MY TRUE SOLUTIONS

More ninja tips in more languages

2009-09-03T18:58:00.000-07:00

More ninja tips in more languages: "Posted by Zach Yeskel, Product Marketing Manager

When we published the Gmail tips guide in July, we promised it would help you become a Gmail ninja. Now, if you want to become a Gmail ниндзя or 忍者, you can do that too: these tips are now available in Spanish, French, Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese, Russian, and UK English.

We've also added a handful of new tips to the English site, culled from suggestions you submitted. Some of the new tricks to help manage your email efficiently include sending and receiving mail from multiple addresses, adding formatting to chat messages, and selecting multiple messages at once using shift-select. Thanks to everyone who submitted ideas, and please keep them coming.

Fun and games with Opera 10 widgets

2009-09-02T19:27:00.000-07:00

Fun and games with Opera 10 widgets: "

If you've just started using Opera for the first time with the release of Opera 10 (download for Windows|Mac), you're probably looking to add some widgets to your browser. But finding exactly what you need might take some time. That's why it's best to start with Opera's 'Fun and Games' widgets. They're perfect for those times at work when you want to forget about the day and just zone out for a few minutes.

Fun and games with Opera

25 Square Puzzle If you enjoyed Lights Out, an electronic puzzle from the 1990s, you might like 25 Square Puzzle.

Unlike Lights Out, 25 Square Puzzle wants you to turn lights on. As you start clicking on different blocks in the game, you'll find that based on the block you click, other lights will turn off. You'll need to find the right combination to get all the lights on in as few clicks as possible. It's much harder than it sounds. Try it out.

Try to get all those lights on in 25 Square Puzzle.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Basketball Basketball is an extremely simple Opera widget, but it's also quite fun once you learn how to play.

Basketball places a basketball hoop to the left of your screen and a ball underneath the hoop. At the top of your screen, you'll find a scoreboard. The goal is to score as many points as possible within the allotted time. To do so, you'll need to click on the ball at the right angle to 'shoot' it into the hoop. It's a tough game to get used to, but once you do, you'll probably find yourself sneaking games when no one is looking.

Basketball is a fun, addicting game.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Brainkrieg If you're looking for a brain teaser to start your day, Brainkrieg is the widget for you.

The app lets you play a handful of games through its 'Daily Training' menu. They range from simple games, like remembering which block changed when it crossed a plane, to arithmetic questions that require you to figure out the missing number in a simple equation. Brainkrieg is addictive and fun. Check it out.

Do some simple math with Brainkrieg.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Bubbles If you're a fan of puzzle games, Bubbles is a widget that will definitely keep you occupied for as long as you require.

Although the game has been re-created in numerous places, Bubbles displays a grid of colored 'bubbles.' Your job is to click on as many of the same-colored bubbles as possible. The more bubbles you eliminate with one click, the better your score. If you own a Windows Mobile device, you know the game as Bubble Breaker. In either case, the game is quite fun. Simply click on the bubbles and rack up points. It doesn't get much easier than that, does it?

Bubbles is ideal for puzzle lovers.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Daily Crossword There are several options on the Web to work on crosswords. But I think you might just like Daily Crossword a little better.

Daily Crossword is simple, but effective at delivering an appealing crossword experience. Above the blocks, Daily Crossword features the topics running down and across. When you think you have the answer, you can simply click on the box you want to fill in, input a letter, and move on. If you need some help, the app even features clues. As the name might suggest, Daily Crossword changes every day, so when you get into work in the morning, you'll have a fresh crossword puzzle waiting for you.

Daily Crossword is definitely worth trying out.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Galaxy Fighter If you're a fan of taking down aliens, Galaxy Fighter might be the game for you.

Galaxy Fighter is simple: control the ship that runs across the bottom of the screen with your arrow keys and shoot the floating objects with your control key (command key on Mac OS X). The enemies come at you with greater speed and frequency as you work your way through the levels. Every four levels, you'll be thrown into a boss fight. The controls take a little getting used to (your character moves around the screen too quickly at times), but once you get the feel for it, I think you'll like Galaxy Fighter.

Galaxy Fighter is for the galactic warrior.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Ninja Ropes Extreme Ninja Ropes Extreme is one of the more addictive games in this roundup.

The widget presents you with a ninja that's falling to the ground. But thanks to its handy ropes, the ninja can stay up and move across the screen. To help the ninja do that, you'll need to click on the circles that run across the top of the game's screen. When you do so, the ninja shoots the rope toward the circles to stay up. The goal is get as far as possible without watching your ninja plummet to the ground. After I learned exactly how to play, I was hooked. Definitely try out Ninja Ropes Extreme.

Ninja Ropes Extreme will help you pass the day.

(Credit: Opera)

PipePanic PipePanic is another puzzle game that challenges your wits. The game requires you to build a piping system that will transfer water from one area to another without any leaks.

PipePanic is an interesting game. It's not the most difficult game in this roundup, but it's certainly addictive. Just how long you'll be addicted is hard to say. My guess is that you'll find some real value in PipePanic for a while, but you'll eventually spend more time with some of the other widgets in this roundup.

