Just call him Bruce

Posted by Biz Stone, Blogger team

You'll never guess how I uploaded this photo of Brewster. Okay, maybe you could guess, but I'll tell you anyway: Blogger Images.


All Blogger users can now upload photos to their blogs. There's a button in the posting interface that looks like a little image, and when you click it, you can browse for an image on your computer or input the location of an image on the web. If you don't have cat photos to share on your blog, that's okay. We accept non-cat photos as well.

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One man's food pyramid

Posted by Michael Krantz, Google Blog Team

We may choose to eat only healthy food here at the Googleplex. The cafes serve sumptuous veggies and subtly seasoned fish, meat and pasta dishes, and the various kitchenettes always have a tempting array of fruits to choose from.

Photoblog Friday, however, is today devoted to the Dark Side.

On Friday mornings, one must resist this gooey, glazed array...



...the kitchenettes emit a psychedelic aura of caloric evil...



...and at lunchtime, how is one to avoid the table of doom?

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The world in your pocket

Posted by Steven Schirripa, Software Engineer

Since millions of people across the globe already use mobile phones like there's no tomorrow, we're launching Mobile Web Search in many languages. Try it the next time you visit Google on your mobile phone - you'll see a new option to search the Mobile Web. How different is it than standard web search? There are sites out there that have already been designed for your mobile phone, which makes them more navigable on the small screen. So we've created an index specifically for these sites. And so your phone can now be that much more useful.

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Google got me a camera...

Posted by Michael Krantz, Google Blog Team

...so from now on, we can all look forward to weekly slices of digital-photography life from the Googleplex, along with contributions from Googlers in our offices around the world.

A few hours ago, in honor of Photoblog Friday's maiden voyage, I walked over to the volleyball court, where, every lunchtime, a group of disturbingly fanatical volleyballers gathers to spend an hour or two in fierce competion, to the briefly entertained delight of hundreds of less athletically inclined Googlers passing by on our way to getting in even worse shape in the Cafe.

Is the ball going up or down here? I can't remember.

A giant yellow globe falls from the roof of Building 41.


The eternal triumph of the human volleyballing spirit.

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Dot what?

Posted by Tom Stocky, Product Marketing Manager

There's been a lot of talk lately about ICANN's preliminary approval of some new top level Internet domains (.cat, .jobs, .mobi, .post, .travel, and .xxx), some more controversial than others. I've followed the various social and political debates only peripherally, but it seems like this could lead to a broader trend of sites assigning themselves to categories like jobs and travel.

Using the Site Search feature, you can narrow searches to a specific website [admissions site:www.mit.edu]. But what many people don't know is you can also use Site Search to narrow searches to a top level domain, which I found handy during tax season: [1099 site:gov].

Right now, Site Search can be used for top level domains (.org, .edu, .mil, .com, and .net), as well as country domains like .it (Italy) or .sz (Swaziland). As more of these come into play, topic-specific searching could become even easier.

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Webmaster-friendly

Posted by Shiva Shivakumar, Engineering Director

We're undertaking an experiment called Google Sitemaps that will either fail miserably, or succeed beyond our wildest dreams, in making the web better for webmasters and users alike. It's a beta "ecosystem" that may help webmasters with two current challenges: keeping Google informed about all of your new web pages or updates, and increasing the coverage of your web pages in the Google index.

Initially, we plan to use the URL information webmasters supply to further improve the coverage and freshness of our index. Over time that will lead to our doing an even better job of delivering more search results from more websites. (Danny Sullivan interviewed me about this if you want to read more.)

This project doesn't just pertain to Google, either: we're releasing it under the Attribution/Share Alike Creative Commons license so that other search engines can do a better job as well. Eventually we hope this will be supported natively in webservers (e.g. Apache, Lotus Notes, IIS). But to get you started, we offer Sitemap Generator, an open source client in Python to compute sitemaps for a few common use cases. Give it a whirl and give us your feedback.

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The Summer of Code

Posted by Chris DiBona, Open Source Program Manager

We're very excited to launch our newest Open Source initiative, the Summer of Code, a program that aims to help students enter the world of Open Source software development by honing their skills on real problems with real programmers. It's not only intellectually rewarding, though - we're offering stipends to each student who successfully completes a project by the end of the summer. If you're up for it, go for it!

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