Googlified

Google China (along with Google Taiwan, Hong Kong, and possibly other versions of Google in Asia) celebrates Chinese New Year today.

Chinese New Year is the most important of the traditional Chinese holidays. It is sometimes called the Lunar New Year, especially by people outside China. It is an important holiday in East Asia. [Wikipedia]

This year is the Year of the Rat, that’s why you are seeing the rats up there. The Chinese character on the logo (福), loosely translates as luck and wealth. Google Translate returns something else though.

Happy Chinese New Year! :)

Google Brazil today celebrates Carnaval, or Brazilian Carnival, “an annual festival in Brazil held 40 days before Easter and marks the beginning of Lent.” Orkut also has a special logo for this event:

I thought the girl (on the Google logo) was standing on a big pie or something. :-/

[via Zorgloob]

Inspired by Google’s logo for celebrating Lego’s 50th birthday, AFOL(Adult Fan Of LEGO) Antonio Manfredonio replicated the logo with real Lego bricks. It looks exactly the same, except that the shirt is not red.

That’s the coolest thing I have seen all day.

[photo by Antonio Manfredonio, used under a CC-license]

Google today celebrates the 50th anniversary of the invention of the modern Lego bricks.

The LEGO history began in 1932 in Denmark, when Ole Kirk Christansen founded a small factory for wooden toys in the unknown town of Billund in the south of the country. To find a name for his company he organized a competition among his employees. As fate would have it however, he himself came up with the best name: LEGO – a fusion of the Danish words “LEg” and “GOdt” (”play wellv). [”50th Birthday of the LEGO Brick” - Lego.com]

The two Google founders “have always had a thing for LEGOS“. They built a programmable plotter, hard drive enclosure, and numerous of other things out of Lego bricks. This post from two years ago on the Google Talkabout featured a REAL Google logo made out of Lego bricks.

Google Australia today celebrates the annual Australia Day. The special logo they have on their website is the winning design (by Janelle San Juan) of last year’s Doodle for Google My Australia, and getting the logo displayed on Google Australia was part of the prize.

Australia Day, celebrated annually on 26th January, is the official national day of Australia, commemorating the establishment of the first European settlement on the continent of Australia. [Wikipedia]

Google celebrated the holiday last year by sending air planes to capture “super-high-resolution aerial images of Sydney,” (euphemism for spying). Well, Happy Australia Day! :)

Google today celebrates Martin Luther King Day with a special logo on its U.S. home page.

Martin Luther King Jr. Day is a United States holiday marking the birth date of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., observed on the third Monday of January each year, around the time of King’s birthday, January 15. [Wikipedia]

Martin Luther King delivered his famous I Have a Dream speech “on August 28, 1963, from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was a defining moment of the American Civil Rights Movement.”

I remember spending two months studying the Civil Rights Movement last year.

Googlified reader Morgan commented on the Google’s New Year logo post that there maybe a hidden message in the logo. Upon further examination of the logo, the hidden message slowly reveals itself as “SYN SYN/ACK ACK” - the “three way handshake” that establishes the communication between two computers over a TCP connection. An analogy for this, from the PCCitizen website is, “you picking up your phone, getting a dial tone, dialing the number, hearing ringing, and then the other party saying ‘hello’ or ‘mushi mushi.’”

I was looking for more than that, but well. :)

[thanks Morgan :)]

Still two hours away from 2008 here at the Googlified headquarter (not my basement lol), but most of the world have celebrated the arrival of 2008. I wish you a Happy New Year and have fun celebrating.

The above Google logo not only celebrates the New Year but also 25 years of TCP/IP (the Ethernet cable is twisted into the shape of “2008″). That also means I don’t have much time left to write my “Looking Back at 2007″ post (will be posted on my personal blog, iHaochi).

See you in 2008. :)

Merry Christmas! Google today celebrates Christmas with a special logo on their home pages across the world. Orkut’s also celebrating the holiday with the following logo:

Happy holidays! :)

Google have started today their annual Christmas doodles, what it has to do with Christmas, I’ll leave for you to decide. Leave your ideas in the comments.

Google today celebrates Saint Lucy’s Day on their Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, and Finnish home pages.

Saint Lucy’s Day is the Church feast day holiday dedicated to St. Lucy and is observed on December 13. […] It is celebrated in Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Italy, Bosnia, Iceland, and Croatia. […] In traditional celebrations, Saint Lucy typically comes as a young woman with lights and sweets. [Wikipedia]

[thanks to Andre]

The Official Google Australia Blog announced the winners of Doodle 4 Google My Australia today. The national winner of the competition is Janelle San Juan, “a 12 year old student from […] Victoria.” Below is her winning doodle:

Janelle won “$10,000 worth of technology equipments for her school and a MacBook Pro” for herself with this competition. The 32 finalists were all invited to Sydney and they have taken a group picture which you can find here (wearing t-shirts with their doodle design on).

Congratulations to Janelle and all finalists. :)