Take into consideration - What if there was no "FREEDOM"? Then you see this Blog and are reminded that you would be missing out on so many important things...Enjoy your stay and recommend to your friends to come and taste the "FREEDOM" Geminimay
Posted by Leslie Burger, President, American Library Association
What was your favorite book when you were in school? Did F. Scott Fitzgerald give you an inside look at a world of glamorous parties where the wealthy fell in love and went home with their feelings hurt? Did Holden Caulfield speak directly to your inner misanthrope? For decades, literary classics such as The Great Gatsby and The Catcher in the Rye have had a profound impact on millions of readers. Yet every year, there are hundreds of attempts to remove great books from schools and libraries nationwide. Fortunately, the American Library Association and many other organizations are fighting back with Banned Books Week, taking place this year Sept. 23-30.
Now Google has joined the party. At google.com/bannedbooks, you can use Google Book Search to explore some of the best novels of the 20th century which have been challenged or banned. And while libraries and bookstores around the country celebrate the 25th anniversary of Banned Books Week with special readings, displays, and more, you just might end up with a visit to your local library or bookstore and an old favorite or a new banned book in hand.
Posted by Dr. Taraneh Razavi, M.D., Staff Doctor One of my goals in starting my blog has been to reliably provide useful health information and advice to a wider audience than just the people I see. As part of this effort, I have been labeling health-related websites that I think are good ones using Google Co-op, a beta product that premiered in May. Google Co-op is designed to improve results for searches. If you opt in to my Co-Op profile (and subscribe to it), you'll see my labels in your health-related search results.
Posted by Cliff Samaniego, Google Video team A while ago, New York filmmaker Steve Rosenbaum produced 7 Days in September which tells the story of a week -- September 11-18, 2001 -- with the help of many filmmakers and a multitude of perspectives. As Rosenbaum notes, "Those seven days are full of fear, anger, pain, loss, and a deep sense of community," adding that 7 Days "isn't meant to be an answer, but rather a sounding board that may help people to ask deeply personal questions." We're honored to share it with you on Google Video.
Posted by Anurag Acharya, Distinguished Engineer As a teenager, history was the class in which I daydreamed -- the one that required memorization of long lists of kings, of battles, of arcane disputes that led to war. It was something I left behind when I graduated from high school and went on to the "real" things in life.
But history was not done with me. Many years later, I drifted from reading George Orwell's novels 1984 and Animal Farm and Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon to reading more about the Russian Revolution. The evolution of the Bolshevik Old Guard from scruffy revolutionaries fighting a stifling monarchy to becoming ruthless dictators for Stalin's killing machine was fascinating. History had drawn me into its web. History isn't a dry laundry list of the likes of "Ozymandias". It is what everyone in any era does, full of rich detail.
And now you can find those contemporary details (and more current ones as always) through a new archive search feature of Google News. This new feature can help you explore history through archives of news and other information sources. You can search for events, people and ideas, and see how they have been described over time. If you were to seek information on the 1969 moon landing, now you can find original coverage from that year, as well as analysis, news and commentary from the 37 years following.
Based on relevance, the archive results on Google News include freely available articles from sources such as TIME.com, The Guardian and many others, as well as snippets of articles available for a fee or via subscription. These may come from news organizations like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, and also from news aggregators like AccessMyLibrary.com, ThomsonGale, Factiva, HighBeam™ Research, LexisNexis and others.
In addition to finding the most relevant articles for your query, you can get an historical overview of the results by browsing an automatically created timeline. Articles related to a single story or theme within a given time period are grouped together to enable you to see a broad perspective on the events. The archive search results include articles about an incredibly wide variety of topics, people and events over the last 200 years or so. About kings and battles, yes, but also about athletes and games, political dramas, crimes, romances and much, much else.
History is often presented to us with a viewpoint many years after it happens -- and it's frequently smoothed over in many ways, and for many reasons. Here's hoping archive search in Google News can help you read about history as it has unfolded, and explore and understand the past for yourself.
