Getting to know the Blogger Community

Posted by Lisa Ding, Community Manager

Hi Bloggers!

For more than a decade now, the Blogger team has watched our community of users grow dramatically and have had the pleasure of seeing some truly amazing blogs along the way. Here on Buzz, in addition to keeping you updated on new features, we’re going to focus on engaging with our user community and connecting more readers to exceptional blogs.

On Buzz, you can be expecting a variety of new posts, such as:

1. A revolving showcase of funny, interesting, beautifully designed, creative, and just plain awesome blogs. 
2. Guest posts from other successful Blogger users. 
3. Re-shares of interesting posts from your blogs. 
4. Personal posts from members of the Blogger Team, so you can get to know us better. 

In the coming weeks, I’ll be asking you to submit quality blogs that you enjoy reading. Each week, I’ll post a sample of the best blogs I’ve found within a certain theme (food, design, sports, etc) or, that incorporate a recently-released feature. I encourage you all to nominate blogs that don’t necessarily have an established following, since we’d like to promote new bloggers who could benefit from more interactions with other bloggers and more readers. Also, we’ll be sure to credit the nominators, so you’ll be getting a readership boost, too!

Please say hello via comments, and tell the Blogger community a little about yourself. Also, look out for the first request for blog nominations coming soon.

Best,
Lisa

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The +1 button launches in Australia

Back in March, we announced the +1 button on search results in English on Google.com - a way for you to recommend content to your friends, contacts and the rest of the world directly from Google search results and ads. Today, 1+’s will start appearing on Google’s search results in Australia for some users, and will start showing for most logged in users by the end of the week.



Just like on Google.com, the +1 button allows you to recommend a news article, your favourite brand of sandals or an attraction you visited with a single click.

The +1 button will appear next to each search result

After pressing the +1 button, you have the option to undo the action immediately

Say, for example, you’re planning a trip to London. If you are searching for a hotel, we may show you +1’s from your globe-trotting friend. Or if you’re looking for things to do on a sunny day, we may show you +1’s from your food-loving cousin next to the result for a gourmet market.





But +1s aren’t only for search results. You will also see +1 appear on sites large and small across the Internet. From today, you can +1 local businesses on Truelocal, holiday accommodation at Stayz, vehicles at Mitsubishi, daily deals on Spreets and electronics at Kogan. In the next few days sites like Trading Post, The Australian and News.com.au will also be adding +1 to their sites. Website owners can implement the +1 button on their site within minutes.



How do we know which +1’s to show you? We use many signals to identify the most useful recommendations, including the people you are already connected to through Google (your chat buddies and contacts, for example).



To get started +1’ing the stuff you want to recommend, you’ll need to create a Google profile. You can use your profile to see all of your +1’s in one place, and delete those you no longer want to recommend. To see +1’s in your Google search results you’ll need to be logged into your Google Account.



We believe that +1, combined with all of the social content we’re now including in search globally, will mean even better, more relevant results than you get today.



Posted by Kate Conroy, Product Specialist

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365 reasons to consider Google Apps

This is a cross-post from the Google Enterprise blog.

Today Microsoft is launching Office 365. Many of you have asked for our perspective, so we thought we’d share some thoughts to help you make an informed choice.



Technology inevitably gets more complicated as it gets older. Upgrading platforms and adding features results in systems that are increasingly difficult to manage and complex to use. At times like these, it's worth considering a clean-slate: an approach based on entirely modern technologies, designed for today’s world.



Here are some things to think about as you compare Google Apps and Office 365:



Designed for Teams

Office 365 is for individuals. Apps is for teams.



Most of us no longer spend our days working on our own. We work with others: creating, collaborating, sharing.



With Apps you can work with multiple people in the same document. There’s no need to worry about whether or not it’s possible to share a spreadsheet, or co-edit a presentation. You can see people type in real time, and share a file in just two clicks. Discussions bring people into your documents for rich conversations. You don’t need to buy additional licenses to work with others, or hope people outside your company have upgraded to the same software. If you have a Google account, you can collaborate.



“We’ve shaved eight weeks off of the end-to-end budgeting process using Google Docs, which translates into close to 30% time savings,” said Michael Rodger, Delta’s Director of Digital Innovation.



