≡ Category: Comedy, Google | ≅ Leave a Comment
He appears in the well-known Mac v. PC commercials, on The Daily Show and occasionally on This American Life. John Hodgman is kind of everywhere these days, and now, promoting his new book, More Information Than You Require, he hits the stage at Google and gives the crowd an offbeat hour talk.
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The British Slant [...]
≡ Category: Amazon Kindle, Google, e-books | ≅ 10 Comments
According to Steven Johnson’s piece in The Wall Street Journal, the “breakthrough success of Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader, and the maturation of the Google Book Search service” could “make 2009 the most significant year in the evolution of the book since Gutenberg hammered out his original Bible.” Johnson goes on to explain why e-book readers (like [...]
≡ Category: Google, YouTube | ≅ 1 Comment
On Thursday, we announced the launch of YouTube EDU. Now, as promised, it’s time to give you some more details about the new university video hub.
I had a chance to chat with Obadiah Greenberg, a key Googler behind the launch. And he gave me some insight into the genesis of the project. As you can imagine, YouTube EDU wasn’t built overnight. [...]
≡ Category: Google, YouTube | ≅ 9 Comments
Here’s a little breaking news: Today, Google has launched YouTube EDU, which centralizes the content from over 100 universities and colleges (get list here). This robust collection gives you access to lectures by professors and world-renowned thought leaders, new research and campus tours. At the moment, you can access over 200 full courses from leading universities, including MIT, [...]
≡ Category: Google, History | ≅ Leave a Comment
In November, Google launched a 3D tour of Ancient Rome, circa 320 AD. The tour, produced with the help of the Rome Reborn project at the University of Virginia, features over 6,000 buildings, some rendered in fine detail, and it includes some interiors as well. The Coliseum, the Roman Forum, the Basilica Julia, the Temple of Vesta — they’re [...]
≡ Category: Google, YouTube | ≅ Leave a Comment
It’s another good day for the open education movement. As part of an experiment, YouTube has partnered with a select number of universities (Stanford, UC Berkeley, Duke, and UCLA) to make lectures, courses and other videos available for free download. This gives educators and lifelong learners the freedom to watch educational videos offline, whenever and wherever they want, including [...]
≡ Category: Google | ≅ 1 Comment
Given that water covers roughly 70% of our planet, it makes sense that Google Earth should take the oceans into account. Thanks to a partnership with the California Academy of Sciences, Google Earth now offers, according to the company blog, detailed maps of the ocean floor “so you can actually drop below the surface and explore [...]
≡ Category: Books, Google, Harvard, Web/Tech | ≅ 1 Comment
In the latest edition of The New York Review of Books, Robert Darnton, a prominent French historian who now runs Harvard’s Library system, puts out a tantalizing idea: “Google can make the Enlightenment dream come true.” Having settled its lawsuit with publishers and authors, Google is now steaming ahead with its effort to digitize millions [...]
≡ Category: Art, Google, Video - Arts & Culture | ≅ 3 Comments
Thankfully, it’s not all bad news here in Silicon Valley. Yesterday, Google and the Prado (the major art museum in Madrid) announced that you can launch Google Earth from wherever you live, travel virtually to Spain, and then take a close look at fourteen of the museum’s finest paintings. And, by “close,” I mean close. [...]
≡ Category: Google, Media | ≅ Leave a Comment
Just last month, Google announced that it was bringing the massive LIFE Magazine photo archive online. Two million photos are already uploaded, and another 8 million will be coming online soon.
This week, they’ve made a new announcement. The upshot? Google has reached an agreement with magazine publishers to digitize their historical archives. This will bring [...]
≡ Category: Google, Web/Tech | ≅ 2 Comments
Google recently turned 10, and, as part of the celebration, it has re-published its first search engine index from 2001. A mere 1.3 billion pages. Now, go ahead and do your vanity search and see if you show up. Me, I’m barely there. You?
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≡ Category: Google, Wikipedia | ≅ 3 Comments
The Chronicle of Higher Education is running a new piece (where I happen to get a small blurb) on Google’s Knol, asking what it will mean for students and professors. But it also deals, at least indirectly, with another question: Is Knol really intended to compete with Wikipedia?
When the content initiative was first announced, many [...]
≡ Category: Google | ≅ Leave a Comment
Here’s a heads up from Altaf, one of our readers…
The tech world is buzzing today about Google Chrome, the new web browser coming out of Mountain View. If you’re wondering what it’s all about, you can read a comic book (produced by Google) that introduces the new initiative. (Windows users can download the browser here; [...]
≡ Category: Google, Web/Tech | ≅ 4 Comments
Just in case you haven’t seen it yet, some former Google engineers launched a new search engine, Cuil (pronounced “cool”), which claims to be the “world’s biggest search engine,” indexing 120 billion web pages, or roughly about three times what Google supposedly does. (Get more info on the new site’s schtick here.) A quick round [...]
≡ Category: Google, Video - Arts & Culture, Wikipedia | ≅ 1 Comment
Here is Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s founder, being interviewed after Google debuted Knol. Interesting that his first thought is that users should copy Knol content and bring it to Wikipedia … :
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≡ Category: Google, Wikipedia | ≅ 2 Comments
Last December, Google announced that it was testing a new content initiative — dubbed “Knol” — intended to rival Wikipedia. The fruits of their labor are now live (in beta), available for all to see.
