Blogger is turning 10

A few months ago we mentioned that Blogger was turning 10 years old later this year. That day is almost upon us just six days away in fact and we've been hard at work trying to think about what we could give you to celebrate.

Wait, what? What we could give you? That's right. This is our birthday but we're celebrating your contributions over the years. Over the past decade, millions of people around the world have made Blogger what it is today: a vibrant community of real people telling their stories. When we asked you to tell us your Blogger story, you responded: you connected with far away family, shared your art, grew up, demonstrated your expertise in an emerging area of research, overcome childhood adversity, met authors and poets you admire, coped with an illness, became a parent, learned a new culture, struggled with your parents' divorce, placed digital messages in virtual bottles, helped people fix their cell phones, wrote a novel. You even made the inaugural blogging team at school, and while there you're working on your PhD on consumer trends towards blogs. There are millions of such stories and they grow by the day.

As we turn ten, we wanted to give you some presents to commemorate this milestone and thank you for letting us be part of your story. Over the next several weeks we will be releasing a number of new features on Blogger. Some presents are because you asked for them this spring. Other presents are because they meant a lot to us. And some are because our friends (both inside and outside of Google) wanted to chip in and give you something. In short, it's a lot like a real birthday: you won't necessarily want or need every present that you get, but keep in mind: it's the thought that counts!

We're excited to share this milestone with you. Stay tuned, the next several weeks will be a lot of fun!

Read More Here...

Blogger Joins the Hubbub

When you publish a public blog post, you want to share it with the world—immediately! Blogger helps by feeding your posts to subscribers all over the web. Unfortunately, while we really want things to be as speedy as possible, sometimes it can take a while for the bits to travel through the intertubes.

We're happy to announce that Blogger has rolled out support for the PubSubHubbub protocol, which turns feeds into real-time streams. What does this mean to you? As feed readers adopt PubSubHubbub, your posts will surface immediately for their users. For example, Google Reader has started rolling out support for PubSubHubbub; when it's complete, your Blogger posts will surface in Google Reader as soon as you publish them. FriendFeed, Livedoor Reader (a feed reader popular in Japan), and FavIt already support PubSubHubbub—which means that their readers are already benefiting from this new feature.

Best of all, your blog is already broadcasting updates—you don't need to do anything to enable it.

Some more details: All blog post feeds now contain a "hub" element, and will ping Google's hub on every post update. If you're a developer writing code to monitor feeds and want to get updates efficiently in near real-time, you just need to detect the hub link and subscribe to the hub server. Then, sit back and let the hub push updates to you. To learn more about PubSubHubbub and start adding code to your project, see the PubSubHubbub site.

Thanks to Brad Fitzpatrick and Brett Slatkin who worked on a 20% project with the Blogger team to add this support over the past few weeks. We encourage any developer who wants to get a near real-time flow of updates from Blogger to use PubSubHubbub for their application—it's simple, efficient, and lightning fast. If you have questions, you can find answers in our developer support forum, or you can reach us on Twitter: @blogger.

This is one of many features announced as part of Blogger's 10th birthday. Happy Birthday!

Read More Here...

5, 4, 3, 2, 1 Blast Off for National Science Week

Today was an exciting day for Google Australia. We are thrilled to partner with National Science Week to launch the National Science Tour. In honour of the launch, today we hosted in our offices NASA astronaut Megan McArthur, astrophysicist and indigenous astronomy expert Ray Norris, high school students from St Andrews Cathedral College, science teachers, and science writers.





At Google we're passionate about advancing science in Australia and inspiring students to study science, maths and engineering because we believe that these will be the important and sexy jobs of the future. These fields will allow you to pursue your passions, to think big, and to progress Australia and the world.

Today we were certainly inspired to think big as we heard the awesome space travel experiences of Astronaut McArthur, fresh from her May space mission on the STS-125 deployment that serviced the Hubble Telescope.

Astrophysicist Ray Norris wowed us with explanations of black holes and explored the possibility that Aboriginal Australians were the world’s first astronomers.

If you're interested in learning more about science and astronomy (it is International Year of Astronomy and Evolution), here are some great places to start:
www.scienceweek.gov.au
www.starhunt.net.au
earth.google.com/sky/
earth.google.com/moon/


Read More Here...

Allianz combines TVC and online

Australian consumers are increasingly going online to research and purchase financial products and services. In recognition of this trend, award-winning insurance company, Allianz, has used an innovative TV and search marketing campaign to attract consumers to its online offering.

The insurance company's most recent TV commercial continues its creative campaign of using genuine customer testimonials. It features Saskia, who found Allianz by searching on Google, and who likes the fact that buying insurance online fits her lifestyle. Allianz offer 10% discount for customers who buy online.

Allianz compliments the TV commercial with a search marketing campaign to capture customers at point of relevance. Used in conjunction with an offline campaign, AdWords can provide real-time measurability of how that campaign is performing.




