Google has added a new feature to Google Maps called MyMaps, which makes it possible, with no programming experience, to create a map with detail. You can place pushpins by just right-clicking on the map, write descriptions on them, even add HTML to include pictures, and save the whole thing to send to a friend. It even had drawing tools for drawing lines or complex areas. I did a simple mashup, listing some favorite places in New York, in a

Blogger has added integration of the AJAX news bar and YouTube/Google Video bar as an easy drag and drop addition to your template. The bars are available for every website, as well as blog and web search bars, but Blogger’s addition makes it easy for less advanced users to configure and just drop in.
Also, Anothr is making it easy to receive RSS feed updates in Google Talk. Read more at Download Squad. Finally, Google released today a

Nathan Weinberg is out today. He’ll be back tomorrow night. Till then, here’s a post he wrote yesterday. Yay…
Saw an ad on YouTube for this contest by Clean & Clear (some face cleanser company [what, I’m supposed to know makeup?]) asking YouTube users (girls only) to send in footage of their “wackiest wakeup”. Pretty much just post 15 seconds of a real or “recreated” memorable waking up mo

YouTube’s labs test site, called TestTube, has added two new features to the service.
The first, called AudioSwap, lets you replace the audio in your video with audio provided by YouTube. The audio on your video will be complete replaced by the new audio, so this is really designed for audio-free videos, like photo slideshows, nature video, or screencasts. There’s a lot of music there, most of which I’ve never heard of, but s

Google is coming under criticism for rolling back satellite imagery of New Orleans, replacing the images of post-Katrina New Orleans with older, pre-hurricane photos that show the city in a much cleaner condition than is the reality. In this article by The Age, Google says it is only offering the best images it has, and that there are many factors that went into the change:
Chikai Ohazama, a Google product manager for satellite imagery, said th

Google Managing Counsel Michael Kwun has a letter to the editor in today’s Washington Post, an on-the-mark rebuttal of a Viacom op-ed from last weekend. Google paints Viacom as an author of the DMCA who is no longer satisfied with the law it had pushed, and defends the DMCA as the only legitimate way to protect copyright on sites like YouTube.
Google’s best point: If Viacom screwed up in figuring out which videos YouTube needed to

Two years ago this Sunday, Google introduced two gigabytes of email storage for Gmail, with the amount of storage ticking up slowly, what they called their “Infinity + 1″ system. The idea was that since the counter went up continuously, you really had near-infinite storage. It was a great idea, except for one thing: Infinity + 1 implies better than inifinity, but it’s not.
See, Yahoo has announced that, as of this May, Yahoo

Google is holding lectures giving tips to political and advocacy group consultants, showing them how to better use all of Google’s services in managing their messages. According to the Los Angeles Times, Google packed 80 consultants into a lecture hall earlier this month, and conducted an hourlong seminar showing: Which types of videos resonate on YouTube
How to improve search engine rankings
Use Google AdWords to reach an already intere

The results of community voting in the first ever YouTube Awards were announced Monday, and here the winners: Most Creative - OKGo - Here It Goes Again - a music video of the band moving in sync on treadmills
Best Comedy - Smosh - Smosh Short 2: Stranded - a man falls into despair at his situation, trapped on a deserted island. The punchline is pretty damn good
Best Commentary - thewinekone - Hotness Prevails - commentary on how it’s too

Niall Kennedy did earlier this month an exhaustive analysis of Google Gadgets, coming out with a lot of graphs, facts and figures that would make your head spin. If you’re a geek for infoporn, you’ll love his post on it.
A taste: The average Gadget is 181 pixels
20 or so Gadgets require you to be using Firefox
Google’s 48 Gadgets account for 44% of all Gadget page views More stats at this post, too.
Alex Iskold did a look at

Google AdSense has added a new referral product: Google Checkout. The way this one works is that if someone follows your referral ad/link and signs up for Checkout, and buys at least ten dollars within the next 90 days, you get a dollar.
Here are some of the ad formats (funny, no little buttons):
Text link:
Sign up for Google Checkout
Banners: Boxes: Leaderboards:

Today is the last day for you to vote in the 2006 YouTube Video Awards and pick the top videos of last year. Go to youtube.com/ytawards to make your picks. I’m going to list all the nominees, in order of how I liked them, so you can have some fun watching these videos. My advice: try the comedy category, where the best stuff is, followed by the Adorable stuff. The Commentary is the worst category, mostly idiots talking boringly at thei

