Dynamic Views: seven new ways to distribute your blog with the world

As we said a few weeks ago when we launched a totally rebuilt, streamlined authoring and editing experience, we’re in the process of bringing you a much enhanced and modernized Blogger. The next phase of these updates starts today with seven new ways to display your blog, called Dynamic Views.

Built with the newest in web technology (AJAX, HTML5 and CSS3), Dynamic Views is a exclusive browsing experience that will inspire your readers to discover your blog in new ways. The interactive layouts make it easier for readers to enjoy and find out your posts, loading 40 percent faster than conventional templates and bringing older entries to the exterior so they seem fresh again.

Dynamic Views is a lot more than just new templates. With just a couple clicks, you’ll get endless scrolling (say goodbye to the “Older posts” link), images that load as you browse, integrated search, sorting by date, label and author, light box-style posts for easy viewing, keyboard shortcuts for rapidly flipping through posts, and one-click sharing to Google+ and other social sites on each post.

No two blogs are the same, so you can decide from seven different views that display text and photos differently. For pattern, if you have lots of photos on your blog, you may prefer Flip card or Snapshot. If your blog is more text-heavy, then Classic, Sidebar (what you’re seeing now on Blogger Buzz) or Time slide may be preferable. Here’s a quick report of each of the new views, along with links to some of our favorite blogs where you can check each of them out in action.

• Mosaic (Crosby’s Kitchen) - A mosaic mix of different sized images and text
• Sidebar (Blogger Buzz Blog) - An email inbox-like view with a reading page for quick scrolling and browsing
• Snapshot (Canelle et Vanille) - An interactive pinboard of your posts 
• Timeslide (The Bleary-Eyed Father) - A horizontal view of your posts by time period

If you want to insert your own touch to any of these new views, you can upload a header image and customize the background colors. We’ll be adding up more ways to modify Dynamic Views in the coming weeks.

We hope you enjoy the newest update to Blogger, and that, as always, you tell us what you think by completing this short review.

I'm in a Google Apps State of Mind

When I graduated from the high school in the New York, the Internet didn’t exist. Teachers were preparing me and my peers for the traditional service or manufacturing careers—jobs that didn’t require advanced technical knowledge. Today’s students are facing a completely different landscape; they’re expected to enter the workplace fully literate in technology, with strong communication and collaboration skills that will allow them to succeed in a connected and global environment.

New York state is making changes to prepare students for this future, implementing a host of initiatives designed to incorporate the development of 21st century skills into the state’s core learning objectives. As a product of the New York state public education system, I couldn’t be more excited to announce one of these endeavors—a new K-12 initiative that will bring powerful communication and collaboration tools to the more than 3.1 million students and hundreds of thousands of teachers throughout New York state.

Today, New York Institute of Technology (NYIT), in partnership with the New York State Teacher Centers and associated Boards of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES), the New York State teacher unions and New York State professional organizations, will offer Google Apps access, training and support to 697 public school districts, as well as all non-public and charter schools, across New York. We’re excited that NYIT is committed to providing schools the deployment and professional development resources they need to make Google Apps for Education—including Gmail, Docs, Sites and Calendar—a powerful tool for teachers and students across the state.

New York follows Oregon, Iowa, Colorado and Maryland as the fifth and largest state to bring Google Apps access to K-12 classrooms and will join more than 8 million students and teachers that use Google Apps today.

I no longer live in New York, but all of my family is spread out across the great Empire state and I look forward to bringing Google Apps to their local school districts!

Seventh U.S. state is fourth to head to the cloud

Today we’re happy to announce that The Maryland Education Enterprise Consortium (MEEC) will make Google Apps for the Education available to 1.4 million students in the state. MEEC is comprised of the University System of the Maryland, Maryland Higher Education Commission and the Maryland Department of Education, and provides software resources and services to its 194 members across the state. This includes all 24 public K-12 districts, libraries and all public and the private higher education institutions.

