their privacy by limiting who can see the videos, pictures and blogs meant to be shared with family members only. We’ve also added a section on mobile and how to manage geo-location features in apps like Search and Latitude and on Android devices as a whole.

But it’s not just about Google’s products and features. For other day-to-day practical tips about online safety we asked some of our Google parents to share their own ideas.







In order to include answers in the Safety Centre to specific questions on topics like how to deal with inappropriate content online and cyberbullying, we worked with a number of wonderful organisations that share our commitment to online safety. Thank you to the Australian Communications and Media Authority, Bravehearts, Bullying No Way, Kids Helpline, and ThinkUKnow, for their enormous help and support in putting together this Safety Centre. Together, we want to help everyone be smart, safe and responsible online.

With kids growing up in an age where digital know-how is essential, it’s increasingly important to ensure that they’re developing healthy, safe, and responsible online habits. And at Google, we’re thinking every day about how we can help people to do just that.

Posted by Ishtar Vij, public policy team, Google Australia and New Zealand

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Blogger’s 11th Birthday Round-Up

Posted by Seth Shamban, Blogger Consumer Operations

Last week we hosted Blogger’s 11th bday celebration, and a huge thanks goes out to everyone who helped us celebrate! Since we were only able to attend a few parties in person (which was awesome!), we enjoyed watching tweets, videos, and photos stream in at #bloggerfiesta. From the four hour conference for 90 people in Manila, Philippines to the three person casual rendezvous at a restaurant in Duluth, Georgia, we heard great stories from around the world about bloggers meeting each other face-to-face.

Even though we’re an internet company, we know the importance of meeting in-person. It provides a great opportunity to learn from others, meet new folks and share tips. We loved that one Fiesta attendee even learned how to set up a custom domain.

While we had some fun of our own last week (particularly in our Sydney office), our favorite stories are the ones you’ve shared. We’ve linked to some of our favorites below. If you have a story from your Blogger Fiesta that you would like to share with us, please send it along to blogger-fiesta@google.com.

Blogger Fiesta Sydney in Google's Sydney office

• Post about Blogger Fiesta Buenos Aires
• Sidewalk Safari's Photo from Blogger Fiesta Dublin
• Bronx Blogger Fiesta Photos
• Blogger Fiesta Manila Videos

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Working to keep kids smart online, safe offline

This week is National Child Protection Week, an annual event to raise community awareness of child abuse prevention. There are many things we can all do to help prevent abuse and neglect of children - here are some tips from the National Association for Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect (NAPCAN).

Today is also the 14th annual national awareness and fundraising campaign for White Balloon Day, which highlights the work of Bravehearts - an organisation dedicated to combating child sexual assault in Australia. We share Bravehearts' belief that new technologies and new media are a vital way to educate children and parents about family safety, and recently assisted Bravehearts to deliver their child sexual assault prevention education program to 5,000 disadvantaged children in New South Wales. The Bravehearts Ditto education program has been seen by over 100,000 children across Australia, and an independent evaluation of the program suggests that the delivery of the principles embedded in the program can reduce the prevalence of not only child sexual assault, but also other forms of abuse including family violence and bullying, in a range of settings. To find out how you can get involved in White Balloon Day, visit this website.

Part of teaching kids to stay safe ‘offline’ involves teaching them how to be smart ‘online’, and we work with a number of child safety organisations to teach Aussie kids these important skills.

For example, last year we partnered with NAPCAN on Smart Online Safe Offline (SOSO), a unique social initiative that brought together community, government and the digital media industry to educate Internet users aged 9-15 years about potential dangers in their online environment. YouTube was a big part of SOSO's 2009 Cyber Bullying Affects Real Lives campaign, speaking to the video-savvy target audience in their own language and encouraging them to take a stand against cyberbullying and sharing harmful material online.

We also work with Reachout.com, a web-based initiative that offers information, support and resources to help young people improve their understanding of mental health issues, develop resilience, and increase coping skills and help-seeking behaviour. The service aims to break down the stigma attached to seeking help, and connect young people so they can share their stories and keeping themselves safe online and in everyday situations - from sex to partying, to driving. We’re working with Reachout.com to make their services more widely available, via different technologies like SMS.

We look forward to continuing our work in this space, with organisations who share our goals of seeing Australian young people be smart online and safe offline. This week we applaud the tremendous work of these organisations, and many others, who are working hard to achieve this every single day.