It’s official, we are definitely in the middle of a massive multi-industry war on the level of the RIAA/filesharing and other major technology wars of recent memory. Today, the war entered its third major stage, with many of the opposition joining forces to announce a YouTube competitor, coming this summer.
The chronology:
Pre-war ops: Various companies and startups enter the video sharing arena. YouTube (2/15/2005), Revver (11/2005), Br

I am so sick of the news on this blog being, on average, a week old. Its my fault. I let these tabs build and build and build, and I don’t have time to write because I’m too busy amassing tabs, and when I finally do write something, it’s a week old. Dammit! I am so not doing this anymore. I hate missing news, but it is beyond stupid to have late and irellevant news because you don’t want to miss anything.
And because

Google is now reporting how many of its users are subscribed to website’s feeds, by including the subscriber info in the header its Feedfetcher spider leaves when it grabs a feed. This means that if you look at the header, you’ll know how many users combined subscribe to that feed in Google Reader and the Google Personalized Homepage

YouTube announced last week a deal with Digital Music Group to bring that company’s archive of old TV shows to YouTube. Digital owns over 40 hours of video content, including a bunch of old TV shows and movies, mostly from the 1960s, including “I Spy”, “Gumby” and “My Favorite Martian”

Compete.com has released these graphs showing the top 10 video websites, also showing what would happen if Google Video was added to YouTube, due to Google owning YouTube, and thus claiming the traffic of both. As you can see, the Google/YouTube juggernaut owns 51% of the market:
Of the 194 million sessions among the top ten sites, 108.46 million belonged to a Google-owned site

Hitwise ran another story on Google Checkout market share, and they included the top 10 sites sending traffic to Checkout. Basically, this list contains the most important stores of Checkout traffic, so it’s worth noting, especially if one of these sites drop Google in the future:

You really have to discount Google Base, since it isn’t going away anytime, and eBay, since they aren’t an official Checkout partner (and how they send any referal traffic is beyond me), but we have

Nike has released a Google maps mashup called “Nike+ : Map It” that helps runners track, distribute and share their runs. There are pre-programmed routes all over the country, and tons of runners in the Nike+ program running them with you (all told, 6.7 million miles have been run by the community).
If you don’t like the (or don’t have any) routes in your area, you can draw one right on the map, see how long it is, and track it, as well as share it with the rest of the community

Over the last week, Viacom, reportedly after negotiations went nowhere, demanded YouTube remove 100,000 videos. Now, people are complaining that legitimate videos got swept up in the Great Purge, including this guy who had a video of him and some buddies discussing RSS and OPML, deleted because it occured in a restaurant that shares a name with a CBS personality.
What’s always been ridiculous with YouTube’s copyright enforcement is that the few times it even tries to enforce it, it usually deleted tons of legitimate content, with this incident being the worst

Hitwise released a graph that shows Google Calendar growing at an astronomical rate, reaching the same number of visits as MSN Calendar in late December. If GCal continues its growth, it may have already topped Yahoo’s Calendar to become number one in market share. Google Calendar stood, at the end of 2006 (and only 9 months on the market) at .0043% of all internet visits, above MSN’s .0040% and within striking distance of Yahoo’s .0051%.
Why is Google succeeding so quickly? I suspect it is a case of Yahoo and MSN failing to convert their larger email userbase into calendar users through poor promotion

I headed to Google’s mobile site on my T-Mobile MDA over the weekend, and was presented with a new, non-Java version of Google Maps for Windows Mobile. Naturally, I was excited, but as with most of Google’s mobile offerings, it comes with its own issues, but is a much better product than those we’ve seen in the past

The Google Reader team added a little convenience for Blogger users: If you’re using the new Blogger system (and practically everybody is now), you can add a Google Reader widget to your blog sidebar just by clicking an “Add to Blogger” button. Reader is taking advantage of Blogger’s new architecture to streamline the process for users, making it completely unnecessary for less experienced users to have to edit code.
Oh, what does the widget do? If you are sharing feed items, like some bloggers do, making a nice little link blog, you can use it to display the latest headlines to your blog readers

This might have been useful to a lot of people last night, searching with their rabbit ear antennas for the highest quality HDTV signal to watch the Super Bowl, but now, if you know you have a problem, you can use this tool to get the most reliable signal. Just head to this list, click on the name of your city, and you’ll get a Google Map showing where the HDTV stations/transmitters are located in your area.
If all your major stations are in the same general direction, like they are in New York, just set up your antenna pointing in that direction