PipePanic doesn't want you to drip water.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Sudoku-X Sudoku-X is an ideal platform for those who like to play Sudoku.

When you start using Sudoku-X, you'll notice that it eases you into tougher Sudoku puzzles. If you're more advanced, you can set your difficulty level to have the puzzle match your skill level. In either case, Sudoku-X is designed well. It's a fine alternative to so many other sites that offer Sudoku puzzles. It's convenient, responsive, and simple. Check it out.

Sudoku-X is a great way to play the popular puzzle game.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Torus Torus is one of my favorite Opera widgets. And if you're a Tetris fan, you'll likely agree with my sentiment that Torus is a must-see.

Instead of playing Tetris in the typical 2D fashion, Torus changes it up by creating a circular stand for Tetris pieces. As blocks start falling towards the platform, you'll need to use your arrow keys to rotate the platform and fit the block in the appropriate section. If the blocks get too high, you lose. The game's design is quite nice, the controls are simple, and like Tetris, it's extremely fun to play. It will take some time to get used to Torus, but once you do, you'll be happy with what you find.

Torus is a fun, Tetris-like game.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

My top 3

1. Torus: Tetris on a circular platform? Awesome.

2. Basketball: Maybe it's because I'm a sports fanatic, but I love the Basketball widget.

3. Bubbles: Bubbles is an extremely addictive game that you should add to your Opera widgets listing.

50+ URL Shortening Services (Including Top Sites And Favorites)

2009-09-02T08:55:00.000-07:00

50+ URL Shortening Services (Including Top Sites And Favorites): "

Any URL shortener’s main purpose is to shorten a long URL into a short URL.

URL shortener are criticized by many bloggers because sometime they are used for bad purpose but their popularity never gone down. Now you can create your own URL shortening service as TechCrunch and Gigaom use their own URL shorter.

Tinyurl.com is I think oldest URL shorter on the earth, bit.ly is blessed by Twitter so now it is most busy URL shortener. Ow.ly and tr.im are other famous services.

Some URL shortener need to open an account before using them and others you can use without opening an account.

Google News Tips for Publishers

2009-09-01T21:14:00.000-07:00

Google News Tips for Publishers: "Posted by Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead
[cross-posted from the Google Webmaster Central Blog]

During my stint on the 'How Google Works Tour: Seattle', I heard plenty of questions regarding News Search from esteemed members of the press, such as The Stranger, The Seattle Times and Seattle Weekly. After careful note-taking throughout our conversations, the News team and I compiled this presentation to provide background and FAQs for all publishers interested in Google News:

Along with the FAQs about News Sitemaps and PageRank in the video above, here's additional Q&A to get you started:

Would adding a city name to my paper—for example, changing our name from 'The Times' to 'The San Francisco Bay Area Times'—help me target my local audience in News Search?

No, this won't help News rankings. We extract geography and location information from the article itself (see video). Changing your name to include relevant keywords or adding a local address in your footer won't help you target a specific audience in our News rankings.

What happens if I accidentally include URLs in my News Sitemap that are older than 72 hours?

We want only the most recently added URLs in your News Sitemap, as it directs Googlebot to your breaking information. If you include older URLs, no worries (there's no penalty unless you're perceived as maliciously spamming -- this case would be rare, so again, no worries); we just won't include those URLs in our next News crawl.

To get the full scoop, check out the video (filmed by Michael Wyszomierski of our Search Quality Team) or the Google News Forum Publisher FAQ!

51 Languages in Google Translate

2009-08-31T22:31:00.000-07:00

51 Languages in Google Translate: "Posted by Franz Och, Principal Scientist

Are you using Google Translate to access the world's information? It can help you find and translate local restaurant and hotel reviews into your language when planning a vacation abroad, allow you to read the Spanish or French Editions of Google News, communicate with people who speak different languages using Google Translate chat bots, and more. We're constantly working to improve translation quality, so if you haven't tried it recently, you may be pleasantly surprised with what it can do now.

We're especially excited to announce that we've added 9 new languages to Google Translate: Afrikaans, Belarusian, Icelandic, Irish, Macedonian, Malay, Swahili, Welsh, and Yiddish, bringing the number of languages we support from 42 to 51. Since we can translate between any two of these languages, we offer translation for 2550 language pairs!

How do we decide which languages to add to Google Translate? Our goal is to provide automatic translation for as many languages as possible. So internally we've been collecting data and building systems for more than 100 languages. Whenever a set of languages meets our quality bar we consider it for our next language launch. We've found that one of the most important factors in adding new languages to our system is the ability to find large amounts of translated documents from which our system automatically learns how to translate. As a result, the set of languages that we've been able to develop is more closely tied to the size of the web presence of a language and less to the number of speakers of the language.

We're very happy that our technology allows us to produce machine translation systems for languages that often don't get the attention they deserve. For many of the newly supported languages ours is the only mature and freely available translation system. While translation quality in these languages will be noticeably rougher than for languages we've supported for a longer time like French or Spanish, it is most often good enough to give a basic understanding of the text, and you can be sure that the quality will get better over time.

