Adding comments and videos hosted by YouTube were a clear signal that Google News starts to become more aggressive and to go beyond the comfortable status of being a news aggregator. As a results of its partnerships with important news agencies like AFP and Associated Press, Google News will host original content from these sources.

“Our goal has always been to offer users as many different perspectives on a story from as many different sources as possible, which is why we include thousands of sources from around the world in Google News. However, if many of those stories are actually the exact same article, it can end up burying those different perspectives. (…) By removing duplicate articles from our results, we’ll be able to surface even more stories and viewpoints from journalists and publishers from around the world. (…) Because the Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, UK Press Association and the Canadian Press don’t have a consumer website where they publish their content, they have not been able to benefit from the traffic that Google News drives to other publishers. As a result, we’re hosting it on Google News,” explains the Google News Blog.

It’s unclear whether Google will monetize the hosted content or will add new features that let users interact with news. What’s clear is that today is a turning point for Google News that could bring more users and less friends from the press.

Example of article hosted by Google News:

Related:
The history of Google News

The Economist compares Google with a bank that stores and manages a lot of information (some of it, personal information).

“Google is often compared to Microsoft (another enemy, incidentally); but its evolution is actually closer to that of the banking industry. Just as financial institutions grew to become repositories of people’s money, and thus guardians of private information about their finances, Google is now turning into a custodian of a far wider and more intimate range of information about individuals. Yes, this applies also to rivals such as Yahoo! and Microsoft. But Google, through the sheer speed with which it accumulates the treasure of information, will be the one to test the limits of what society can tolerate.” (my emphasis)

As with any bank, you need to trust it, to make sure it has transparent policies, that it serves your interests and it doesn’t have “hidden costs”. Your ISP, your doctor, your employee, your bank - all have a lot of personal information about you and some of it could migrate to online services like Google Health, Google Checkout, Google Web History or Google Web Accelerator. The worst thing that can happen to Google is losing the trust of its users, so Google has another incentive to not betray peoples, besides the mythical “Don’t be evil” corporate motto.

The Economist thinks that Google should find the right balance between users’ privacy and storing personal data indefinitely. Google already does a good job at explaining the consequences of your actions and how could some options affect your privacy, but it would be nice to expand the Web History to a big personal center that shows all the information Google has about you and provides ways to remove or export some of the information.

“Google in effect controls a dial that, as it sells ever more services to you, could move in two directions. Set to one side, Google could voluntarily destroy very quickly any user data that it collects. That would assure privacy, but it would limit Google’s profits from selling to advertisers information about what you are doing, and make those services less useful. If the dial is set to the other side and Google hangs on to the information, the services will be more useful, but some dreadful intrusions into privacy could occur. The answer, as with banks in the past, must lie somewhere in the middle; and the right point for the dial is likely to change, as circumstances change.”

{ Photo illustration: “At last!”, licensed as Creative Commons. }

Related:
Google as a personal assistant
Google, Behind the Screen (documentary)

Sky has today announced to its users that it will be outsourcing its e-mail platform to Google, which has been offering outsourced e-mail solutions for a while.

Sky has today announced to its users that it will be outsourcing its e-mail platform to Google, which has been offering outsourced e-mail solutions for a while.

Google Calendar will improve the feature that lets you embed calendars in a site, by adding the option to include multiple calendars, giving you more control regarding the display and the size and adding a week view.

You can embed a calendar by clicking on the small arrow next to its name in the left sidebar, selecting “Calendar settings” and then clicking on the blue “HTML” button. A configuration tool will generate the code.

Google slowly rolls out this update, so you may still see the old version that lets you embed only a single calendar at a time.

{ Thank you, Nick Chirchirillo. }

Now that Google indexes pages extremely fast and saves the date of the first indexing, it would be nice to have more options for restricting search results to a date range. Google only provided three options in the advanced search: see all the pages last updated in the past 3, 6 or 12 months and a difficult-to-use operator (daterange).

The advanced search page has been updated and it shows four more options: find the web pages first indexed in the past day, week, month or in the past 2 months.

If you remove all the uninteresting parameters from the search URL, you’ll find that as_qdr is responsible for date restrictions. For example, here’s how to restrict a search for [China] to pages first seen by Google’s crawler in the past 24 hours:

http://www.google.com/search?q=china&as_qdr=d

Note that you’ll only find new web pages and not pages that were updated in the past 24 hours. That means you won’t find homepages from popular sites or other frequently-updated pages. If the date range is small, you’ll mostly find news and blog posts.

The nice thing is that you can change the value of as_qdr to custom intervals. Here are all the possible values of the as_qdr parameter:

d[number] - past number of days (e.g.: d10)
w[number] - past number of weeks
y[number] - past number of years

For example, http://www.google.com/search?q=china&as_qdr=d10 lets you search for pages that contain “China” and were created in the past 10 days.

A finer control (hours) and an option to sort the results by date would make this feature almost perfect.

You could say that widgets (or gadgets, as Google likes to call them) are small applications that bring together a lot of information relevant to you. Now what if these gadgets would communicate with each other by sending small messages? PubSub is a new beta feature available at iGoogle. You won’t find too many gadgets that use this feature, at least for now.

“PubSub allows multiple gadgets on the same page to send and receive data from each other. In other words, you can now build a gadget that communicates back and forth with one another. This introduces a brand new concept and strategy involved when writing gadgets. Information is no longer constrained to fit inside a single gadget. Instead, you can now split up various pieces of information amongst multiple gadgets and allow them to communicate with each other to paint a bigger picture. Gadgets now have the ability to be more closely integrated with one another and present a network of information to users.”

This works if you add at least two gadgets, so it makes sense to create an entire tab with interactive gadgets (here’s a sample tab). For example, you could have a gadget that includes a search box and other gadgets that show search results from different sources. Or another gadget could collect events (new email, new event, breaking news) and cleverly organize them based on your preferences.

“PubSub is a new framework which allows ‘publisher’ gadgets on iGoogle to communicate changes to ’subscriber’ gadgets that have declared interest in those changes. This is currently available only on iGoogle and publisher/subscriber gadgets must be on the same page.”

If you intend to write gadgets that use this new feature, read the documentation. How would you this framework?

Ace Internet have issued a statement outlining their version of events which have lead to users being disconnected for a period of time.

Ace Internet have issued a statement outlining their version of events which have lead to users being disconnected for a period of time.

Lava Software has released Kenbushi Pro 7.1, an update to its media entertainment software for Mac OS X, Windows and soon, Linux. The software is now free for personal users, schools and charity organizations. For commercial users it costs $24.95 per user.
Kenbushi® Pro is a powerful Media Server with full-screen media control (like Apple TV) […]