Google

The Google Talk blog announced that they have opened the source on their voice communications to further the development of their Google Talk infrastructure. Of real note is the libjingle library released by Google. As the article states:

Libjingle is the very same code Google Talk uses to negotiate, establish, and maintain peer-to-peer voice sessions, packaged as a library for other developers to use in their own projects. By incorporating Libjingle into your project, you enable its users to voice chat with other users of the Google Talk service.

Google released two new FireFox extensions - Blogger Web Comments and Google Safe Browsing for FireFox. Blogger Web Comments allows you to more efficient surf and post comments on Blogger sites while Google Safe Browsing helps prevent users against phishing attacks.

What's really interesting about the timing of these two releases is the rumor circulating the web that Google may be in talks to buy Opera, the "other" non-Internet Explorer web browser. With Google backing

Google has increased the statistics reported using their Sitemaps application. Before, users were limited to only 5 search terms used to pull results from their page. Now, on my own Sitemap, there is a list of over 20 search terms. This information correlates exactly to the information I see on my Analytics account.

The Official Google Blog states that users can create personalized home pages using a very fluid Web 2.0 interface. This is hardly news as I have been using Google IG for almost a year at this point.

However, one new additional feature is that Google has opened up the Homepage API for developers to create modules that can be added to your personalized home page. Google developers have created a few already which you can check out from the links on the Google blog post.

Google's Official AdWords Blog offers a few very helpful tips for testing your AdWords advertisement since many advertisers were having difficulty viewing their offerings. The blog entry points out that members can use their troubleshotting wizard and their Diagnostic Tool to help fine tune their online ads.

These are great tools to use any utilities that some online ad publishers do not have giving Google yet another edge in the online marketing game.

A new site, Performancing, interviewed Matt Cutts, a Google search engine optimization guru. He offers some great insight into Google's approach to blogs, tools readily available and tips for running a successful web outlet. From the article:

I wouldn't bother with year/month/day in blog urls; I'd just use the first few words from the title of the post in the url. Don't try to rank for a huge phrase at first--pick a smaller niche and get to be known as an expert there, and then build your way out and up. Controversial posts are sure to build links, but too many controversial posts may undermine your credibility. I think you attract more links with a conversational style, humor, and doing your own research to produce new insights or tidbits of info. In my opinion, just commenting on other blogs isn't as useful. There are a lot of ways to build a reputation, from having a great blog to producing a unique service to speaking at conferences. A single creative idea that catches fire in the blogosphere or digg.com is probably more useful than just chasing/buying/trading links. Original information or research is great bait to attract links.

Gmail has introduced some new functionality into their web based email client - Gmail Clips. Clips allows you to be emailed stories from your favorite blog or website in a similar manner to how RSS feeds work. In fact, you might call this the "beginners" interface into the world of RSS feeds.

Personally, I won't ever take advantage of this feature since my RSS reader is extremely more functional than either Gmail Clips or Google Reader. However, for those less computer savvy, email is an Internet basic and getting their favorite site's stories emailed to them could prove useful to some.

Do you need Google Base help? If you're performing bulk uploads, I bet you do since the bulk upload procedure is unclear, not working, tempermental and just plain frustrating. However, another Google product, Google Groups, has some good information and help on Google Base here.

If many of you were wondering why I haven't finished my Google Base tutorial, now you know why - it really doesn't work when it comes to bulk uploading. I actually already have a RSS 2.0 feed ready and an automated process to FTP the information to Google, but the articles are overwriting, disappearing and just plain never showing up.

Newsweek has published a self administered interview by Eric Schmidt about the Ten Golden Rules at Google. In short, those rules are:

• Hire By Committee
• Cater to their Every Need
• Pack them in
• Make Coordination Easy
• Eat Your Own Dog Food
• Encourage Creativity
• Strive to Reach Consensus
• Don't be Evil
• Data Drive Decisions
• Communicate Effectively

The Google Talk Blog has an article discussing the Internet Voice Campaign which is a movement towards moving all of our communications through Internet based resources. Ithe IVC's main objective seems to be answering user questions such as what exactly Internet voice services really are, 911 support, privacy, security, power failures and call quality. It's a PDF so go take a look to learn more about this objective.