Remember, you can also use Google Translate from inside other Google products. For example you can translate e-mails within GMail, translate web pages using Google Toolbar, translate RSS news feeds from around the world in Google Reader, and translate documents in Google Docs. (The new languages aren't available in these products yet but will be soon!) And, if you're translating content into other languages, you can use our technology within Google Translator Toolkit to help you translate faster and better. In the future, expect to find our translation technology in more places, making it increasingly simple to get access to information no matter what language it is written in.

Suggest on Google News

2009-08-31T22:28:00.000-07:00

Suggest on Google News: "Posted by Corrie Scalisi and Ari Shotland, Software Engineers

Like many of our users, we were very excited when Google Suggest was incorporated into Google.com almost a year ago. The feature provides real-time suggestions while you search.

Today, we're happy to announce that we've enabled Suggest in all of our Google News editions in English, French, Italian, German and Spanish. The feature can make your experience searching Google News better by helping you formulate queries, saving you keystrokes, correcting spelling mistakes and exposing you to queries you might not have thought of. The goal of all that? To get you to the articles you're looking for as quickly as possible.

As you can see, we've tuned our algorithm so that it presents suggestions that are particularly relevant for news-related queries:

We are working on enabling Suggest in other editions of Google News, so stay tuned!

Find great stuff to read in Google Reader

2009-08-28T22:02:00.000-07:00

Find great stuff to read in Google Reader: "Posted by Zach Yeskel, Product Marketing Manager

Have you ever clicked the 'Reader' link at the top of your Gmail inbox and ended up in Google Reader, kind of unsure about what to do next?

We realize this happens from time to time, so to help people get started with Reader, we asked a bunch of prominent journalists, techies, fashion critics, and foodies for their lists of favorite sites and blogs. We compiled their reading lists and made them accessible to everyone at google.com/powerreaders, where you can explore and subscribe to lists from Thomas Friedman, Arianna Huffington, Paul Krugman, the editors of Lifehacker, Boing Boing, Kottke.org, and many more.

Whether you're new to Google Reader or already have an extensive reading list, we hope this will be a good place to find great stuff to read. And if you want to create your own reading list to share with others, you can do that too.

Share from Nav Bar

2009-08-28T22:00:00.000-07:00

Share from Nav Bar: "by Talin, Software Engineer, Blogger (Mountain View, CA)

It's fitting that our newest birthday present was announced first on Twitter. Starting yesterday, the Blogger Navbar includes a new button: 'Share.'

When your readers are on your blog's home page, they can click 'Share' to post the blog's URL to Twitter, Facebook, or Google Reader. If they navigate directly to an individual blog post, clicking 'Share' in the navbar also lets them share the post by email.

We've already seen some nice adoption of this new feature and hope this helps you build out your audience and share your story with the world. Here's a fun hack: each URL that gets shared has a specific parameter appended (?spref=nn, where fb=Facebook, tw=Twitter, and gr=Google Reader). If you're using Google Analytics to measure traffic on your blog, you can search for those strings to see how much traffic you're getting from each source.

On the other hand, if you're interested in seeing which blogs people are sharing, head on over to Twitter search and you can watch as people share blogs and posts that they like. Don't forget to follow us on Twitter while you're there!

This is one of many features announced as part of Blogger's 10th birthday. Happy Birthday!

Google Docs: now with translation

2009-08-27T19:39:00.000-07:00

Google Docs: now with translation: "At Google, I often collaborate with colleagues around the world, so it's quite common to be working with someone whose native language is different from my own. To make sharing content easier, we just added the ability to translate documents into Google Docs.

With this feature you can write a doc once, and with a few clicks make it available in any of 42 supported languages: Albanian, Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croation, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese.

Here is an example of an interview feedback form being translated from English to Russian.

When you combine this new feature with the template gallery, things get more interesting. Anyone in your domain can make a template, and put it in your organization's own gallery. From there, colleagues from around the world will be able to grab a copy of the template and with a couple of clicks, localize it into the language that they're most comfortable with. All of the document's original formatting and layout will be preserved.

You can find the Translate option under the Tools menu.

Posted by Jeff Harris, Associate Product Manager, Google Docs team

Get timely updates on new features in Google Apps by subscribing to our RSS feed or email alerts.

How Restaurants Can Use Social Media

2009-08-27T03:39:00.000-07:00

How Restaurants Can Use Social Media: "

Various trades and industries are using social media for marketing, creating brand awareness, reputation monitoring and consumer engagement. The restaurant industry is no different. By definition restaurants are very social offline, but what about online? This got me thinking about how restaurants can utilize social media platforms for marketing, brand monitoring and beyond. In talking with a potential client, who is a major player in the restaurant industry, I outlined the following initiatives and talked about how they can and should be using social media.

Chances are that if you are a restaurant, especially a well known, recognized one, people are talking about you online. Make no mistake that there is chatter happening. The question is what type of chatter is it? Good, bad or in between, and how do you plan on dealing with it?