Google had announced that it would be flying over parts of Australia on Australia Day, last week Friday, in order to take photos for Google Earth and Google Maps (Microsoft was doing it, too). Australians were excites, with people planning to build giant signs and write words on the ground, or just wave at the sky, in order to live on for a while in Google’s maps of the country

Here’s a shocker: Wikipedia isn’t the only major site that uses “nofollow” on outgoing user-generated links; YouTube does it too. I looked at the source code on a typical YouTube video page and discovered 137 rel=”nofollow” tags!
The strange thing is, YouTube doesn’t reserve the nofollow for outgoing links, they even slap it on links to other parts of YouTube

Some funny Google Maps sightings in the last day or so:
First off, a bug in the directions system in Google Maps sent drivers into a tail-spin, with Google instructing them to make well over 200 u-turns. Yikes!
A screenshot of the first 28 steps in the process, courtesy of Kandarp:

Don’t worry, Google’s already fixed it, but I heard there was a major traffic incident in New Jersey yesterday involving 8,500 dizzy drivers

Download Squad’s Jordan Running took upon the task of discovering which stores, beyond the 15 listed on the promo page, are participating in Google Checkout’s deal that gives ten dollars off the first purchase a new Google Checkout user makes. Turns out there are a ton of them, 234 in all! I had no idea Google Checkout had so many partners, all of which makes me wonder if the service might be reaching further than I thought.
All I know is, I am going to have to find a decent way to track stores signing up with and dumping Google Checkout

JP Morgan has published a report on how Google Checkout did in 2006, and their findings show that Checkout reached 6% of the 1,100 consumers they surveyed, compared to 42% for PayPal, what I call a good, but not massive, start. They also found that:

Google Checkout users are younger (57% under 35), more likely to be male (penetration rates 2x more for men) and more affluent (34% have incomes over $75,000) than PayPal.
Only 19% of Google Checkout users reported it as Good or Very Good, abysmal compared with 44% of PayPal users and 65% of credit card users

Google’s been doing some unpopular things of late:

They ran “tips” above search results, basically ads for Google services on any remotely related search, ones that no one could compete with and that appeared on searches that were completely irrelevant, like “tips” for Blogger on searches for “blogoscoped”

Jason has completely made my day by identifying that song from the Geico commercial (you know, the one where a caveman is riding a moving walkway in an airport) as “Remind Me” from Royksopp’s Melody A.M. album. I get that commercial stuck in my head every time I see the commercial, but after watching the eery music video, the tune lingers for hours

Now, no one’s going to suggest YouTube has passed MySpace to become the number one trafficked website on the internet (assuming MySpace is even that), but Google’s aquisition can claim one thing: #5 on Alexa’s rankings. It’s quite an honor, to be moving up a questionably accurate, non-respected, easilly spammed service

Apple introduced the iPhone today (you can read more about that at Apple Watch, and get my very long op-ed on it at InsideMicrosoft), and joining Steve Jobs onstage for about a minute was none other than Google CEO and Apple board member, Eric Schmidt. Schmidt was there to announce that Google Maps and Google search would be built into the iPhone

Blogger added a new feature: Bring your own domain. All you have to do is buy a domain, anywhere, at any price you can find, set up your Blogger account and point your DNS at Google’s server at ghs.google.com, and viola*! Now your Blogger blog appears at its own domain name, and all you had to do was pay less than ten bucks a year for the domain

Google Checkout has yet another promotion available: $10-off free for new users. Sign up for Checkout before February 15, 2007 and you get a ten dollar bonux on your first purchase of ten dollars or more, that you must use before March 31, 2007.
(via Ben’s Bargains)

Hitwise’s blog posts a graph showing Google Calendar rising strong, catching up with the competition at MSN and Yahoo:

Hitwise’s stats also support the idea that, unlike MSN and Yahoo, Google’s calendar isn’t feeding off Gmail, but is rather being used by many people who aren’t using Gmail, being a popular product in its own right. This doesn’t entirely surprise me, with Google Calendar’s features being very attractive to outside users.

