Posts tagged google
Chrome overtakes Internet Explorer as the Web’s most popular browser
Filed under that didn’t take long. Chrome’s first public, stable release was in December 2008. The first version of Internet Explorer, 1995.
In 2002-2003, IE controlled about 95% of the browser market.
More info via The Next Web.
Image via StatCounter.
Google’s Richard Gingras: We are at the beginning of a journalism renaissance
via Nieman Journalism Lab:
Richard Gingras, the head of news products for Google, visited the Nieman Foundation last Friday to talk about Google’s approach to news and information discovery, but also the pace of change in technology and how it has affected the future of news. Recently Gingras has spent time talking about his8 questions that will define the future of journalism.
On Friday he said newspapers need to completely rethink their approach to news, how the design of their site responds to the flow of audience and the ways news companies can separate their business model and content model to help increase audience and generate revenues.
Click-through to watch the video.
Google-NSA: A Relationship That Dares Not Speak Its Name
Via Wired:
A federal appeals court on Friday upheld the National Security Agency’s decision to withhold from the public documents confirming or denying any relationship it has with Google concerning encryption and cybersecurity.
That’s despite the fact that Google itself admitted it turned to “U.S. authorities,” which obviously includes the NSA, after the search giant’s Chinese operation was deeply hacked. Former NSA chief Mike McConnell told the Washington Post that collaboration between the NSA and private companies like Google was “inevitable.”
The Electronic Privacy Information Center, invoking the Freedom of Information Act, had sought such documents following the January 2010 cyberattack on Google that targeted the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. The attack was among the considerations that prompted Google to consider abandoning China, and Google announced that it was “working with the relevant U.S. authorities.”
The Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post followed up, saying Google had contacted the NSA following the attack.
EPIC sought documents seeking to know what type of collaboration there was between Google and the NSA and, among other things, records of communication between the NSA and Google concerning Google’s e-mail service Gmail.
In response, the NSA invoked a so-called “Glomar” response in which the agency neither confirmed nor denied the existence of records on the topic at all. EPIC sued and lost in the lower courts.
On appeal, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit sided with the NSA’s conclusion that admitting the existence of relevant documents would harm national security. (.pdf)
Today’s Keith Haring Google Doodle.
Applications Open for the AP-Google Journalism and Technology Scholarship Program
It’s early still but that doesn’t mean we can’t think ahead. And thinking ahead to the 2013-2014 academic year is what we’re going to do.
If you’re a journalism undergrad or grad student, the AP-Google Scholarship is offering six awards for $20,000 each. The deadline to apply isn’t until February 2013 but that doesn’t mean you can’t get a head start know.
This is especially true because much of the application require online portfolios and digital work so you have nine months to clean up, organize and put your best foot forward.
Via ONA:
The AP-Google Journalism and Technology Scholarship Program fosters new journalism skills in undergraduate and graduate students developing projects at the intersection of journalism and technology.
The program is targeted to individual students creating innovative projects that further the ideals of digital journalism. A key goal is to promote geographic, gender and ethnic diversity, with an emphasis on rural and urban areas.
Have you created original journalistic content with computer science elements? Are you thinking up new ways to tell a story with technology? Are you a “techie” who knows how to construct a journalistic story through multimedia? We’re looking for students pursuing studies at the crossroads of journalism, computer sciences and new media. If you’re on the cutting edge of digital media beyond the classroom, this scholarship is for you!
Application materials and requirements are available at the Online News Association.
To get a sense of what they might be looking for, take a look at this year’s winners.
As Google wrote on its blog when the winners were announced:
These students have big plans that range from producing hyperlocal data-driven stories, to developing open-source apps that allow for democratic news gathering and greater collaboration, to data visualization for current events and entertainment, to producing political news games and teaching journalists how to code.
Mailbag: Google+ & Social Media Edition
A graduate student at Indiana University emailed in with these questions.