Note: Although this post is about how restaurants can use social media, the tactics and strategies I outline can be used for any industry.

Look and listen first: who is talking about you and what is being said?

Talk is happening everywhere, forums, blogs, comments, review sites, Twitter and so forth. Starting with the basics, Google Alerts should be setup to track any keyword/brand mentions.

The next step is monitoring Twitter. Twitter is the real time watering hole for all types of chatter. It is often the first place that a rant or rave will be mentioned, and from there it can quickly go viral in no time. Once something starts to spread on Twitter, it’s often hard to do the right damage control. It’s imperative that Twitter is monitored heavily and should be priority number one for brand monitoring.

Automation is key, let the tools do the work. Set it and forget it.

Search Twitter for your brand’s relevant keywords and set up RSS feeds to track them in Google Reader. You should also utilize Tweet Beep, a free service that will automatically email you hourly updates when a specific keyword or URL is mentioned on Twitter. This is a tool I heavily rely on for brand monitoring, it works extremely well and allows me to bypass going to Twitter’s website to search.

Conversations are everywhere, that’s where BackType fits into the mix. BackType is a free service that indexes millions of conversations from blogs, social networks and other social media platforms. You can search the BackType website or set up email alerts, it’s not real time but it’s close enough.

These are at the very least the minimum amount of tools you should be using. There are plenty of other tools out there, but they all pretty much do the same thing. My personal preference is using Google Reader or NetVibes as my social media dashboard. The other route is paying for a reputation monitoring service. One that I use and highly recommended is Filtrbox.com. The service monitors a wide scope of the social media sphere, and sends me daily email reports with mentions of the brands that I’m tracking. They are reasonably priced compared to their competitors as well.

Additional platforms and services to be monitoring:

The services I mentioned above cover most of the social media landscape, but not everything. It’s also a good idea from time to time to scan the services mentioned below. The last three on the list monitor pretty much the same social media platforms. They are popular, their user interfaces are different, and they are definitely worth a notable mention.

Search engines, the main one being Google

Google Blog Search

Technorati advanced search

WordPress.com search

Micro-blogging applications such as Posterous & Tumblr search

FriendFeed advanced search

Delicious search

SocialMention.com

Social Media Firehose (Yahoo Pipes)

Spy.appspot.com

Now that you have looked and listened, it’s time to learn:

So what about all this Twitter chatter?

People who are talking about you on Twitter or any social media network are mainly two things, existing customers or potential customers. Follow back everyone who talks about your brand in a positive manner. After all, these are brand evangelists, it’s word of mouth marketing, and it’s not costing you a dime. Reciprocation shows that you as a brand have taken interest in your customer. Be responsive to this and when applicable engage them in a conversation, or at the very least send them a quick thank you note. You should also identify and develop relationships with your loyal brand endorsers because these people are essentially an extension of your online marketing dept. In addition to engaging these people, reward them with a gift card to your restaurant. Tokens of appreciation go far and are always remembered. If you think they are talking now, just wait until that gift card arrives in the mail. The positive stuff is pretty much a no brainer, but always remember social media is all about the conversations, unfiltered at that. Responding to negative chatter is equally important as well, use these social media tools wisely to handle crisis situations, and avoid a PR nightmare. In the online environment, word spreads at an alarming high frequency, and once it does, there will be very little that you can do no matter how much you try to correct the situation.

Twitter for the most part is a customer service tool as I outlined in the previous paragraph, but it can also be used for marketing.

Announce the new menu or drink specials of the day

Promote a happy-hour event or special restaurant event

Start a promotion called Twitter Tuesday (or tweet ups)

Solicit ideas for new menu items or specials of the day on Twitter.

Offer a special prize for people who follow you on Twitter by a specific time and date, to be entered to win a free bottle of wine or gift certificate.

Brand your restaurant’s menu and marketing material with your Twitter account url. Take it a step further and have your Twitter url printed on customer receipts. If you are a QSR (Quick service restaurant) brand your social profiles at your POP (Point of Purchase).

Start a company blog:

A blog can be used for the same things as Twitter, only in much greater detail. Twitter has limitations where as a blog has none. Pictures and videos are just two examples. Use your restaurant blog to showcase customer testimonials, pictures from a specific event, menu items, food & drink recipes, employee bios and over all anything and everything that relates to your restaurant. The possibilities are endless on what you can use your blog for. A suggestion I give to clients in the industry is to start a weekly “Ask the expert” series on your blog. If my restaurant was a Sushi restaurant, I would encourage my customers to ask a Sushi related question and let our star Sushi chef answer them on the blog. The other purpose of a company blog is to generate new content, content that will get indexed in search engines and give potential new customers a way to find you on the web. Every blog post is a gateway into your website, so be sure to optimize your content with the correct keyword branding, post titles, tags and so on. Encourage your patrons to subscribe to your RSS feed and to share your blog’s content. Install ShareThis so that your patrons have an easy way of distributing your blog content.

Reviews, Reviews, Reviews!

