Transit directions for Adelaide in Google Maps

Getting from Victoria Square to Upper Sturt Park via public transport in Adelaide just got easier, with the launch of transit directions for the city on Google Maps. Adelaide is the second Australian city to get transit directions on Google Maps, after we announced it was launching in Perth earlier this year.

Using information from Adelaide Metro, you can see public transport directions and timetables for Adelaide in Google Maps.

Want to know where the nearest bus-stop is? Planning a trip a week or two in advance? Figuring out a new commuting schedule? The transit feature on Google Maps lets you to customise your searches by specific date and time, so that you can see what's up and coming, and how to get where you need to be.



I'm looking forward to using the feature when I visit Adelaide for my friends' wedding (hi Trav and Jem!) next year. I can now guarantee I won't be late for the ceremony ...

We want to keep providing Australians with useful local tools that make their lives easier, and we're excited about working with other transit agencies to roll out transit directions on Google Maps in even more Australian cities.

Posted by Andrew Foster, Product Manager

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Improved look for Street View in Australia

Street View in Google Maps has been quite a hit! In fact, when we launched it in August, covering most of the country, searches on Google by Australians for Street View increased by over 5000%.

Lots of Australian businesses are embedding Street View into their websites, and we're hearing great stories of Australians who are using it to find shops and restaurants, places to live, or just explore the country.

Today, thanks to feedback from our users, we've now made Street View even better and easier to use.


View Larger Map

You can read all about the improvements on the LatLong blog here. Or watch the video below where the famous "Pegman" takes you through the streets of Sydney.



Happy exploring!

Posted by Andrew Foster, Product Manager

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My Maps Australia Awards 2008 - Three Days to Go

The 2008 My Maps Australia Awards are soon coming to a close. Over the past month we've been receiving My Maps from across the country highlighting your special knowledge of Australia. Some great examples include:

Photodiary of a Nomad
Big Things of Australia
Brisbane Coffee

Have an idea for a My Map you would like to share with the world? There's still time to enter the 2008 My Maps Australia Awards and receive one of ten "Best My Maps Awards" or the grand prize of a 13" 2.1 GHz Macbook and eternal Australian mapping fame. Entries close this Friday, November 28.

Posted by Jori Pearsall, Product Marketing Manager

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Keep in touch with voice and video chat

Today we're launching a new feature that lets you have free, high-quality voice and video chats with friends and family anywhere in Australia or overseas. Gmail voice and video chat takes place all without leaving the browser -- no more switching to another window or running another program.

Sometimes there's no substitute for speaking to and seeing someone, and in tighter economic times, an online video or voice chat is a cost-effective option. If a smiley face and a 'lol' aren't getting your message across, with a simple click you can now share your real meaning face-to-face over a video connection.



All that's needed is a webcam and small browser plugin, and you can start video chatting with your friends, family, and colleagues in Gmail. If you don't have a webcam, you can simply chat by voice.

To get started, visit this site.

Posted by Ashley Gorringe, Product Marketing Manager

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Reactions: easily engage your readers

One of our goals at Blogger is to make it easy for authors to get feedback on their content; we believe that authors are driven in part by the reactions and criticisms offered by their readers, and that these interactions enhance the quality of blog content. In support of this effort, we're launching Reactions, simple annotations chosen by authors and given by readers.

With Reactions, readers can easily respond with one click, increasing feedback on posts.

Photo by Kevin Steele

To enable Reactions, log in to your dashboard, go to Layout > Page Elements and click the Edit link in the Blog Posts element to open the blog post configuration tool. Then, check the box next to Reactions, edit your reactions as a comma-separated list, and click Save.

Reactions works with Layouts templates, though if your template is heavily customized, you may have to reset your widget templates for Reactions to appear. If you have a Classic template you will need to switch to Layouts to use Reactions.

Of course, Reactions isn't the only way to gather great feedback from readers; we also recently launched the Embedded Comment Form. With both Reactions and better commenting, we aim to make it easier for you to get the response and adoration you deserve.

Try Reactions now! We hope your reaction is <3.

Updated, 2:30 PM: Corrected to say that Reactions is a Layouts-only feature.

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Blogger.com - more like a big truck, less like a series of tubes

Here at Blogger we’re always working to make the site and your blogs faster and more reliable. We want you to think of us as a big truck: able to handle anything you can dump on us.

Tuesday’s election was a good chance to see just how big a truck Blogger actually is, and we’re happy to report that Blogger-hosted blogs, for the most part, held up under the record-setting traffic.

That being said, there were definitely some hiccups (potholes?) along the way. Our favorite political and polling analysis blog, FiveThirtyEight.com, received an order of magnitude more visitors than the next most visited blog. They also received more than 50 times as many comments as the next most commented-on blog. Unfortunately, this traffic caused some publishing delays for Nate and Sean as well as some intermittent slowness on their site.

After we got word of the trouble, we were able to shift some resources around to keep things running fairly smoothly for the rest of the night. Now that traffic has calmed down, our engineers are hard at work tuning and improving Blogger based on the experience.

We’d like to thank bloggers, commenters, and readers for participating in one of the biggest blogging events ever. Your voices validate what we do, and every day we look forward to making Blogger faster and better for you.

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The 2009 Google Online Marketing Challenge is on

Online advertising is an increasingly important part of Australian businesses' marketing mix.

In 2008, we launched an Online Marketing Challenge to give students the chance to experiment with the medium and empower small local businesses to harness the power of the web to attract more customers.

The response to last year’s Challenge was so overwhelming that we decided to make this an annual competition. Giving students direct experience of online marketing whilst they are studying is a great way for Universities to provide students with direct practical skills they can use on graduation. Whether they find a job in marketing, accounting or retail, or set up their own business, graduates can all benefit from understanding online marketing.

The 2009 Google Online Marketing Challenge is now open. It's a global online marketing competition that is open to any higher education institution, anywhere in the world. To find out more or to register your team, visit the 2009 Challenge website.

1650 different teams across 47 different countries took part in 2008, pitting their wits against one another to further develop and maximise returns for real world local businesses' online marketing strategies.

Using free $200 vouchers to spend on Google AdWords, each student proposes and implements a campaign for their chosen local business, makes tweaks and then final recommendations at the conclusion of a three week competition period.

Full details on 2008’s winning teams and finalists can be seen here.

Last year, a team from the University of Western Australia was the global winner. We're hoping Australia can go back-to-back this year!

Recently, the 2008 Asia Pacific regional winners – from the Australian Graduate School of Management, and two regional finalists – The National Kaohsiung University of Applied Sciences (Taiwan) and The National Taiwan University – visited Google's headquarters in Sydney for the Regional Finalists' retreat. For many students, it was their first visit to Australia and a chance to compare approaches, discuss strategies with online marketing optimizers at Google and gain some insights prior to the 2009 Challenge.

For us at Google, it was immensely gratifying to meet these students and hear them speak of the enthusiasm and benefit they received from competing. In fact, one of our winners had to leave early for a job interview, and it was fantastic to hear that his Challenge experience is helping him in his quest to find a job!

We hope lots of Australian students from across different academic disciplines will get involved in 2009. Good luck!

Posted by Will Blott, University Programs Manager

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