Posted by Mendel Chuang, Product Marketing Manager With all the great entries we received for the Google Desktop Gadget Contest, we've learned that there are some very talented developers out there. Amongst all the gadgets submitted, these three really stood out:
diGGGadget by Marius and Yannick Stucki – Stay on top of the latest stories from digg.com. Click on a few buttons and you'll know why we think it's so great. It also takes advantage of our advanced APIs to enable sharing news with friends plus personalization based on your interests.
Multiplayer Reversi Game by Turhan Aydin – Immerse yourself in the fun game Reversi with this visually rich gadget. Not only can you play against the computer, but this gadget takes advantage of our Google Talk API so that you can also play with your friends.
Day/Night World Clock by Beatrix Gottanka – We couldn't have designed a better world clock. Not only does this clock show you the local time, but there's also a map that indicates whether it's night or day at any given hour. And if you want options, this gadget has them.
For more on the winners and the honorable mentions, read the Google Desktop Blog, and don't forget to check out all the other great gadgets you can add to your desktop.
Posted by Cliff Samaniego, Google Video team TED stands for Technology, Entertainment & Design. For more than 15 years TED has produced a conference notable for its eclectic and stimulating mix of thinkers, leaders and doers from many fields. Traditionally, about 1,000 TEDsters gather each February at an exclusive invitation-only program in Monterey, California. Until recently, most of us could only read about TED or these talks -- but now talks are available online via Google Video, as well as at the TED site.
The goal for making these talks public isn't to sell more seats (TED 2007 is already sold out); under TED Curator Chris Anderson, the idea is simply to find the widest possible audience for these provocative presentations. The first batch of eight include Al Gore's compelling story of climate crisis; Hans Rosling's inspired interpretation of global public health statistics; Sir Ken Robinson's vision for an education system that values creativity; MacArthur Foundation prize-winner Majora Carter's commitment to environmental justice; storyteller Julia Sweeney's quest for a sensible faith; architect Joshua Prince-Ramus' tour of the new Seattle Public Library; Tony Robbins' roadmap for human potential; and David Pogue's unforgettable technology-inspired show tunes.
And do check back for more: we'll continue to add talks to Google Video regularly, pulling primarily from TED 2006 and TEDGlobal, but we'll also feature a number from previous years.
The TED Talks video series was edited specifically for the micro-screen with closer shots and faster cuts. To ensure the widest possible audience, the talks are also released under a Creative Commons license so that non-commercial sites are free to re-post them in their entirety. However you partake of them, we hope you're as inspired by TED as we are.
Posted by Philipp Lenssen, Google Blogoscoped It's time for a little guest post from Germany -- thanks, Google, for inviting me over! I'm the author of a blog on Google (Google Blogoscoped), and this year I've written a book called 55 Ways to Have Fun With Google. In it, I present Google-related riddles, games, cartoons, search tips, stories, and miscellaneous insights (no programming skills needed -- and most of the time, you don't need to be close to a computer, either).
You'll learn about such things as the giant Japanese Google painting, the man who traveled the world looking for Googlewhacks, advanced tips for Google-searching, how Google News can screw up in funny ways, or the Google Image prediction trick. There's a great German word for this -- "Wunderkammer," a cabinet of curiosities.
The book is self-published with Lulu.com, an interesting service. Basically, Lulu allows you to upload your Microsoft Word or OpenOffice Writer file along with your cover, and then convert it to a print-on-demand book. If you pay a little extra, your book will also appear on Amazon. The process ain't free of headaches but I gotta say, it's worth it. Lulu will also make sure the book's findable through Google Book Search.