Chances are your restaurant is already on review sites like Urbanspoon and Yelp. If it’s not, be sure to encourage your customers to post a fair review. Ask your brand endorsers on Twitter to leave a review, as well as customers in your restaurant. Remember nowadays everyone is a food critic. These online review sites are a big source of customer information and they are global reaching. There will be negative reviews, not everyone can be pleased, no matter the caliber of service you provide. If there is a negative review left, try to reach out to that customer and correct the situation if possible. The goal with a negative review or reviews is to get them buried on page 10. The only thing you can do for this is to provide good service atmosphere and food in the hopes of getting good reviews in front of it. Your brand endorsers will always leave a great review, encourage all of them to visit these sites and post a review as often as possible.

Food is visual, visual, visual!

Your restaurant should have a YouTube channel and photo sharing channel, ideally on a site like Flickr. These social media platforms have two important things, search, and passionate communities. You can use video to showcase restaurant events, provide a visual of your existing menu or new menu items. Do a biweekly show on some of the menu items you serve in the restaurant. Showcase your kitchen talent and break open the kitchen doors. The possibilities are endless, use your imagination. These videos can be embedded on your blog and shared throughout the social media landscape. The same goes for photos. Take pictures of your guests, let them share their experiences with images on your blog. Take pictures of your menu items, signature drinks, kitchen staff, and everything that represents your restaurant.

Embrace and prepare for mobile, it’s here and it’s not going anywhere:

With the advent of the iPhone and the mobile digital revolution, it’s essential that you pay attention to this. Starting with your website, make sure its optimized for mobile devices. We talked about review sites earlier, well guess what, they have iPhone applications, and they are very popular at that. That’s why it’s essential that your restaurant be on these sites. The bigger picture depending on the type of restaurant you operate would be to develop an iPhone application, one where people can easily view your menu options, contact information, and more specifically to place orders. Just look at how much success Pizza Hut is having with their newly released iPhone application, with over 100,000 downloads in the first month. The bottom line is embrace mobile every which way possible.

Get as much data as possible from your customers:

Online this mainly refers to email addresses. Your website should be collecting people’s email addresses. Encourage your existing customers and potential customers to sign up to be notified about any upcoming events at the restaurant. Send out a monthly newsletter informing customers about what’s happening at the restaurant, new menu items, special events, new store openings and so forth. Reward people for subscribing to the newsletter with a gift card or free glass of wine when they come in. Include quality information in your newsletter such as the recipe ingredients of an upcoming or existing menu item, maybe accompany that with a link to an online video or photographs of the dish. I have only touched upon the surface here, but I’m sure you get the picture by now.

In closing:

I could go on and on with this post but I will stop here. Restaurants have an advantage over a lot of other industries that use social media. Why you may ask? Social media is about story telling and visuals. Food is very visual, both physically and emotionally. Food evokes conversations, experiences, memories, and stories that people share. This is what social media is all about.

Composing a message? Try the contact chooser

2009-08-25T19:50:00.000-07:00

Composing a message? Try the contact chooser: "Posted by Benjamin Grol, Product Manager

When composing messages, you probably rely pretty heavily on auto-complete to add recipients. Auto-complete is convenient and fast, and usually does the trick. But sometimes seeing your list of contacts can help you remember all the people you want to include on your email. So, we've added a contact chooser to Gmail. Click the 'To:' link (or Cc:/Bcc:) when composing a message and you'll see something like this:

You can click on the contacts you want to add or search for others.

If you use contact groups, your groups will appear in a drop-down menu in the contact chooser, so you can select contacts from the groups you've already created. And if you happen to use Gmail in Chinese, Japanese or Korean, being able to pick from your list of contacts should be particularly useful since auto-complete doesn't offer the same search as you type experience that it does in other languages.

Partly cloudy, chance of labels

2009-08-25T19:48:00.000-07:00

Partly cloudy, chance of labels: "by Wiktor Gworek, Software Engineer, Blogger (Krakow, Poland)

In April, we announced that we wanted to hear from you about your wish list for features in Blogger. Many of you said that the label gadget should be more flexible. Today we are rolling out two enhancements to the label gadget.

Label Cloud

Previously, the label gadget showed a list of labels—and by far the most requested enhancement was to present the labels as a 'cloud' instead of as a bulleted list. That's now supported in the gadget directly:

Once enabled, the more popular labels appear in a bigger font than the less popular labels:

Selected Labels

If you've been on Blogger for a while, you might have more labels than you know what to do with. Don't want to show all of your labels in the widget? No problem: go to the label gadget settings and choose 'Selected labels.' You will be able to select a subset of labels to be displayed in the widget:

We hope you like it!

This is one of many features announced as part of Blogger's 10th birthday. Happy Birthday!

Yahoo gets more social with Mail, search updates

2009-08-24T19:18:00.000-07:00

Yahoo gets more social with Mail, search updates: "

Yahoo Messenger, along with several other core products, are looking more and more social every day.

(Credit: Yahoo)

SUNNYVALE, CALIF.--Yahoo increased the social graces of its core products Monday, with a nod to its new home page and a declaration that it's not done with search just yet.