Productive Anywhere

Office 365 is built for Microsoft. Apps is built for choice.



Office 365 is optimised for Windows-based PCs and devices, which reduces your flexibility. Our applications are designed to work well on any device, on any operating system. Desktop, laptop, Chromebook, tablet, smartphone. Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, Blackberry, iOS, Windows Mobile. Edit on the go. Share from anywhere. Start on your computer, move to your tablet, finish on your phone. When the web is the platform, it just works.



“The initial reason we looked at Google Apps was cost savings, but the on-going value of access to information from anywhere totally independent of the device is where we're seeing the real gain,” said Scot Adams, the CIO of Cadillac Fairview.



Simple & Affordable

Office 365 is 11 different plans, three editions and two tiers. Apps is $5/month with no commitment.

Google Apps for Business and five of eleven Microsoft Office 365 plans

(Click image to expand)

We have a single, transparent, low price that meets everyone’s needs, and it hasn’t changed in 4 years. There’s no extras for basics like phone support and robust productivity apps. No long term contracts or opaque enterprise agreements.



We also don’t lock you in. By design, we make it as easy as possible for you to move off of Google Apps if you want. We have a dedicated team of engineers whose sole goal is to help you get your data in and out of our products for free. We believe that the way to keep you long term is to continue to innovate and make our products better so that you choose to stay with us.



Pure & Proven Cloud

Office 365 is about the desktop. Apps is about the web.



Google Apps are accessed in a browser. There’s no client software to install, secure and maintain. Upgrades and years of patience aren’t necessary to get access to the latest innovation, just click refresh. Our customers received more than 125 new features in the last year alone.



Running a reliable and secure cloud-based service is challenging and requires you to rethink everything. This year Gmail has been available 99.99 percent of the time, which translates to less than 5 minutes of downtime per month. That includes all downtime, planned and unplanned, of any duration, for any and all users. We make zero exceptions when calculating our uptime, and we’re transparent with you in the rare cases when things go wrong.



You can't just take legacy, desktop software, move some of it to a data center and call it "cloud." Apps was born for the web and we've been serving hundreds of millions of users for years.



Ok, we didn’t get to all 365 reasons here today, but we hope we gave you some things to think about. Ultimately, we have a fundamentally different vision for the future of software. That’s good, because it provides a clear choice. Before you invest ten years in the past, we’d humbly encourage you to invest ten minutes in today by checking out why so many businesses have chosen Google Apps.



Apps isn’t for everyone. But in the last week alone 38,000 businesses decided to give it a try. Maybe you should too.

Posted by Shan Sinha, Google Apps Product Manager

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5 days, 5 Tips: Pick the right content for your website

Three weeks ago we shared five tips to help you master the basics of your website. This week’s tips will help you refine what’s on your website already, or give you new ideas for helping your customers understand your products and services.

TIP #1 -- Make sure your customers can contact you. Do you include the basic information customers need to visit your store? An address and a map is a good start. Go a step further and specify whether your entrance is on the corner of two streets or around the back. Do you have the right phone number for customers to call you with questions? If you’ve included an email address, make sure it’s an account you check regularly.

TIP #2 -- Willing to travel...but how far? If you travel to your customers -- like carpet cleaners or massage specialists or pest control specialists do -- be clear about how far you’re willing to travel. Do you only service clients within the city limits? If you deliver, what’s your delivery area? Consider listing a neighborhood, postcode, or street boundaries.

TIP #3 -- Keep it fresh. What information can you include to keep your customers up-to-date about special offers, new products, or events? Consider featuring a new product or offer every week on your homepage so your customers keep coming back to your website. If you update Facebook or Twitter pages, include a link to these on your website. Sydney based Cakes by Nadia does this well.

TIP #4 -- Look your best. Photos help your customers see instantly if you have what they’re after. Show images of your business in action: a stylist cutting hair, a restaurant during dinner service. Keep in mind some basic photo editing tips. If you’re showcasing a product, make sure it’s well lit so your customers can see the details. Crop the photo to keep the focus where you want it. Consider what appears in the background. One restaurant took pictures of some fantastic looking main courses, but there was a dirty stove and a grease-splattered chef lurking in the background.

