Music Rich Snippets in Google Search

Last week, Google announced a new taste of rich snippets, this time for music pages. At that time, I couldn't see the new snippets, but now they ought to be obtainable for everyone.

"With this new feature, site owners can mark up their pages using the newly shaped music markup spec on schema.org, and search results for that site may start displaying song information in the snatch so that users know that there are songs or samples there for them to listen to. Several early partners have implemented the music markup on their sites, counting MySpace, Rhapsody and Reverb Nation," explained Google.

The new rich snippets comprise links to music pages that could be establish by visiting the search result, but it's faster to bypass the search result and start to play a song. It's important to talk about that the songs aren't played on Google's results pages, so you still need to go to a different page. You'll only see the music rich snippets when your inquiry includes the name of an artist, a song or an album.

Google also shows rich snippets for events, profile pages, recipes, videos, reviews and products. "With rich snippets, webmasters with sites containing structured content—such as review sites or business listings—can label their satisfied to make it clear that each labeled piece of text represents a certain type of data: for example, a restaurant name, an address, or a rating."

At some point, Google will make structured data searchable and it will be a lot easier to purify results. Recipe search previously lets you do that and it's pretty useful.

No More separate Google Dictionary

Google Dictionary is no longer obtainable as a standalone service at google.com/dictionary. You can still find it in Google Web Search and Google Translate. For example, you can look for [define keyword] and click "more" or search for [keyword] and click "Dictionary" in the look for options sidebar.

Google Music Lyrics

Google Music Lyrics is a Grease monkey script that adds a lyrics panel to Google Music. It only facility in Firefox and there's a single lyrics provider: SongLyrics.com.

The lyrics are cached so that they're displayed right away the next time you play the same song. You can also edit the lyrics and the changes are saved using HTML5 local storage. To hide the panel, click the title.

Chris Hendry, who urbanized the script, plans to add other lyrics providers, allow users to import and export lyrics and to make the script work in Google Chrome.

Try Blogger's New Interface

Google promised a new Blogger interface back in March and started a imperfect test in April. "The new design is not only cleaner and more modern, but it also uses Google Web Toolkit, delivering the newest in web technology."

The new interface is now obtainable in Blogger in Draft, but it looks quite different. "Over the last couple of months, we've made important improvements to our new user interface. First and foremost, we've incorporated your feedback and made many fixes based on that feedback. Also, we've rationalized the look and feel of our new design, inspired by Google's newest design evolutions," explains Google. Blogger uses Ajax, so all the pages load a lot faster, including the post editor. Unfortunately, Blogger is still very slow when you carry out a search and try to display posts or comments.

Blogger's new UI is cleaner and it offers added information about your posts: the number of page views. Tabs have been replaced by a upright menu and the list of labels is now a drop-down. The post editor is much better, particularly if you use the default view. Blogger's new editor takes up most of the page and post settings are now incorporated in a sidebar.

There's a lot of white space in the new border, buttons aren't big enough to be legible and Blogger includes too much information that's not very useful: the total number of published comments and the total number of page views. The new interface is a mixed bag: it's modern, clean, faster and more powerful, but there are many belongings that need to be changed before replacing the accessible interface.

You can try the new UI at draft.blogger.com and you also have the alternative to make it the default interface.

Quickly insert a YouTube Video to a Playlist

YouTube's embeddable player additional a new feature that lets you quickly update your playlists with new videos. Click the arrow next to the "plus" button and you can add the video to one of your playlists. You can't make new playlists from the player and you can only see the first 10-15 playlists, depending on the player's height. I couldn't discover a way to scroll the list.

Here's a video you're almost certainly anxious to add to your playlists (there's no "remove" button in the player, sorry about that!):

It's surprising that the embeddable player doesn't have like/dislike buttons and you have to go to YouTube's video page for such a easy action. There's also a related menu that lets you copy the video's URL and the embedding code, but YouTube uses the old Flash-only code.

Blogger and Picasa Web Could Be Rebranded

Mashable reports that Blogger and Picasa Web Albums could change their names and become Google Blogs and Google Photos. "Google intends to leave several non-Google name brands and rename them as Google products. The move is part of a better effort to unify its brand for the public launch of Google+."

While Google Photos makes a lot sense, replacing Blogger with Google Blogs is not a great idea. When people say "Google Blogs", they refer to the long list of Google's business blogs. "Google Blogs" is previously used for Google Blog Search, but only on the homepage.

On the other hand, Blogger could be redesigned and use boundary elements from Google+, Blogger's profiles could be replaced by Google Profiles, the commenting system could be revamped and included with Google+.

One of the reasons why Picasa Web Albums didn't get improved too much is that it has always been perceived as Picasa's online extension. It wasn't a separate photo sharing service and many of its features required Picasa. You couldn't upload more than 5 photos, download albums or edit photos without installing Picasa. Google measured changing Picasa Web's name back in 2008.