Popular Yahoo products such as Mail and Messenger will soon grow more social, allowing users to update their status, share photos with friends, and initiate video calls. In addition, Yahoo Search is about to get a new results page that can connect searchers directly to the Web content they seek without leaving the results page.

'Our user base grows when things are simpler and more delightful,' said Elisa Steele, executive vice president and chief marketing officer at Yahoo. The idea is twofold: to attract more people who are not already familiar with Yahoo's content and to entice those who already use products like Yahoo Mail to spend more time on the site. Either way, that's more eyeballs for advertisers.

To that effect, Yahoo hopes to tap into the popularity of social networking by redesigning Yahoo Mail--the leading e-mail service in the world--to feature status updates, links to social content like photo albums, and additional applications such as Evite. The new home page allows Yahoo members to update their status and broadcast that within the Yahoo network, and that box will also be added to the Mail and Messenger experiences.

At the moment, however, those obsessed with social networking are likely already hooked up with the likes of Facebook and Twitter. The status updates that are available through the top of the Yahoo home page and Mail page will only broadcast to those who you've connected with via Yahoo profiles, but at some point Yahoo wants to link that status update box to outside services to allow you to update your status once and broadcast it to multiple networks, said Tapan Bhat, senior vice president of integrated consumer experiences.

Still, there's still an awful lot of people who haven't taken the Twitter plunge, said Bryan Lamkin, senior vice president of applications products. Yahoo wants to have it both ways: to provide a social outlet for Yahoo users who haven't signed up for things like Twitter and to give those Yahoo users already hooked into other social networks a chance to run everything through Yahoo.

And although Yahoo plans to offload its search business to Microsoft at some point over the next several years, it demonstrated a new search results page that can display search results from specific sites that are related to the query. For example, searches for queries such as 'how to make sushi' return Wikipedia and eHow links on the left hand side of the page, and searches for people link to results gathered from Facebook or Twitter.

'Searching for people has been Google's domain. We're going to take that away from them,' said Larry Cornett, vice president of search products and design.

Many people forget that although Microsoft is set to take over on the back end, Yahoo will retain control of how Bing-powered results are presented on Yahoo pages, said Prabhakar Raghavan, senior vice president of Yahoo Labs and search strategy. That means the company will continue to tweak the front-end experience, and from that standpoint could really be considered a competitor of Bing.

'We are not a version of Bing...What we do with (search results), how we paint it, that's entirely up to us,' Raghavan said.

Corrected at 2:45 p.m. PDT with the correct spelling of search executive Larry Cornett's name.

Originally posted at Relevant Results

Why Parents Write More Persuasive Copy

2009-08-22T20:18:00.000-07:00

Why Parents Write More Persuasive Copy: "

I have kids. Maybe you do, too. The more I parent them, the more I realize how similar they are to the people who visit our web sites and blogs. That’s not to say that our site visitors are big babies — far from it.

But site visitors do have needs, questions and worries. And your copywriting is the guide that helps them feel comfortable, happy, and in tune with your site.

Welcome to parenting, Copyblogger style.

“Are we there yet?”

Visitors land on your site today with a purpose in mind. It might be to be entertained, to be informed, to learn, or to buy. But if you make their journey from landing to goal too long, they’re going to start to wonder if you’ll ever give them what they wanted.

You know, the good stuff.

So out with it, already. Don’t ramble on about yourself or fluff your site up with content that isn’t relevant. Get to the point. Your copywriting should be a fast journey right to the good stuff. Make it short, snappy and concise.

Tell people what they’re going to get, then give it to them.

“I said, come here!”

You may want your readers to head over to the Buy Now page or the Hire Me form. They might have different ideas. They may well be running all around your website clicking on unrelated junk or getting distracted with stuff that doesn’t matter.

It’s frustrating. You want people to take action, but most of the time, they don’t even know you want them to do something.

Each page of copy you write should have a purpose, and that’s to get a reader to take some specific action. Your copy is the tool that convinces them to do so.

Plan the route your potential clients should follow, the action they should take at each step. Then write your copy to be the clear, simple path that leads them right to becoming your customer.

“Do you want an apple or an orange?”

Have you ever walked into a toy store with your kids and asked them to choose something? Good luck with that. They’re overwhelmed by the options and run about, touching everything and totally unable to make up their minds about anything.

Your site visitors feel the same way. Give them too many links, too many options, too much to do, and you’ll lose them to option paralysis.

They do nothing. Which means you get nothing.

Good copy gives readers clear direction and limited choices. More isn’t better; fewer options and simple choices help people make a decision. If you present no more than two or three options, you’ll hugely raise the odds that one of them will be chosen.

Don’t ask site visitors to make complex decisions. Stick to a simple either/or and everyone wins.

“But whyyyyy?”

Anyone who’s ever been within an earshot of a kid knows this one.

With kids, everything needs a reason. It’s a never-ending dive into the “Why” black hole that eventually reaches, “Because I said so!” That’s not a very satisfying answer, though.