TIP #5 -- Write clear captions. If you’re including images on your homepage or in a product gallery, make sure you include relevant information in the caption, such as a description of the product with relevant dimensions or weight, how much it costs, and whether it’s available in store or for delivery.

And if you’re reading this but don’t have a website yet, visit Getting Aussie Business Online to get your own domain name and free website.

Posted by Kate Conroy, Product Specialist

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Blog This!

Posted by Bruce Polderman, Product Manager

One of the things I often hear is how challenging it can be to generate ideas for topics to write about. This may be especially true for popular blogs when you feel as though your followers are eagerly awaiting your next post. Sitting down and staring at your computer with the hope of feeling inspired can result in disappointment. 

On my blog for example, I have a mix of posts that were authored be me, and articles that I've discovered elsewhere that I think may be of interest to others. Like many of you, there are times when I have things that I’m eager to write about, and other times when I just want to share something.

If this sounds familiar, you may find the “Blog This!” Chrome Extension of interest. It enables you post to your blog from any web page with just one click. The Extension is available on the Chrome Web Store under the “Blogging” category.

When you install the extension, a button will appear on your browser toolbar. Simply click the button to open Blogger in a new application window.

The new post is pre-populated with a link to the web page you're on, as well as any text you've highlighted on that page. Edit the post to your liking and post it instantly to your blog.

Happy blogging!

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Living Life in a Day and a summer in Australia at the Sydney Film Festival

This is a cross-post from the Official YouTube blog

This weekend at the Sydney Film Festival, we in the Australia office saw a single day on earth, a legendary summer to be remembered and the vision of thousands of YouTubers from all over the world on center stage. Along with the Australian premiere of “Life in a Day,” the world was introduced to “We Were Here,” a feature film made by YouTubers about summer in Australia.



From January - April 2011, YouTubers down under submitted their videos to create an archive of events and experiences from a summer not-to-be-forgotten. Everything from sunsets at the beach, bats in the night, to extraordinary events in Queensland were uploaded to form a new visualisation of the Australian summer map. These stories were pulled together by up and coming Australian director Amy Gebhardt, mentored by Dr. George Miller of “Happy Feet”, “Mad Max” and “Babe.”



To celebrate the world premiere of “We Were Here,” we’ll be featuring the film on YouTube for a short time before making its way around the film festival circuit. Have a look at this collective vision of the Australian summer, as told by director Amy Gebhardt:

Together, these two films are milestones in the evolution of radically inclusive film-making that is taking shape all over the world.



Ernesto Soriano III, Product Marketing Manager, YouTube Australia recently watched “1000 words for summer.”

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Announcing Blogger Mobile Templates

Posted by Jiho Han, Software Engineer

A few months ago we introduced mobile templates to Blogger in Draft. Today, we’re excited to announce that not only will these templates be available to everyone, we’ll be supporting all 27 Template Designer templates. We invite you to make your blog smartphone-friendly by going to the Dashboard > Settings > Email & Mobile tab and enabling the mobile template option.

Blogger mobile templates are mobile-optimized versions of our Template Designer templates. If you are using one of these templates, when you enable the mobile template option your blog will begin rendering using the mobile version of the same variant. Even if you are not using a Template Designer template, or using a heavily-customized version of one, you can still enable this feature to have your blog start rendering in a generic default mobile template that we have created.

Some of our feature highlights:

• Preview: Get a glimpse of how your blog will be displayed by clicking on the Mobile Preview button. You can also see it on your smartphone by scanning the QR-code.


• Automatic redirection: Viewers will see the mobile version of your blog when accessing from smartphones*.


• Template support: We are now supporting all 27 templates. Some gadgets are also supported**.


• Mobile ads: Mobile AdSense ads will be displayed at the top of the post pages and at the bottom of the index page if the blog has an AdSense gadget or in-line blog ads.


• Comments and videos: Viewers on smartphone devices will be able to make comments and watch videos.

We hope you enjoy the mobile templates. As always, we would love to hear from you so please let us know what you think through our feedback form, and stay tuned for future improvements.

*WebKit-based mobile browsers are supported for this launch.
**Supported gadgets/elements in this launch: Header, Blog, Profile, AdSense, Attribution.

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The need for speed - and how it drives innovation

The Internet has become an amazing platform for information and communications. The blogs you read (thanks!), the tweets you send and receive, the videos you watch and share, are all testimony to that fact.