Happy stuff for me: The Bruce Clay Inc. blog has added comments, after much prodding from me (and maybe other people, but who cares?). The Bruce Clay blog has been one of my favorites the last few months, with really good articles (mostly written by Lisa Barone) plus a fun “Friday recap” every week

Amit Agarwal found a weird one: When you upload images to Blogger, the free uploading and storage service delivers you two versions of the image, a full size version and a smaller 400 pixel wide version. Blogger will do this for you automatically, so long as the image is larger than 400 pixels, even if it is only slightly larger, and that is where the problem is

I just noticed that Gmail’s storage meter is increasing again, just like it used to:

Just go to Gmail.com (log out of your Gmail account) to see it moving. Anyone want to figure out if it is increasing at the same rate as before (.33 megabytes a day)? The source code notes this:
var CP = [
[ 1167638400000, 2800 ],
[ 1175414400000, 2835 ]
];

Two Google services have broken in the new year, most likely due to code that failed when the clock struck 2007.
Ionut Alex notes that the Gmail storage counter, which usually adds a third of a megabyte of storage to your inbox every day, stopped incrementing at midnight this morning. Gmail remains frozen at 2800 gigabytes of storage, which is plenty, and a reasonable enough number that it may even be by design

John Musser has compiled some stats on the mashups of 2006, with 1,404 mashups clocking in at year’s end. The number one mashup API of the year? Google Maps, with 51 percent of all APIs. Yahoo’s Flickr API took second place with 10%, while Amazon’s API ranked third at 8%, followed by (Google) YouTube mashups in fourth with 4%. Google Maps has a lot of buzz and geek cred, and it’ll be a challenge to maintain a lead of that size in the next year, especially with Microsoft’s 3D maps gaining steam.

Google has had a rash of missteps in the last few day, leaving a negative feeling going into the new year.
First off: Google accidently deleted the inboxes of some 60 Gmail users, leaving them with none of their stored email (and, surprisingly, Google’s vaunted server architecture didn’t have any backups either)

On December 27, PayPal announced a “virtual debit card”, letting you make online purchases everywhere MasterCard is accepted. One little problem: Christmas was a few days earlier, meaning the online financial service missed the holiday shopping season for some stupid reason.
PayPal’s move was a smart one, devaluing “exclusive” arrangements like the one Google Checkout has with online merchants (in fact, you could use PayPal and Google Checkout on the same purchase, thanks to this)

VideoSift has created a site counting down the top 100 web videos of 2006, 99 of which are from YouTube and Google Video (mostly just YouTube). Here are my favorites of the entire list, which can provide hours of time-wasting entertainment:
#38 - Brilliant Mime Routine + Natalie Imbruglia

Via: VideoSift
#52 - David Blaine Street Magic - SATIRE

Via: VideoSift
#98 - a couple gets kinky in the bedroom

Via: VideoSift
#43 - Monkeys - A Short Movie About What We Are

Via: VideoSift
#90 - adorable animated dog takes care of baby, loves cheese

Via: VideoSift
#8 - judson laipply: evolution of dance

Via: VideoSift
57 - Must love jaws

Via: VideoSift
#93 - Casting for the Xbox360 “Shootout” Commercial

Via: VideoSift
#30 - Simpsons Live!

Via: VideoSift
#42 - The Internet: “A Series of Tubes”

Via: VideoSift
#45 - Trick-or-Treater Scared Witless by Dummy Scarecrow - Poor Fellow (15 secs)

Via: VideoSift
#12 - Best home made lightsaber duel ever!
Via: VideoSift
#80 - I think this Xbox is the best present I ever bought for you
Via: VideoSift
#99 - Progenitorivox - the drugs I need

Via: VideoSift
#37 - Stick Magnetic Ribbons on Your SUV

Via: VideoSift
#53 - This Kid Wants Someone To Play Football With Him

Via: VideoSift
#33 - The Art of Motion - Nice Stop Motion Action
Via: VideoSift
#87 - “There will come soft rains” animation of Ray Bradbury story

Via: VideoSift
#85 - Animated short - Gerald wakes as a woman (en femme) (warning: nsfw? animated boobs)

Via: VideoSift
#64 - Broken Escalator: Somebody help me - please! There are two people stuck on an escalator and we need help!

Via: VideoSift
#25 - stephen colbert swallows a banana and totally loses it

Via: VideoSift
#56 - Roller Coaster + Bowling == Fun

Via: VideoSift
#35 - Skateboarding Dog

Via: VideoSift
#44 - Rube Goldberg - amazing.