Your site visitors have a few more years under their belts. They aren’t kids anymore, and they aren’t stupid. They’ll ask why, too. In fact, they’ll demand to know why they should do something, and you need to give them solid, convincing and compelling reasons.

Every person in the world wants that type of knowledge. No one likes uncertainty. It makes us feel hesitant — and when we feel hesitant, we don’t buy. A potential customer who doesn’t have his questions answered is going to avoid clicking the button even if he really wants the product, and you just lost a sale.

Site visitors who feel good about their choice and feel they’re making the right decision for them are going to take action — and confidently so.

That’s why long copy works well — it covers all the answers and potential arguments. Then it gives solid reasons why this decision is the right one for your site visitor to make.

“Are you listening to me?”

You’re talking and talking to your kids and nothing happens at all. That’s when you realize . . . no one’s listening. You might as well be talking to the wall.

If your copy has the same reaction with site visitors, then you’d better start thinking about how you’re talking to them.

Are you talking at them? They won’t listen. They care about themselves, not about you.

Talking too much? Boring. Shut up already, and get to the point.

Talking a different language? Don’t use fancy words and jargon to try and impress. People want to be spoken to their way, not your way.

The secret to great copywriting — and great parenting — is simple: keep the connection. Hook their interest, hold their attention, give them good reason to listen to you, guide them well, and feel proud when they do exactly as you’d hoped.

About the Author: James Chartrand is a copywriting dad who treats his clients just as well as he does his two beautiful daughters — except he doesn’t make his clients eat their oatmeal. Catch more of James’ great advice at his blog, Men with Pens.

Video chat from iGoogle

2009-08-21T20:15:00.000-07:00

Video chat from iGoogle: "I use iGoogle to chat with friends while I check the daily news, email co-workers, and even scan through cute kitty pics — you name it, iGoogle has it. Chatting is great for sharing quick thoughts, but sometimes I'd rather just talk to my friends face to face. For instance, last week I got to hold an adorable 3-month-old giant panda. I really wanted to share the excitement of it with my friends, but my fingers just couldn't keep up with the speed and emotion of my thoughts. Now we're making it easier to chat face-to-face, with video chat built right into iGoogle. Just a few clicks and I can see and hear friends and family right from my homepage.

The first time you use video chat in iGoogle, you'll need to download a small plugin. It's free and installs in seconds. To video chat with a friend, click on the 'Start video chat' link in the 'Actions' menu at the bottom of a chat window. You can see which of your friends are set up for video by the small green camera icon next to their name in their chat list. Once you start chatting, you can pop out the window and make the size bigger or go full-screen.

We have had video chat in Gmail for a little while now, but the nice thing about video chat in iGoogle is that you can video chat with friends who don't have gmail accounts, all you need is a Google account. One less thing to worry about when you want to stay in touch. We'll also be rolling this new feature out over the course of the next few days so if you don't see it on your homepage today, just keeping checking back. As always, we'd love to know how you're enjoying the new feature.

Posted by Robin Schriebman
Software Engineer

Video chat tips

2009-08-20T19:48:00.000-07:00

Video chat tips: "Hi all, we wanted to share some thoughts, tricks and tips around our Gmail video chat feature. Our first video chat tip is around making the call window bigger on your screen. When a video chat first starts, it is in the small chat window, and you see more of your email inbox than the person you wanted to talk to.

Did you know you could use the 'pop-out' arrow on the top of a chat window to make a video chat bigger? This will separate the video chat into its own window that you can resize and move around as you like.

If you want to make the video chat as large as possible and block everything else out, simply use the Full Screen button in the top left corner of the video area. This will fill up your screen and make your conversation much more immersive. Based on the feedback you've given us, we have added the ability to mute your microphone while in full screen mode. To do this, simply hit the space bar!

Feel free to reach us by linking to this blog and by using twitter. We monitor 'Gmail video chat', Gmail video chat', 'Google video chat', or #googlevideochat in your tweets.

Posted by Fredrik Oja,
Software Engineer

What Apps Should Twitter Highlight? Twitter HQ Wants to Know

2009-08-18T20:46:00.000-07:00

What Apps Should Twitter Highlight? Twitter HQ Wants to Know: "

Twitter is working on an automated method of discovering interesting 3rd party applications and websites built on its service to promote to users in the top right corner of its home page. Until that automated method is established, co-founder Biz Stone told us by email today that Twitter should do a better job of highlighting more projects and that he is open to suggestions for projects to feature.

We would love to make some suggestions, but we thought we'd start by asking our readers for ideas.

The short list of projects featured right now looks to us like a group of companies that Twitter has a financial interest in or are run by Silicon Valley celebrities. Stone assures us that's not the case (there is no affiliate relationship with Threadless, for example, and he's planning on highlighting the forthcoming event Twestival) - but let's offer him a list of lesser known apps to broaden what millions of people see when they log in to their stream of Tweets.

Stone and Evan Williams are invested as founding advisers of Trazzler,
but what other Twitter-based projects should be highlighted in this prime real estate?

Please post your suggestions for Twitter apps and projects that deserve some of the limelight in the comments below. We may grab the ones that get named more than once and hold a vote later to discover the 'must-see' Twitter apps in the eyes of the ReadWriteWeb community.