Self-publishing is already an interesting experiment on its own, but I chose to take an alternative route with copyright as well. 55 Ways can be copied, remixed and shared under a Creative Commons license, and the full text is available as a free download. People have already converted it to websites, and there's a group effort going on to translate the full book into Chinese! Some people told me making the book available for free will stop people from buying the "offline" version ... well, here's your chance to prove them wrong :)
Posted by Jeanne Williams, Staffing Programs There are only 5 days left until registration closes for Google Code Jam 2006. So far, about 16,000 competitors have signed up to show off their programming skills -- and perhaps win an all-expenses paid trip to our New York City engineering office to compete in the finals on October 27. The winner gets $10,000 and global bragging rights: people have registered in huge numbers not only from the U.S., but from India, China, Canada, Brazil, the Russian Federation, Poland, Pakistan, Iran, Australia, the U.K., Germany, Singapore, Japan, Hungary -- you get the idea.
The top 100 finalists will be flown to NYC to show us what they've got. Have you got what it takes to Code Jam? Then by all means register here.
Posted by Adam Mathes, Associate Product Manager, Google Book Search Starting today, you can go to Google Book Search and download full copies of out-of-copyright books to read at your own pace. You're free to choose from a diverse collection of public domain titles -- from well-known classics to obscure gems.
Before the rise of the public library -– a story chronicled in this 1897 edition of The Free Library – access to large collections of books was the privilege of a wealthy minority. Now, with the help of our wonderful library partners, we're able to offer you the ability to download and read PDF versions of out-of-copyright books from some of the world’s greatest collections.
Using Google Book Search, you can find The Free Library and many other extraordinary old books, such as:
To find out-of-copyright books that you can download, simply select the "Full view" radio button when you search on books.google.com. (Please note that we do not enable downloading of any book currently under copyright. Unless we have the publisher’s permission to show more, we display only small snippets of text –- at most, two or three sentences surrounding your search term -– to help you determine if you’ve found what you’re looking for.)
Of course, this is just the beginning. As we digitize more of the world's books -- whether rare, common, popular or obscure -- people everywhere will be able to discover them on Google Book Search.
Posted by Raju Gulabani, Product Manager, Google Apps for Your Domain Back in February, we blogged about an experiment called "Gmail for your domain" that enabled IT administrators to power their custom domain email with Gmail with 2GB of storage, powerful search tools, and other Gmail features to all of their users. Since then, we've been listening to feedback from thousands of small businesses, K-12 schools, non-profits, universities, even families with their own websites, and based on what they've suggested, we've added so many features that the original name just didn't describe the service accurately any longer.
So say hello to Google Apps for Your Domain, a service available at no cost to organizations of all shapes and sizes.
We think we may be on to something here: all the functionality of Gmail, Google Talk and Google Calendar wrapped up with tools to make them work for your organization, plus Google Page Creator for designing and publishing your website. There's no hardware or software required, and you can customize the user interfaces with your branding and color scheme, so they look and feel like your own.
Things have come a long way in the last six months, and we're still working on the service. If you're from a larger business or university with more advanced needs for communications and sharing, please get in touch regarding premium versions of the service, due out later this year.
Movie stars, films, television shows, and musicians are not just for entertainment anymore. The media and the superstars we admire are powerful vehicles and voices to encourage and motivate people to do the right thing.
"ROCKWORKS is a non profit 'construction-production' organization that is inspired by the power of music and the efficiency of Roadies, using their talent and skill, as well as that of recording artists and celebrities, to actually do the work, not just raise the funds."
Because really, the only way to help New Orleans is to get your hands dirty...
Today's Highlighted Videos
Click here to watch "Rockworks [re]building the Gulf Coast" One year after Hurricane Katrina’s brutal sweep across the Gulf Coast, the area is still on the path to recovery. This video features the community of Forest Heights, Mississippi, and ROCKWORKS Foundation’s efforts to help them rebuild their lives. Visit www.rockworks.us for more information. 6 min 3 sec
Haydenfilms.com is an online community that allows filmmakers (like yourselves) to participate in their Online Film Festival. Below you'll find some of Haydenfilms' top picks!