Could you introduce yourself briefly?
I’m Michael Cervieri, creator of the Future Journalism Project. I used to teach media and technology at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and at the university’s School of International and Public Affairs. In my non-FJP life I run a media technology firm with my brother Peter.
Do you like using other social media platforms other than Tumblr? What is your feeling about social media?
Tumblr’s the primary platform I engage with, then Twitter, and then Google+ and Facebook about equally… Which is to say not very much. Through the FJP I’m also playing with Pinterest and Storify.
What do I think about social media? For my personal use it’s a bit of a time suck and I have to remind myself to step away from it, head outdoors and wrap my mind around something more substantive than the flurry of information I find myself in.
For professional use it’s integral to the FJP’s ability to build audiences and engage with them. I can’t think of how we would be able to accomplish what we do without it.
Societally, I’m a big believer in tools and platforms that allow people to connect, organize and share information. Social media increases the speed with which people can do so more than any other tool in history. This is great.
My fear with it though is that people will increasingly build information silos around themselves and only hear and expose themselves to information that they want to hear, and from a partisan perspective from which they’d like to hear it.
Do you use Google+ to communicate with your friends or family members? What is your feeling about Google+ Compared with other social media platforms?
Yes, but not very much. When I signed up for G+ I purposefully put people in Circles who I was not exposed to on other platforms. When it launched I thought of almost as a social media reset button where you could start from scratch and, for me, that was a good thing.
I like its feature set and think it great in developing conversations. There are only so many places though that you can spend your time online and G+ remains probably third on my list of places to engage.
After Google+ launched it was criticized for being a clone of Facebook. What do you think of that? And what features of Google+ do you think are unique compared with Facebook?
I wouldn’t call it a clone. Instead, I think social media has a distinct, baseline feature set.
Obviously, Facebook already had them and equally obvious was that if Google was going to launch a social network it would need those specifics as well. Circles, though was an innovation. So too what they’re doing with Hangouts.
I think Google and Facebook are pushing each other to innovate and become better. This is a good thing.
Google+ Hangouts platform opens to independent developers this week. Is that a way for Google to get more out of its chat feature? Do you think is that an imitation to Facebook?
I think any time you can open your platform for third party developers to work and interact with it you’ll see an explosion of innovation and use cases that weren’t previously thought of before. I don’t think it’s an imitation of Facebook. I think it’s a recognition that opening up APIs to third party developers is something every platform needs to do if it wants to be sustainable.
The competition between social media websites is increasingly fierce. What areas do you think products of Google+ should enhance in the future?
I think it’s just further refining what they currently have. For example, they just announced that with Hangouts they’re going to allow for larger audiences rather than the previous 10 maximum that they could handle. Previously, the integrated Google Docs into Hangouts to ease onlnie collaboration.
That said, I think it’s important to think of Google as an online identity system more than as a social network. Or at least to give its desire to be an online identity system equal weight to its being a social network. That’s how its chairman Eric Schmidt described it last summer.
Wikipedia: Goodbye Google Maps, Hello Open Street Maps
Wikipedia joins a growing list of high profile organizations leaving Google Maps and moving to the open source Open Street Maps. The move comes after Google announced in March that they would begin charging Web sites that receive more than 25,000 requests per month for use of their maps.
Via Wikipedia:
Previous versions of our application used Google Maps for the nearby view. This has now been replaced with OpenStreetMap - an open and free source of Map Data that has been referred to as ‘Wikipedia for Maps.’ This closely aligns with our goal of making knowledge available in a free and open manner to everyone. This also means we no longer have to use proprietary Google APIs in our code, which helps it run on the millions of cheap Android handsets that are purely open source and do not have the proprietary Google applications.
OpenStreetMap is used in both iOS and Android, thanks to the amazing Leaflet.js library. We are currently using Mapquest’s map tiles for our application, but plan on switching to our own tile servers in the near future.
