Google Street View Trike on tour: Aussies choose their favourite destinations

We recently unveiled the Street View trike at Taronga Zoo in Sydney - soon you'll be able to take a tour of the zoo from your own lounge room. But where to go next in a country that offers so many beautiful locations off the beaten track? We knew there was no one better to ask than those who know our country best - you guys. We called on Australians to share with us their most inspired suggestions on what the trike should photograph for the rest of the world to see on Google Maps, and we've been overwhelmed by the response. More than 3,000 destinations across the country were nominated in the categories of City Life, Cultural Areas, Natural Wonders and Hidden Gems.

Last week, thousands of Aussies voted on which of their favourite off-road attractions they want the Google Street View Trike to capture for a special Street View imagery collection on Google Maps.

We're happy to announce the winning destinations for each State and Territory:

• Parliament House and War Memorial, ACT
• Valley of the Giants and Tree Top Walk, WA
• Mount Lofty Botanic Garden, SA
• Lord Howe Island, NSW
• Melbourne CBD laneways, VIC
• Port Arthur, TAS
• Simpson Gap Bicycle Path, Alice Springs, NT
• Hamilton Island QLD

Thank you to everyone who submitted ideas and voted in the Street View Special Collections Poll. From natural wonders like Hamilton Island to the Melbourne CBD Laneways, we feel proud to show-off to the world some of our most beautiful destinations that reflect our culture.

The trike will now embark on its national tour with a team of specially-selected Google riders, who have been in training to get their quads of steel in tip-top shape. We hope to add as many of these locations to Google Maps as we can over the next year.



Posted by Katharina Friedrich, marketing manager

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Broadcast your cause: YouTube Nonprofit Program now in Aus

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

Thousands of organisations have joined the YouTube Nonprofit Program since it first launched in the US in 2007 to raise awareness for a range of issues - from kids in need to people with disabilities, animal welfare to ending poverty. Some have even raised tens of thousands of dollars in a single day by urging the community to donate with a call-to-action overlay.

Now nonprofits in Australia can join as well! Starting today, eligible Australian organisations can apply to receive a free brand channel, increased upload capacity, placement on the Nonprofit Channels page, and the ability to add a call-to-action overlay to their videos. These organisations can also join YouTube Video Volunteers to find a skilled YouTube user to create a video for their cause.

Aussie organisations that join the YouTube Nonprofit Program by March 12 can also be eligible for the global DoGooder NonProfit Video Awards to honour the best nonprofit videos of 2009. YouTube has partnered with See3 Communications and the Nonprofit Technology conference to make these awards possible, and will feature the winning videos on the YouTube homepage, as well as award $2500 to each winner and recognise them at NTEN, the world's largest nonprofit technology conference, in the US. Visit the Nonprofit Video Awards channel to find out more.

Want to know how to get started? We worked with three great nonprofits in Australia already using YouTube - Plan Australia, AIME - Australian Indigenous Mentoring Experience and NAPCAN National Association for Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect - to create a video about their experiences. Check it out below and visit the YouTube Nonprofit Program's homepage to learn more.



Posted by Leticia Lentini, Nonprofit Lead in Australia

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The next generation of ad serving for online publishers

Editor's Note: This is a cross post from the Official Google Blog. DoubleClick Ad Exchange is not yet available in Australia.

Today, we're announcing the next generation of ad serving technology for online publishers -- DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP).

For the past few years, we've been investing in a suite of solutions — AdSense, ad-serving technology and the DoubleClick Ad Exchange — to help online publishers make the most money possible from their content, whether they sell advertising directly through their own sales force, through an ad network such as AdSense, or a combination of both.

For major online publishers — including social networks and online communities, entertainment sites, e-commerce sites and news sites — managing, delivering and measuring the performance of ads on their websites can be a hugely complicated process. A publisher's ability to manage this process can have a significant impact on how much money they make from their online content.

Imagine you're a major online publisher with a popular global surfing website and an ad sales team. Every second of every day, you have difficult decisions about what ads to show and how to measure their relative performance. For example:

• In the same ad space, a surfboard wax advertiser may want to run a static image ad for your Australian readers, while an airline offering flights to Hawaii may want to run an expandable interactive ad for your American readers.
• A fast-food restaurant wants to run their burger ads before noon and their pizza ads in the afternoon.
• You've sold 10 different surfboard makers a million ad slots at slightly different prices; now you have to allocate them across your various webpages to fulfill all these orders over the next two weeks.
• One of your surfing tournament reviews is linked to by a popular news site and you have a surge in traffic. Your sales team couldn't predict this, so you're potentially left without any ads for thousands of readers. You want to fill this ad space by selling it via an ad network which has ads available.