Connect with Haydenfilms for Season Two of their Online Film Festival. Fifty short films from around the world are competing for a $10,000 grand prize, with the online community selecting the winning film! Go to www.haydenfilms.com to vote for this year's winner and for more information.
Smartcard is a story about a man who realizes that his perfect automated life is not in his control, but the corporation that created the system. After the discovery, does he have the will left to escape? 15 min 39 sec
An old man searches in the grainy darkness for one last conquest – one last test of worth – before the light fades forever from his eyes. Alone, frail and confused, he wanders the harsh lonely wilderness, haunted by memories and hallucinations. 6 min 14 sec
An inspirational speaker, JESSE THOMAS, while selling his tapes door to door, unwittingly inspires a potential serial killer to act on her desire TO KILL. Properly motivated she chooses him as her first victim. Trapped in the house he scrambles to escapes with his life. 9 min 5 sec
New videos appearing on the Google Video Movers & Shakers list for September 12, 2006:
"Five years ago, I found myself watching a heartbreaking disaster from my office window that seemed like the world was coming to an end: The Twin Towers of the World Trade Center as they burned and crumbled. Out of a desperate need to do something useful, I gathered some members of my team and we began to film. After weeks of staring at the buildings burn [on the tapes we shot], I realized that these attacks needed to be told by a community of voices, with a multitude of perspectives.
"7 Days In September" is the result. It's a work of collaborative filmmaking, a collection of voices, cameras, and perspectives. It begins on the morning of 9/11, and ends the evening of 9/18. Those seven days are full of fear, anger, pain, loss, and a deep sense of community. I'm told that the film touches people in different ways, and that there is no single message or point of view. I hope that's right. It isn't meant to be an answer, but rather a sounding board that may help people to ask deeply personal questions.
On the fifth anniversary, we had many options for this film. We could have put it back in theaters. We could have played it on television in the U. S. and around the world.
We choose to do neither. Instead, we are sharing it on Google Video for free. For those of you who choose to watch, we hope it helps you connect with feelings that are productive rather than simply painful.
And if you have your own video or footage to share, we hope you'll use our CameraPlanet 9/11 Archive site to post your own videos and thoughts. This archive is built to gather and protect the images, video, and stories of 9/11 for future generations. We hope this memory helps bring context and understanding to future generations."
Click here to watch "Watch the Entire Prison Break Episode: Scan" Michael and Lincoln experience car trouble as Mahone's pursuit of them goes up in flames; Sucre hits the road to stop Maricruz from taking a gamble; C-Note is determined to reunite with his wife and daughter despite their surveillance; a familiar face keeps a close eye on Sara, who finds the tables turned on her; determined to cash in on the prison break, Bellick partners with an unlikely ally. Prison Break airs Mondays 8/7c, only on FOX! 43 min 55 sec
Click here to watch "Watch the Entire Vanished Episode: Drop" Senator Collins grapples with a new development while FBI Agents Kelton and Mei follow leads regarding the inexplicable disappearance of Sara. The senator's ex-wife, Jessica Nevins, is brought in for questioning and admits to wanting her kids back in her life. Meanwhile, Marcy rendezvous with her boyfriend, who, Max informs her, is now a suspect. Armed with new footage from when Sara Collins was known as Nikki Johnson, ambitious reporter Judy Nash uncovers more mind-bending evidence into Sara's mysterious disappearance. Vanished airs Mondays 9/8c, only on FOX! 42 min 13 sec
New videos appearing on the Google Video Movers & Shakers list for September 8, 2006:
Click here to watch "Improv Everywhere's Suicide Jumper Prank" This is a video from Improv Everywhere in which they stage a fake suicide jump from a ledge about 4 feet off the ground. It's hilarious. For more imformation on Improv Everywhere, visit their site at www.improveverywhere.com 3 min 56 sec
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