Posted by Ishtar Vij, public policy team, Google Australia

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Wave open source next steps: "Wave in a Box"

(Editor's note: This is a cross-post from the Google Wave developer blog).

Since the announcement that we will discontinue development of Google Wave as a standalone product, many people have asked us about the future of the open source code and Wave federation protocol. After spending some time on figuring out our next steps, we'd like to share the plan for our contributions over the coming months.

We will expand upon the 200K lines of code we've already open sourced (detailed at waveprotocol.org) to flesh out the existing example Wave server and web client into a more complete application or "Wave in a Box."

This project will include:

• an application bundle including a server and web client supporting real-time collaboration using the same structured conversations as the Google Wave system
• a fast and fully-featured wave panel in the web client with complete support for threaded conversations
• a persistent wave store and search implementation for the server (building on contributed patches to implement a MongoDB store)
• refinements to the client-server protocols
• gadget, robot and data API support
• support for importing wave data from wave.google.com
• the ability to federate across other Wave in a Box instances, with some additional configuration
• This project will not have the full functionality of Google Wave as you know it today. However, we intend to give developers and enterprising users an opportunity to run wave servers and host waves on their own hardware.

Since the beginning, it has been our vision that the Google Wave protocols could support a new generation of communication and collaboration tools. The response from the developer community to date has been amazing and rewarding. Even more so now, we believe that developers and other projects are a critical part of this story.

While Wave in a Box will be a functional application, the future of Wave will be defined by your contributions. We hope this project will help the Wave developer community continue to grow and evolve. We'll discuss more technical details of our plan on the Wave Protocol Forum, which is the best place to keep up with the latest progress on the open source project and learn how you can contribute.

Wave on.

Posted by Alex North, software engineer, Google Wave team

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Australian presents for Chrome's birthday

Today marks the second birthday of our web browser, Chrome. Looking back today on Chrome’s history, it’s amazing to see how much has changed in just a short time. In August 2008, JavaScript was 10 times slower, HTML5 support wasn’t yet an essential feature in modern browsers, and the idea of a sandboxed, multi-process browser was only a research project. All browsers have come a long way in the last two years and the web has become much more fun and useful.

Behind the scenes, we continue to extend the security features that help you browse the web more safely. This includes Chrome’s Safe Browsing technology—which serves as a warning system if you’re about to visit a site suspected of phishing or hosting malware; Chrome’s auto-update mechanism—which helps ensure that the browser is always up-to-date with the latest security updates; and the browser’s “sandbox”—an added layer of protection which prevents malicious code on an exploited website from infecting your computer.


Today, we’re releasing a new stable version of Chrome that is even faster and more streamlined. Chrome is now three times faster than it was two years ago on JavaScript performance. We’ve also been working on simplifying the “chrome” of Chrome. As you can see, we took the already minimalist user interface and stripped it down a bit more to make it easier to use. We combined Chrome’s two menus into one, revisited the location of the buttons, cleaned up the treatment of the URL and the Omnibox, and adjusted the color scheme of the browser to be easier on the eyes.

If you haven’t tried Chrome recently, we invite you to download our new stable version today at google.com.au/chrome. For those of you who have been using Chrome, thanks for a great second year! We hope that Chrome has made your life on the web even better, and look forward to the next year.

But what’s a birthday party without presents?! We thought we’d share the love around by compiling a list of some brand new Aussie Chrome extensions you might like to use to make life a little easier.

News and sports
Want some water cooler conversation for the office? You can find out what’s been happening with, for example, the election and the local economy simply by checking out the News.com.au and The Australian Business extensions. Or if you like sports, or acronyms, check out the AFL and NRL news sites with the click of a button.

Food, glorious food
Try our Menulog extension and browse for your food delivery options and special deals around the area, all from a handy map. If you are after a homemade meal, check out new recipes through the Taste.com.au extension.

Out on the town
The new Lasttix extension will provide you with hot last minutes deals for theatre, music concerts, comedy shows, sports games, opera, symphonies, and much more.

Collecting miles?
For all those who frequently travel to, from and around Australia there is the Qantas Frequent Flyer extension. Here you can get a snapshot of points earned plus great ideas on ways to use them.

Road trip
With the new CarSales extension you will be able to search 200,000+ cars for sale and get live notifications matching your search criteria.

You can find all these Aussie extensions and more in the Chrome extensions gallery. You might also want to make Chrome even prettier by using a Carla Zampatti or Akira Isogawa theme.

Enjoy and happy birthday Chrome!

Posted by Katharina Friedrich, product marketing manager

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