This is really just scratching the surface. Managing ad space can involve faxes, emailed orders, the manual scheduling of different ad campaigns across multiple sites and difficult decisions about how to allocate ad space most effectively.

Major online publishers use ad serving technology to manage the complex process of how and when the ads they have sold appear on their websites. In recent years, we've invested significantly in our ad serving products — DoubleClick's DART for Publishers for large publishers and Google Ad Manager for growing publishers. Thousands of major online publishers use these products to serve billions of ad impressions every day.

But we see an opportunity to improve ad serving even further by combining Google's technology and infrastructure with DoubleClick's display advertising and ad serving experience. Since we acquired DoubleClick in March 2008, our engineering and product teams have been working with online publishers to tackle the obstacles that prevent them from maximizing revenues from their websites.

The upgraded DFP includes a wide variety of features that will help publishers to get the most value out of their online content:

• A new interface that has been completely redesigned to save time and reduce errors.Far more detailed reporting and forecasting data to help publishers understand where their revenue is coming from and what ads are most valuable.
• Sophisticated algorithms that automatically improve ad performance and delivery.
• A new, open, public API which enables publishers to build and integrate their own apps with DFP, or integrate apps created for DFP by a growing third-party developer community (apps under development today include sales, order management and workflow tools).
• Integration with the new DoubleClick Ad Exchange's "dynamic allocation" feature, which maximizes revenue by enabling publishers to open up their ad space to bids from multiple ad networks. Dynamic allocation is described in this document [pdf].

DFP comes in two flavors, tailored for different publishers' needs: DFP, for the largest online publishers, and DFP Small Business, a simple, free version designed for growing online publishers. We'll be migrating current DFP publishers to the upgraded DFP over the next year as we continue to add features and modules, and we'll be moving Google Ad Manager customers to DFP Small Business in the coming weeks.

To reflect our continued investment in DoubleClick's products; and the central role of DoubleClick's technology products within Google's display advertising business, we're also today unveiling some changes to the DoubleClick logos - including typset changes, incorporating a new "by Google" theme, and retiring the "DART" brand.

The upgraded DoubleClick for Publishers is a perfect example of our continuing innovation in this area, and we believe that it will add significant value to online publishers' content. You can read more about the features of the upgraded DFP on the DoubleClick blog and on the DFP website.

Posted by Neil Mohan, Vice President of Product Management

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Auto Pagination on Blogger

by Vardhman Jain, Software Engineer, Mountain View

Latency is a word you hear a lot at Google. We are always looking for ways to make our products faster, because we have consistently found that faster page loads mean more satisfied users. This post is the first of an occasional series that will discuss ways in which we’re working to make blogs load faster for all users.

A few months ago, we took a look at ways to improve the performance of Blogger blogs, and noticed that many pages — particularly search results pages, label pages and archive pages — were taking longer to load than they should.

This has lots of implications. Users suffer — pages take longer to load, and for anyone around the world who pays for their bandwidth, they can incur unnecessary charges as their browser downloads more content than needed. You suffer, because as latency increases, pageviews go down. (See here for a study Google did last year for this phenomenon at google.com.)

Starting today, we’re rolling out a change that affects how we paginate webpages on Blogger. We will dynamically adjust how much content to send to the browser depending on (a) the amount of HTML on the page being requested (in kilobytes) and (b) the number of images on the page. Users can continue to use “older posts” and “newer posts” navigation elements to see additional posts.

For major changes like this, we do incremental roll-outs so we can monitor performance as they progress. We expect the change to be fully deployed over the next week, and once fully deployed, we expect to see several results:

• pages will load faster


• pageviews, if impacted at all, may increase

We will keep an eye on things, and if we see anything unexpected, we will update this post. Otherwise, keep blogging — and we’ll keep working to make your blog faster for you and your readers!

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Our submission on mandatory ISP level filtering

There has been a lot of attention around the Australian Government's mandatory ISP level filtering proposal. Google--and many of you--have argued that the proposal goes too far, with a broad-scoped filter, and a regime which takes the focus off more important areas such as online safety education and better support for policing efforts.