As we mentioned in our initial piece, Knol caters to the individual author/expert, not to the wisdom of crowds (à la [...]
≡ Category: Google, Most Popular, Video - Arts & Culture, Video - Politics/Society, Video - Science, YouTube | ≅ 6 Comments
Smart video collections keep appearing on YouTube. But rather antithetical to the ethos of its parent company (Google), YouTube unfortunately makes these collections difficult to find. So we’ve decided to do the job for them. These enriching/educational videos come from media outlets, cultural institutions, universities and non-profits. There are about 70 collections in total, and [...]
≡ Category: Google, Science | ≅ 2 Comments
Not an obvious conclusion, I’ll agree. However, Chris Anderson, editor of Wired, presents the argument like this: as all sorts of data accumulate into a vast ocean of petabytes, our ability to synthesize it all into elegant theories and laws will disappear. The story is the cover of this month’s issue of Wired but I [...]
≡ Category: Books, Google, Video - Arts & Culture | ≅ Leave a Comment
Salman Rushdie’s latest book, The Enchantress of Florence: A Novel, has hit the streets. And it comes just three years after his last one, Shalimar the Clown, which makes him a good deal more prolific than many of his contemporaries. (A piece in The Guardian — The Great American Pause — notes that many celebrated [...]
≡ Category: Google, Science | ≅ 2 Comments
Here’s what you get when Google engineers put their heads together with astronomers from large observatories: With Google Sky, “you can search for planets, listen to Earth & Sky podcasts, watch some beautiful Hubble telescope images, or explore historical maps of the sky from the comfort of your browser.” The product was rolled out just [...]
≡ Category: Apple, Google, Media | ≅ 2 Comments
Today, the Chronicle of Higher Education has a good article on an emerging trend — universities bringing their lectures to YouTube. As you’ll see, we get a mention in the article.
We first began discussing this trend about a year ago. In this public radio interview aired last March, we talked about the sheer dearth of [...]
≡ Category: Google, Video - Arts & Culture | ≅ 21 Comments
(UPDATED: See 70 Signs of Intelligent Life at YouTube)
It’s been a constant lament that YouTube offers its users scant little intellectual content. And that content is itself hard to find. Just visit YouTube’s so-called Education Section, and you’ll be hard-pressed to find anything actually educational. But the good news is that we’re seeing some recent [...]
≡ Category: Google | ≅ 9 Comments
As many now know, Google announced Friday that it’s testing a new content initiative — dubbed “knol” — that it hopes will rival Wikipedia. Realizing that Wikipedia entries rank first on 27% of all Google search result pages, the folks at Googleplex couldn’t resist launching a competitive product. In announcing “knol,” the company highlighted two [...]
≡ Category: Google, MIT | ≅ Leave a Comment
Here’s a quick fyi on two initiatives announced for high school students this past week:
For six years, MIT’s OpenCourseWare initiative has done a great job bringing free educational materials to adult learners worldwide. (More on the initiative here.) Now, it has launched a section of its website devoted to high school students and teachers. Here, [...]
≡ Category: Google | ≅ 2 Comments
Google announced earlier this week that it has partnered with Weekly Reader, a producer of educational materials for children since 1928, to help teach “collaborative writing” to young students in the US. The concept here is fairly straightforward. Using Google Docs (a web-based word processor) and its new revision features, students “can work together [...]
≡ Category: Books, Current Affairs, Google | ≅ 1 Comment
Since the release of An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore has had quite a run. He first won himself an Emmy, then an Oscar, and now the Nobel Peace Prize. Although the film represents Gore’s most well known work on the environment, it’s hardly where his environmental efforts began. His campaign goes back to the late [...]
≡ Category: Books, Google | ≅ 2 Comments
Marking the start of the Frankfurt Book Fair, Google Book Search has launched a “microsite” dedicated to Germany’s most celebrated writer - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. There, you can learn about his life and travels and, even better, get access to free digital versions of his writings. That’s right, you get to read Faust online [...]
≡ Category: Google, UC Berkeley, Video - Arts & Culture | ≅ 17 Comments
Updated: See full collection of University Video Collections on YouTube.
I heard rumors something like this was coming, and now it’s here. YouTube has struck deals with major universities, creating dedicated channels from which schools can distribute their media content. Not surprisingly UC Berkeley, always at the digital forefront, has taken the lead and launched an [...]
≡ Category: Film, Google, Video - Arts & Culture | ≅ Leave a Comment
Here’s a little something for the film buffs out there: TheListUniverse has posted a collection of ten classic films from the 1920s, 30s and 40s that you can watch on Google Video. Just click and watch. On the list, you’ll find Fritz Lang’s M, the 1922 German silent film Nosferatu, The Gold Rush with Charlie [...]
≡ Category: Books, Google, Web/Tech | ≅ 3 Comments
A few weeks ago, our readers contributed to creating a list of books that left an indelible mark on their lives. You can review the original post here. But we figured why not add them to our “My Library” page on Google, a new product that we briefly mentioned yesterday. You can access the [...]
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