Googlified

Google not only celebrated St. David’s Day yesterday, but also ran two more logos to celebrate the March 1st Movement (on Google’s South Korea homepage) and Baba Marta ( on Google’s Bulgaria, Greek, Moldova, and Romania homepages).

The March First Movement, or the Samil Movement, was one of the earliest displays of Korean independence movements during the Japanese occupation of Korea. [Wikipedia]

The name of the holiday is Baba Marta, a Bulgarian tradition related to welcoming the upcoming spring. [...] Romanians also have a similar but not identical holiday on March 1, called “M?r?i?or“. [Wikipedia]

Today, March 2nd, is the 62nd day this year’s calendar, and we have “304 days remaining until the end of the year.” [Wikipedia] Three weeks to go until Spring Break for me. Whoo-ya!

[thanks to Tom and Pascal]

Another day, another doodle. Today Google UK celebrates St. David’s Day on their homepage with a special logo, like previous years.

Saint David’s Day is the feast day of Saint David, the patron saint of Wales, and falls on 1 March each year. [...] Many Welsh people wear one or both of the national emblems of Wales on their lapel to celebrate St. David: the daffodil or the leek on this day. [Wikipedia]

[thanks to Christian, once again]

A few days ago I posted about YouTube testing a new personalized homepage, and now they have provided a link which you can opt-in to test the new homepage yourself. The new personalized homepage, as its name suggests, it does emphasis a lot more on personalization (video recommendation for YOU, latest from your subscriptions, friend activities, etc…), but the way they layout the things are just like a cluttered mess (looks better when you collapse the sections).

Of course, you can remove the sections you don’t like, and this is where the real customization comes it. By clicking on the customize this page on the top of the page, you can choose “the modules you want to see on your customized homepage.

Woot! Today’s February 29th, the ultra-special, once-every-four-year Leap Day.

February 29 is a date that occurs only every four years, and is called leap day. This day is added to the calendar in leap years as a corrective measure, because the earth does not orbit around the sun in precisely 365.000 days. [Wikipedia]

A similar logo was drawn in 2004 to celebrate Leap Day.

Both logos are just, one word - weird.

[thanks Christian]

Last week, Google announced that they have partnered with the Cleveland Clinic to integrate their Google Health platform with the clinic’s online medical records, making the patients’ more accessible. And today, they released two new screenshots of the beta service. The layout & content is similar to what we have seen when a series of screenshots was leaked online.

In a separate screenshot showing the login page, it included a logo of the St. Luke Hospital in Huston, Texas, which probably means that the hospital has also partnered with Google Health.

(Sweet, you can schedule an appointment online.)

It’s a bit odd that the search button is not for searching the user’s medical records, but search the web. I guess that they are still working on the searching functionalities.

Sixteen months of eager waiting, Google finally relaunched JotSpot today as Google Sites. The new service is part of Google Apps, but unlike other services included in Google Apps, Google Sites is not available as a separate application for non-Apps users (yet).

After a few minutes of playing with Google Sites, I found it quite promising (so far). The setup progress for a new site is very simple, just enter the site name, choose who can edit & view the site, and pick one of the 20 available themes. Of course, you will need to enable the service in Google Apps before this. Just go to the Dashboard, click on Add more services, and there you can enable it.

Editing pages for the sites is pretty straight forward, takes place in an advanced WYSIWYG editor. You can include various multimedia content in the sites’ pages, including Google Calendar, Picasa Web slideshows, Google/YouTube videos, and even iGoogle gadgets.

Each Google Sites account receives “10GB of storage in Google Sites” with “an additional 500MB for each user account” of the Premier and Education editions.

Nostalgia strikes! It reminds me the old days of creating websites on GeoCities. *Sigh*

The Google Docs team released a revamped version for the toolbars of Google Documents and Presentations. The new toolbar removed same essential buttons - copy, paste, and cut, but added buttons for printing and saving - which I think is taking up space because Google Docs has an autosave feature which saves opened documents in a quite high frequency. I appreciate that they moved the spellcheck button up there though, and the overall design is pretty neat.

[via Google Blogoscoped]

A few days ago Philipp posted about the Gmail Art Ad video on Google Blogoscoped, and the Official Gmail Blog today shared more behind-the-scene information about the video.

162 meters of gray tape, 45 lego pieces, 32 sticks of plasticine, 18 brushes, 18 square meters of batten, 12 cans of spray paint, 10 liters of white paint, 4 reams of paper, 2 kilograms of millet porridge, 1 printer, 1 hair dryer, 1 mop, and 1 saw.

And that the M at the end of the video was created using “3 sweaters, 3 balls, 3 pillows, 2 dumbbells, 2 pair of gloves, a set of child’s plates, a hockey stick, a scarf, a paper folder, hats and slippers.”

The video’s YouTube page explained that this video was “produced [by Saatchi Moscow] for Google to attract more Russian people on GMail.”

The YouTube Blog announced today that they are testing a new, and more personalized version of YouTube homepage. It will “include personalized recommendations, the latest videos from your subscriptions and an easier way to see” your friends’ activities on YouTube. The new version is currently available only to a small group of chosen users, but it will be available to everyone “in the near future.”

In a related news, the Pakistan Telecom lifted the ban on YouTube.

Google recently put up this jobs billboard in the Fremont neighborhood in Seattle, featuring the famous Google Master Plan (probably a remake though, as the original one has been erased) to find talents in the area. Some interesting things on the billboard are:

• Transfer of human DNA over fiber optic cable
• Minimum wage for machines
• Rocket powered underpant (weird… :-/)

[photo by Michael Lehmkuhl, used with permission]

Only a few days after introducing the invisible mode in Gmail Chat, the Google Talk team added another great feature into the application - Chatback Badge. According to Google, “[a] Google Talk chatback badge will let visitors to your web page chat with you. They’ll be able to chat with you whenever you’re signed in to Google Talk.” Google’s description is not exactly true, but good enough. You will have to approve the chat request before the person can chat with you.

The process goes like: visitor click on the link to chat with you, a Google Talk Gadget opens for the person -> Google Talk will notify you and ask whether you would like to join the chat, providing a link to Google Talk Gadget, which will open in the browser.

The guest can remain in complete anonymous. Yes, this is the Internet, but I would still want to know who I am talking to, even if the person is lying. (ZOMG, pedobear is talking to me!) So guess what? I would like the guests to enter their names first, sort of like GrandCentral, and I hope that they would allow chatting inside the IM client, without using the Google Talk Gadget.

Luka from Zorgloob said that these chats are off the record, meaning that they aren’t stored in Gmail even if you have the option enabled. Also, he noticed that “chat are not merged if you have more than one person contacting you. It is not chat rooms.”

Having someone (an emotionless cluster of computers controlled by a team of Googlers) telling me that I am invisible every morning is just (effing) great.

[via the Google Blogoscoped forum]

YouTube was briefly down today for approximately an hour between 11:30AM and 12:15PM Google/Pacific Time. According to OpenDNS, this maybe occurred when the Pakistan Telecom was trying to block access to YouTube “because of content deemed offensive to Islam”, but accidentally hijacked YouTube’s “IP address space [and] that nobody in the world can reach Youtube.”

For a second I was worried that the Internet crashed, again.