In December we expressed our concern with the Government's filtering proposal in this blog. Today we join the Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA), which represents 12 million library users around Australia, Yahoo! and the Inspire Foundation in proposing some core principles for a Safer Internet. We also expand on our views in a submission to the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy.

Here are the highlights from our submission:

It would block some important content. The scope of content to be filtered ("Refused Classification" or "RC") is very wide. The report Untangling The Net: The Scope of Content Caught By Mandatory Internet Filtering has found that a wide scope of content could be prohibited including not just child pornography but also socially and politically controversial material. This raises genuine questions about restrictions on access to information, which is vital in a democracy.

It removes choices. The Government's proposal removes choices for parents as to what they and their children can access online. Moreover a filter may give a false sense of security and create a climate of complacency that someone else is managing your (or your children's) online experience.

It isn't effective in protecting kids. A large proportion of child sexual abuse content is not found on public websites, but in chat-rooms or peer-to-peer networks. The proposed filtering regime will not effectively protect children from this objectionable material.

Moreover, the filter appears to not work for high volume sites such as Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, as the impact of the filter on Internet access speeds would be too great.

YouTube is a platform for free expression. We have clear policies about what is allowed and not allowed on the site. For example, we do not permit hate speech or sexually explicit material, and all videos uploaded must comply with our Community Guidelines. Like all law-abiding companies, YouTube complies with the laws in the countries in which we operate. When we receive a valid legal request, like a court order, to remove content alleged to violate local laws, we first check that the request complies with the law, and we will seek to narrow it if the request is overly broad. Beyond these clearly defined parameters, we will not remove material from YouTube.

Our view is that online safety should focus on user education, individual user empowerment through technology tools (such as SafeSearch Lock, Safety Mode on YouTube), and cooperation between law enforcement and industry partners. We're partnering with some tremendous organisations in Australia towards this goal.

Posted by Iarla Flynn, Head of Policy, Google Australia

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Free online AdWords training this month

Our free Google AdWords Training has kicked off for 2010. Training sessions are hosted online by local Googlers specialised in AdWords, who present topics live and can answer your questions throughout the session via instant chat.

Join us for our next training session '5 Steps to AdWords Success' on Tuesday 16th February – 11am (Sydney time).

In this session you will learn about the following five steps to a successful AdWords account:

• How to structure your account for best results;
• How to select effective keywords;
• How to write a good ad;
• What makes a good landing page; and
• Free tools you can use to track the success of your AdWords.

This session is ideal for new advertisers, or advertisers who are keen to master the basics of AdWords success. To attend, all you need is a computer with an internet connection and sound.

Register today at our webinars page. This page also includes on-demand presentations that you can watch at any time.

See you online!

Posted by Jenny Woodrow, Google AdWords team

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Introducing Google Maps Labs, your passport to a world of new features

We're pleased to announce the launch of Maps Labs, a set of opt-in features that add useful functionality to Google Maps (and even more pleased because we developed this here in Sydney!). Labs allow us to quickly experiment with new Google Maps features, add new ways of interacting with the map, or just try out something wacky. If a Lab proves popular it may become a standard feature of Google Maps in future.

To activate individual Labs features, click on the green conical flask icon at the top right of the screen. This will bring up a list of Labs that you can enable. If you're logged in with your Google account, we will remember which Labs you have enabled when you next visit Google Maps.

To get started we have a range of useful Labs available today. You can enable the Aerial imagery that we recently launched in the Google Maps API. You can zoom in to a particular location just by dragging a box around it using the new Drag 'n' Zoom control. You can browse nearby businesses with the What's Around Here button and test your world geography with our Where in the World game. Or in case you still yearn for the days when you could turn paper maps upside down we even have Rotatable Maps.

We chose not to offer a lab that replicates the experience of struggling to fold a map back up though. If you really miss that, we can't help you.

Because they're experimental, Labs may not be quite as robust as some other features on Google Maps. In fact there's a chance they could change, break, or disappear at any time. Just in case, we've provided an escape hatch. If you discover that a Labs feature causes you problems use this link to disable all Labs and select just those you want to keep: http://maps.google.com/maps?ftr=0.

We hope Labs enhance your Google Maps experience and look forward to adding more in the future. To keep up to date with the latest Labs, get help with a particular Labs feature, or even suggest new Labs, check out the Maps Labs Google group.

Posted by Jez Fletcher, Maps Labs engineer

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