Also, via Techspot, a look at mapping economics:
In March, Google announced it would be charging high-volume users for its once gratis Google Maps service. Developer accounts which pull in fewer than 25,000 requests per month are not considered high-volume and thus have remained free. However, for accounts that exceed 25,000 views, developers must pay between $4 to $10 for every additional 1,000 views generated. For popular websites and apps that rely on Google Maps APIs, this can add up pretty quickly…
…Although some may be quick to call out Google for its decision to charge a premium, Google Maps has really been the only mapping service to offer its product to everyone without cost. Traditionally, companies like NavTeq and TeleNav have always licensed their map data to third parties. It costs a lot of money to put together accurate maps and Google took some risk offering theirs free of charge. As a result, Google Maps has become the go-to place for many companies and users alike. In fact, comScore found that over 71% of Americans had used Google Maps in February.
For Publishers, Google+ Not Quite There Yet
In a letter to shareholders, Google CEO Larry Page includes some mind bending stats such as the fact that AdSense has paid out over $30 billion to content producers since its launch a decade ago.
Also noted is that Google+ has over 100 million active users.
How Google+ translates to the US news industry is taken up by ReadWriteWeb who report that so far it hasn’t gotten much traction.
Searchmetrics has released new data about the Google+ visibility of top U.S. newspapers that reveals stark differences in performance. But what it reveals most of all is that engagement on Google+ is still too low to send reliable social signals about a story to Google.
Of the top U.S. newspapers, The New York Times has the most popular Google+ page by more than double. As of April 2, when Searchmetrics collated the data, it was in the circles of 360,032 people. The Wall Street Journal had 149,905 followers. It drops off precipitously after that.
The Los Angeles Times had 21,294 encirclers, and The Washington Post had 19,674. Then it drops off another order of magnitude for USA Today and Chicago Sun-Times, and then you’re into the hundreds of followers.
As RWW notes, “360,000 of anything is a lot. Even 20,000 followers represent significant influence.” But the social signal news organizations are sending out through Google+ is scant with few readers actually using the platform to share articles.
Which is too bad since more activity around a publisher’s content within Google+ affects both Google search and Google news results.
Read through to explore RWW’s analysis of publishers’ Google+ numbers.
Google Unveils its Glasses
In a post on Google+ the Google[x] team unveil their vision for augmented glasses. The design concept is available here.
Via Project Glass:
A group of us from Google[x] started Project Glass to build this kind of technology, one that helps you explore and share your world, putting you back in the moment. We’re sharing this information now because we want to start a conversation and learn from your valuable input. So we took a few design photos to show what this technology could look like and created a video to demonstrate what it might enable you to do.
Could almost be as handy as a reporter’s notebook.
(Google) Art Project!
Google’s Art Project is a growing, interactive collection of some 30,000 images taken from participating museums around the world.
Launched in April 2011, the site now includes a social layer built with Google+. For example, visitors can create their own galleries and then use Hangouts to talk about and share the works with others.
Images are hi-res with a few works captured with “gigapixel” technology allowing viewers to zoom in on the art’s finer details.
Participating institutions range from New York’s Museum of Modern Art to Lima’s Museo de Arte de Lima to Delhi’s National Museum with 40 other countries in between.
Images: Pages from a Qur’an in Hijazi. Unknown, Arabia, late 7th Century. Museum of Islamic Art, Qatar.
Zero Dólar. Cildo Meireles, Brazil, 1978 - 1984. Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo.
Cyclists. Jiri Naceradsky, Czech Republic, 1971. Museum Kampa.
H/T: Memeburn.
freeDive
The Knight Media Digital Center at Berkeley has an alpha release for freeDive, a tool that turns Google spreadsheets into searchable databases.
Via the Knight Digital Media Center:
Imagine you have a spreadsheet of campaign contributions or crime statistics that you want to share. For years, you had to pay for a service or know how to code to build searchable databases of that information. You shouldn’t have to do that.
freeDive is a simple way for anyone make data searchable on the Web. The tool gives your users powerful tools to search and play with that data.