Read More Here...

iGoogle now lets you share, play and collaborate with friends

iGoogle's been great with helping me organise my online life. I read the latest news, check my personal email, create (or gladly check off!) my to-do list and sometimes, even play a game of Tetris when I need a quick break --all straight from my iGoogle page. As part of the iGoogle team, we are committed to connecting users to the information that is most useful and important to them in an easy-to-use and customisable format. So I'm excited to tell you about a cool new feature to help users get more out of their iGoogle page.

Starting this week, we're rolling out some new social gadgets for iGoogle to all Australian users. Not only can you continue to do all the things you love to do on your homepage, but you now have the option to share all kinds of information, play games and collaborate with your friends too. We've released 12 new social gadgets to choose from, so that there's something for everyone. If you're into reading news or watching videos and want to share interesting findings with your friends, you can now easily do so with gadgets like GoComics, YouTube, or News.com.au. If you enjoy playing games, add favourites like Chess, Who Has the Biggest Brain, or the New York Times Crossword gadget. And if you're a productivity guru, try out our new social To-Do gadget -- we can only provide the gadget, the actual productivity is up to you!

Your current gadgets will continue to work normally and you don't have to take advantage of the social gadgets if you decide it doesn't fit your interest. But by adding and enabling social gadgets, you'll be able to have an even deeper, interactive experience with your gadgets when you share them with friends. In fact, we've created a Friends group so that you can share things with the people you care about. If you have a Friends group within your Google Contacts, you will be able to share with those friends on iGoogle without any extra work. You can add and edit friends in and out of this group at any time.


Your friends are able to see what you share or do in social gadgets through the gadgets themselves, or through a new feed of information called Updates, a way to see what your friends are doing on iGoogle without adding all the gadgets that they have. Updates can include everything from favourite YouTube videos, to recently shared photo albums, to movie plans for the upcoming weekend...the list goes on and on!


We'll be rolling out these features starting this week. So if you don't see your iGoogle page updated yet, just check back. These social gadgets will continue to have more features built into them and are the first of many to come. We're also encouraging all gadget developers to take advantage of iGoogle's growing audience of tens of millions of users and start building a social gadget for iGoogle If you're an interested developer, you can read more about it on our developer site: code.google.com/igoogle. If you have questions or feedback, check out our support site.

We hope these new social features will enhance the way you discover content and share with friends. But that's enough from me for now -- my iGoogle page is telling me that it's time to make my next Chess move!


Read More Here...

Inverloch Primary School students practice their Google doodling skills

Registrations are arriving daily for this year's Doodle 4 Google Australia initiative. Schools in every state and territory in Australia have registered to have their kids create their very own version of the Google logo depicting their 'wish for Australia'. If your child's school has not registered, there's still time - visit this site before August 14 to get under way.

This year, the young doodlers are lucky enough to have their creations judged by some of Australia's leading artists - Ken Done and Anne Geddes - and Hugh Evans, who's been inspiring Australians to think about their wish for not just Australia but the whole world, through the Global Poverty Project.

Here's a tip for the aspiring artists ... Ken says he'll be looking for colour, originality and creativity in his judging, and he can't wait to see the entries as they come in.

Speaking of colour, originality and creativity ... while we can't share this year's Doodles until the semi-finalists have been announced, we do have some other gorgeous art works to show you instead - and perhaps they'll provide some inspiration.

Earlier in the year, the Year 6 students at Inverloch Primary School in Victoria, inspired by this year's Anzac Day Doodle on google.com.au, decided to create their very own Google Doodles. They cleverly use some of our most iconic ANZAC day imagery - the Australian flag, poppies and rosemary, horses, and slouch hats - in their vibrant art works.










Congratulations to Ms Johnstone's class - your creations are gorgeous, and we've enjoyed decorating the Google office with them!




Read More Here...

Tweet Your Blog

Tweeting your new blog posts is a great way to engage your readers, and something that many on the team have taken advantage of for our own blogs. An easy way to do this is through Twitterfeed, which automatically updates Twitter with each new blog post. Here's how to set it up:

Head on over to the Twitterfeed site, click Sign In with OpenID and type in your Blogger blog's URL. Once you've registered you'll then be taken to the New Feed page where you can start linking blog feeds to your Twitter account.

First click the Connect your feed to Twitter Account button, which will prompt you to enter your Twitter login credentials to authorize Twitterfeed's access. You will get a nice little confirmation once you've successfully linked up your Twitter Account.


Next just enter a name for your feed, as well as your blog's Feed URL into the form. If you want to customize your feed's settings you can modify frequency, add prefixes, and even create keyword filters. Otherwise you're all set—click the Create Feed button and your Twitterfeed is enabled.

You can always come back later to the Twitterfeed site and modify your feed settings, as well as look at click-through metrics for existing feeds.

Read More Here...

Blog Archive