The openness of the Internet has fueled an explosion in innovative online services. Basically anyone can access it, anyone can communicate and anyone can upload content. Nevertheless, online services are only as good the weakest link in the chain, which is typically the user's Internet connection, and sometimes a slow connection is simply not good enough.

Let me illustrate this point with a story about a start-up company. The company:
• started out as a web radio company in 1995.
• saw opportunities in using the Internet to make videos available online.
• was acquired in 1999 by a major search engine company for US$5.7 billion.

What’s the company?
If you guessed YouTube, you were wrong! The company was Broadcast.com, and today it simply doesn’t exist. If you search for Broadcast.com you get forwarded directly to Yahoo.com, who paid quite a bit of money for it at the height of the dot com boom

Broadcast.com had a very similar concept and business model to YouTube, but it failed because of an insufficient critical mass of high-speed broadband users to both upload and download content. Between 2000 and 2007 the number of broadband users in the US increased from 5M users averaging 500kbps to 50M users averaging 3Mbps, i.e., 10x the users, 6x the speed. So it has only been in the last few years that Internet speeds have been fast enough to support YouTube’s business model.

There are other examples. Can you remember the name of the first social-networking site? MySpace? Friendster? No, it was Six Degrees, also back in the mid 90s. Their biggest need was photo uploading which could not be done at the time. Imagine a social network without photos!

So there is a direct correlation between Internet speed and delivering on innovation. Simply put, higher speeds enable innovative new services; slow ones don't. Faster connections not only enable applications that require more bandwidth, but also enable users to run more of them at the same time. Best of all though, faster speeds enable applications to run that have not yet been invented. Bring it on!

This is an excerpt of a talk I gave at CeBIT Australia in Sydney earlier this week.

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Add the +1 Button to Your Blog

Posted by Marcos Almeida, Software Engineer

“+1” is often used as a digital shorthand for “this is pretty cool.” It’s also a way for friends, contacts, and the rest of the world to find great things on Google search. Google launched the +1 button back in March as a way to help share web content and make search more personal and relevant. For more information about the +1 button, you can watch this short video:



Since Google made this feature available, web publishers and bloggers have been asking us how they can add the +1 button to their sites, including Blogger blogs. Today, we’re excited to let you know that you can add the +1 button to Blogger blogs with just a few clicks.

To add the +1 button to your blog, you’ll need to enable Share buttons on Blogger. To do this, go to Design > Page Elements on your Blogger dashboard, find the Blog posts area, click on Edit, and select the “Show Share Buttons” option. If you are already using Share buttons, the +1 button will automatically show up as a new share option.

By adding the +1 button to your blog, you’re providing an easy way for your visitors to recommend your posts to their friends right from your blog. Here’s how it works: Let’s say you blog about biking. One of your readers, Tom, finds your recent post about mountain biking interesting, and clicks on the +1 button. Now, when Tom’s friends and contacts search for biking or mountain bikes and your post appears in Google search results, they might see an annotation showing that Tom +1’d your post, helping your content stand out.

[Example of how a blog post +1’d by visitors appears on the Google search results page]

We hope +1’s will help your blog stand out better in search results, which could increase both the quality and quantity of traffic to your blog. Now, that’s indeed a big +1, isn’t it?

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NSW Office of Trade, Business and Industry joins Getting Aussie Business Online

Across the country there are many organisations dedicated to helping small businesses succeed, and one of the topics they’re most often asked about is “should I get online?” That’s why today we’re launching the Partner Program for the Getting Aussie Business Online campaign.

Today the NSW Office of Trade, Business and Industry has joined the Partner Porgram. We’ve worked with them to organise a series of workshops and website clinics at their current Microbiz Week in Sydney. Microbiz Week is dedicated to solo operators and home-based entrepreneurs; they can drop by to learn how to get online and get some personalised advice on how to make the most out of their website.

As a partner of Getting Aussie Business Online you’ll get free tools to help your members or customers be successful online. You’ll also appear as a featured partner on our portal and you will have an opportunity to promote relevant events. Whenever possible, we’ll assist with training and expert speakers.

Check out out our events at Microbiz Week and let us know if you want to become a partner.

Posted by Bora Toska, Small Business Marketing, Google Australia

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