You don’t need to program anything. We built a simple wizard that uses the Google Visualization API. It pulls data from a Google spreadsheet, builds a table and creates filters that users can interact with. freeDive then gives you an embeddable widget that you can paste in any Web page.
And, if you can learn a few spreadsheet tricks, the world of real-time data is at your users’ fingertips.
Built by Len De Groot and Scot Hacker, freeDive uses the Google Visualization API, Google Query Language and jQuery.
Nelson Mandela Digital Archives Now Online
Via Memeburn:
Google and the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory (NMCM) have created a new Nelson Mandela Digital Archive on the web that is freely accessible to the world.
Google donated about US$1.25-million to the Johannesburg-based Centre in 2011 to help preserve and digitise thousands of archival documents, photographs and videos about Mandela.
Along with historians, educationalists, researchers and activists, users from around the world now have access to extensive information about the life and legacy of this extraordinary African statesman.
The new online multimedia archive includes Mandela’s correspondence with family, comrades and friends, diaries written during his 27 years of imprisonment, and notes he made while leading the negotiations that ended apartheid in South Africa.
The archive will also include the earliest-known photograph of Mandela, rare images of his cell on Robben Island in the 1970s, and never-seen drafts of Mandela’s manuscripts for the sequel to his autobiography “Long Walk to Freedom.”
Nelson Mandela Digital Archive.
Image: Warrants of Commital (document #1 front), 11/7/1962.
This item consists of 1 Warrant of Committal issued to Nelson Mandela by the Magistrate’s Court of South Africa. The warrant contains Nelson Mandela’s fingerprints. Via the Nelson Mandela Digital Archive.
The Life and Death of Words
Words, like plants and animals, fight for survival and an international group of scientists studying English, Spanish and Hebrew believe that many — in general — are dying off.
Their killer? Editors.
Via Statistical Laws Governing Fluctuations in Word Use from Word Birth to Word Death (PDF):
The modern era of publishing, which is characterized by more strict editing procedures at publishing houses, computerized word editing and automatic spell-checking technology, shows a drastic increase in the death rate of words. Using visual inspection we verify most changes to the vocabulary in the last 10–20 years are due to the extinction of misspelled words and nonsensical print errors, and to the decreased birth rate of new misspelled variations and genuinely new words.
The Guardian clarifies this a bit by killing off some difficult words of their own and getting straight to the point about how words live and how words die:
But it is not only “defective” words that die: sometimes words are driven to extinction by aggressive competitors. The word “Roentgenogram”, for example, deriving from the discoverer of the x-ray, William Röntgen, was widely used for several decades in the 20th century, but, challenged by “x-ray” and “radiogram”, has now fallen out of use entirely. X-ray had beaten off its synonyms by 1980, speculate the academics, owing to its “efficient short word length” and since the English language is generally used for scientific publication. “Each of the words is competing to be a monopoly on who gets to be the name,” [Joel] Tenenbaum told the American Physical Society.
The phrase “the great war”, meanwhile, used for a period to describe the first world war, fell out of use around 1939 when another war of equal proportions hit the world.
Takeaway: Language is a giant Darwinian battle for linguistic supremacy. Choose yours selectively.
Video: MIT’s Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel illustrate what we can learn from analyzing 500 billion words via Google Books and its related Ngram Viewer which gives us the ability to enter words and phrases into a search engine in order to view their frequency over time.
Total Google 2011 Revenue: $37.9 Billion.
Total Google 2011 Advertising Revenue: $36.6 Billion.
Total US Newspaper 2011 Advertising Revenue: $23.9 Billion.
Just saying (with the caveat that the Google numbers are global and newspapers have other revenue streams such as subscriptions and events).
Image: Detail from Breaking Down Google’s 2011 Revenues, via WordStream
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