We'll make sure the good people at Twitter HQ see these lists as well. We like to give them a hard time, but that's just because it's our job and because they are so important. We're excited to see the automated 'cool app' discovery process when it's launched too.

For now though, what do you think millions of Twitter users should be shown in the corner of their pages? Add your favorites to the comments below.

Discuss

Google accounts on Twitter

2009-07-11T19:17:00.000-07:00

Google accounts on Twitter

Today Google posted a list of its all of Google accounts on Twitter, so now you can follow easily all of Google's accounts on twitter to get all of updates real time.
As we know Twitter is Twitter so Google also understands its important more than us and I think If you are a human and related to web then you should have an account on twitter and and separate accounts for each of your services and products.
Here you can visit directly some of Googles account on Twitter.
twitter.com/Google -Google,s main account
twitter.com/Blogger - For blogger fans
twitter.com/GoogleReader - For Google reader fans
twitter.com/YouTube - For Youtube fans
twitter.com/AdSense - for online publishers

For more Google accounts on Twitter visit original post.

DocCash: YOU CAN EARN MONY WITH YOUR DOCUMENTS

2009-05-15T04:00:00.001-07:00

Till now if you are publishing your document at document sharing sites like Docstoc or Scribd for your promotion only then now its time for earning some money too. You should publish your documents like before but now you can get some returning revenue too for publishing your documents with DocCash.

And who is doing all this for you(?) it is Docstoc if you have an account in Docstoc it is nice you only you have to open an account in Google adsense if you have already then its pretty.

How much revenue you will get it will be spilled in 50-50 between you and Docstoc, that's it.

See this video for more details.

Come to Gmail

2009-05-13T21:32:00.001-07:00

Gmail is is email service from Google now it is growing very fast, Gmail team is working very passionately to improve user experience and want to make it world leader as yahoo is at this time in email service so now Gmail users can completely close their other email services and can come to Gmail with all their band and baggage without any hesitation because now Gmail has made it easy to migrate your email contacts from hotmail, yahoo, AOl and many other services.

Gmail have this feature in settings tab accounts and import.

Lets Fun with your tweets with Portwiture

2009-05-12T20:24:00.001-07:00

As Twitter is growing many new services are coming everyday to help and play and have fun with twitter. Portwiture is also a Twitter related service if you are twitter addict+Photo aka flickr lover then Portwiture is defiantly for you. It is amazing service and simple, It grabs photographs from flickr for your recent tweets, on which subject you have twitted it will grab images for matching your recent tweets. You can view your tweets in image and in slide show.

Ugly Lovely Twitter

2009-05-12T04:59:00.001-07:00

About four months ago one of my friend whom I introduced about Twitter a simple micro blogging platform where you can post your message in only 140 characters no music, no video, no picture, he told what a worthless service, but when I told about magic of Twitter he also open an account in Twitter but he never liked this service because he can not request for friendship only can become follower of sexy girls and can not send DM without accepting his friendship, so Twitter was totally worthless for him.

But it is not worthless for all, almost everyone is looking for followers at Twitter and want to promote business and want to make money from Twitter or with the help of.

Few months ago many tech bloggers were crying Twitter is dying and it must not die but now its flying not Twitter is at top, Simply I can say Oprah Winfrey and Britney Spears like celebrities and Microsoft, Google, Yahoo like web services and Facebook like Social media site, CNN like news services and finally TechCrunch, Mashable like group edited blogs all are using twitter and proud member of this service.

Now so many desktop and mobile applications are launching everyday to help you with twitter and everyday new websites are launching.

Now its clear Twitter like small service reached at this place only because of its simplicity.

Get more Twitter Followers with twitproquo.com

2009-05-11T11:06:00.001-07:00

twitproquo.com is a Twitter related service which helps you to get more followers. The funda is simple what you pay is what you get means give and take.

You follow ten peoples and you get quid when other peoples do the same they will follow you they will be quid and other people will come they will do the same.

And it works,

when you get all 10 followers as I said before they will mail you now you are out of queue means then again you can follow 10 peoples.

The service is spreading very firstly among Twitter users because it works.
Only you have to follosify yourself.

When you will follow ten peoples it will send a message to your twitter page like below

New Faster MY SPACE

2009-05-10T20:37:00.001-07:00

As we know My Myspace craze is now slowing down day by day and Facebook is now double of Myspace in size, so Myspace is taking it seriously and trying to do everything possible so today it launches lite view of Myspace, no flash no animation , music or video.

You can not see it at homepage but when you are browsing other profiles you can enable this option.

Look at my profile in lite view.

Technorati Tags: MYSpace,Facebook

My true solutions is back

2009-04-30T06:56:00.000-07:00

Hi friends for last few months I could not post anything but now I am really back and I am able to post again.
I was busy with some of my projects and having many problems but now most of problems have been solved, actually we can not ge rid of problems but I like new version of problems and upgraded problems. So please if you are not visiting this blog from last few months please come again to read my post.