The photo gadget of Google's 3D chat world Lively is working again. Its customization feature to add any pic you like had been disabled a while ago for untold reasons (the gadget is still broken though when it comes to do proper scaling of pics added to it -- refer to the FAQ for one workaround). On that note, I'd like to welcome you to Mackereel McRoy's Museum of Modern Stuff. If Lively doesn't crash on you then what you'll see after some loading is a little museum I set up showing a variety of web experiments from Blogoscoped but also other sites, with a special focus on collaborative works.

Randy Pausch, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University and a good friend of Goo[...]

We've known it for a long time: the web is big. The first Google index in 1998 already had 26 millio[...]

Last month, a group of Googlers traveled to Brazil, to conduct our first-ever project in the Amazon.[...]

One of our goals is to give everyone using Google the information they want, wherever they are, in w[...]

A few months ago we announced that we were testing a new product called Knol. Knols are authoritativ[...]

Posted by Beate List, University Programme, ZurichA few months ago we had the great pleasure of anno[...]

Last week, the ten grand prize winners for the first Google Highly Open Participation Contest, our i[...]

In my previous post, I introduced the philosophies behind Google ranking. As part of our effort to d[...]

What do wedding planners, gas mileage calculators and photo albums have in common? They're all exam[...]

Early on in my career at Google I was approached by a former professor of mine, Jamie Murphy, who wa[...]

Motoko Hunt is originally from Japan and has been doing business in the US and Japan for two decades. She founded her company in 1998 and provides Japanese search marketing services in the US, Europe and Asia. She's also the co-chair of the upcoming Search Engine Strategies Tokyo conference and will be speaking at the SES in San Jose. Motoko loves scuba diving, heavy metal music and Guinness. By your estimate, what are the most popular search engines in Japan? Yahoo has be ...

Management guru Peter Drucker noted that companies attracting the best knowledge workers will "secur[...]

Some people noticed Knol articles are already sometimes ranking very well in Google results, even though Google promised Knol articles wouldn't get any artificial boost. Until further evidence comes in I don't think we've much reason to distrust Google's statement, and yet, the site does get a major boost all the same simply because it's in the vicinity of the superbly ranking network of Google websites (not yet on the PageRank 10 homepage, but for instance on the PageRank 8 -- recently 9, AFAIK -- blog, on PageRank 9 Google Scholar, and perhaps now or soon on other Google properties. ...

Reto Meier in a comment to the ranking debate over Knol wrote, "I don't see any evidence that the moderated collaboration is working yet." This led to some thoughts on the editing of other people's Knols feature, and the question "What is the motivation for editing someone else's Knol article?" For instance: When I edit someone else's Knol article, as opposed to what happens on Wikipedia, my edit may never see the light of the day. To see the light of day, it also needs to pass a person who may disagree with my edit or who may be insulted by the correction. If I spot a factual error in an article, editing it to remove it would make the ...

Posted by Liza Ma, Associate Product ManagerCreating content for the web is easy, but getting people[...]

Posted by Arnaud Sahuguet and Ari Bezman, Product ManagersIn this U.S. election year, what informati[...]

According to the Colorblind Web Page Filter, above is what Google.com looks like for users with protanopia (red/ green color blindness). Perhaps Google should run this as their logo one day to raise awareness of color blindness. Out of interest, does that logo look normal to anyone here/ is there anyone who's colorblind here? The Colorblind Filter site is a bit slow at the moment but if you created a website and you're not color blind, you can check how well your intended color scheme fares. The site also has more information on how to select safer colors. [Via Paul Buchheit

Google added a new feature to Gmail to always use a secure (https) connection. Switch to the settings/ general tab and scroll down to "Browser connection" to see if you got it already (if not, it may still be rolled out for you). While safer, Google in their blog announcement of this also notes it may slow down your Gmail a bit. [Thanks Mrrix32!]

Posted by Steve Grove, YouTube News and PoliticsThrough unprecedented partnerships with both the Dem[...]

Posted by Ola Rosling, Product ManagerA few weeks ago we heard about a project Radiohead was working[...]

Domains using the full character spectrum aren't really supported well in browsers, partly due to security issues... so entering something like bücherei.com (the German word for library) will resolve into what is called a punycode address, namely xn--bcherei-n2a.com. This kinda ruins it for serious uses, but still, there's domains out there using more than just ASCII letters... and some even use the graphical symbols part of Unicode: This one showing the female symbol is still under construction: www.♀.com The self-proclaimed "manliest domain on the internet" is for sale: www.♂.com A page load error for heart-dot-com: www.♥.com The ...

Date: August 7, 2032 From: The Bureau of Public Anomaly Screenings Subject: A notice Dear citizen, As you may know, under the Public Screening Act of 2030, all citizens are undergoing routine checks for anomalies. We do so through the use of public sources only, aggregating and mining your digital traces. According to our findings, which are accurate in 99.5% of all cases -- thus legally qualifying as proof beyond reasonable doubt -- we have come to the following conclusions: - Your 56 Amazon book reviews and ratings: The choice of books reviewed, as well as the reviews given, lead our system to believe you have an above average interest in anti-governmental subjects. The associated review timestamps sh ...

Posted by Amit Singhal, Google FellowIn May, Udi Manber introduced our search quality group, the gro[...]

Posted by Robert Hamilton and David Singleton, Google Mobile TeamOur first downloadable iPhone appli[...]

Nope, this is not the title of a children's book (though it would be great as that!). Quote Google: Chubby is a fault-tolerant system at Google that provides a distributed locking mechanism and stores small files. Typically there is one Chubby instance, or "cell", per data center. Several Google systems -- such as the Google Filesystem (GFS) and Bigtable -- use Chubby for distributed coordination and to store a small amount of metadata. Chubby achieves fault-tolerance through replication. A typical Chubby cell consists of five replicas, running the same code, each running on a dedicated machine. Every Chubby object (e.g., a Chubby lock, or file) is stored as an entry in a database. It is this database that is replicated. At any one time, one of these replicas is considered to be the "master". ...

Posted by Chris DiBona, Open Source Programs ManagerToday we have something special for all you code[...]

Posted by Niniane Wang, Engineering ManagerA while ago, I looked around the social web and wished th[...]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Can You Guess What This Cartoon Is? | Comments][Advertisement] Fi[...]

Google's new publishing platform Knol has an interesting feature to offer: authors are allowed to use one cartoon from The New Yorker magazine per article*. The New Yorker started in the mid-1920s and collectively there's lots of cartoon content. I'm not sure where Google's partnership with the magazine puts republications of articles using the Creative Commons license (as the republication would include the cartoon) or Google's blanket permission to use screenshots of their sites (as screenshots may include a cartoon too).** Also, I wonder if some people will create a short wrapper Knol article whenever they want to freely republish a New Yorker cartoon. Now how would you go about ...