Maryland joins the ranks of the Oregon, Colorado and the Iowa, who each enabled their educational institutions to “go Google” under one statewide agreement. And more than 8 million other students, staff and the faculty across the globe actively use our free messaging and collaboration suite.

In addition to the Google Apps, this agreement also enables MEEC member institutions—for example University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC)—to license Google Postini Services such as Google Message Security, for use with the existing email infrastructure to the enhance the Spam filtering and email security for students, faculty and staff.

According to Assistant Vice President of IT at UMBC, Mike Carlin, students were overwhelmingly in favor of the Google and vocal about their preference when it came to email since it “works exceptionally well with their mobile lifestyle.”

App Inventor for Android

App Inventor is a new tool in the Google Labs that makes it easy for anyone—programmers and non-programmers, professionals and students—to create the mobile applications for Android-powered devices. And today, we’re extending invitations to the general public.

For many people, their mobile phone—and access to the Internet—is always within the reach. App Inventor for Android gives everyone, regardless of programming experience, the opportunity to control and reshape their communication with experience. We’ve observed people take pride in becoming the creators of mobile technology and not just consumers of it.

For the past year, we’ve been testing the App Inventor in classrooms around the United States, and we’ve found that it opens up the world of computer programming to students in new and powerful ways. David Wolber, professor of the computer science at the University of San Francisco and part of the initial pilot program, says “students are traditionally intimidated by technology are motivated and excited to program with App Inventor.” One student from Professor Wolber’s class told us: “I used to think that no one could program the except CS people. Now, I've made dozens of the applications for the Android phone!” Another student, who struggles with the dyslexia, was inspired by App Inventor to take more computer science classes and is now learning Python. Check out this video to hear more about the App Inventor for Android at University of San Francisco.

Visit our site to learn more about App Inventor and to see sample apps. To request an invitation, fill out this form and you’ll soon be on your way to building the mobile applications. And check out the video below to see how it works. We can’t wait to see what you create!

Grandmother’s guide to video chat

Often when I tell people that I work on the Google video chat, I heard stories about how they’ve used it to give a video tour of a new home to friends, introduce a baby to the relatives, keep in touch with traveling loved ones... the list goes on. This got me thinking about how convenient—and sometimes even magical—the experience of video chatting is.

So when I saw that my grandma—who loves keeping in touch with the family more than anyone—wasn’t set up to use video chat, I decided to help her get started. While doing so, it occurred to me how many people there must be out there in similar situations. If only there were a simple way that any grandmother could use to get started on her own...

Introducing the Grandmother’s Guide to Video Chat:

This video, along with a printable guide, can be accessed at google.com/chat/grandma. Feel free to share this link with your grandma—or grandpa—or, well, anyone who wants to video chat to help get them up and running.

And after your grandma is all set up, take a screenshot of you video chatting with her and email it to grammy324@gmail.com to share it with us. The first 100 people to do so will get a t-shirt, printable guide and VHS of the video (because if your grandma’s like mine, she’s still a cassette kind of girl).


In a few weeks, we’ll feature the best photos submitted on the Gmail blog.

Brown University has gone Google

From time to time we invite guests to blog about the initiatives of interest, and are very pleased to have Geoff Greene join us here. Geoff is the Director of IT Support Services at Brown University, and here he shares an update on their campus-wide migration to Google Apps for Education for all students, staff and faculty. - Ed.

About a year ago we put our 6,000 undergraduate students with Google Apps. The results were phenomenal: people were happy, they were productive, they were now excited...and then some people got jealous. Our faculty and staff members started coming to us asking “When do we get to go Google?” Turns out they also wanted access to the same tools to better to connect and engage with students and with each other.

We thought about it for a bit and realized that they had a point. So we decided to bring the entire Brown University community together—faculty, staff, medical and grad students—with a common set of tools: Google Apps for Education. This summer, our Computing & Information Services team is in the process of migrating everyone to our new GoogleApps@Brown system. The positive experience our undergrads have had using the Apps suite helped our Provost David Kertzer decide that the change would bring significant benefits and the cost savings to the university as a whole. In fact, we predict this change could save us somewhere around $1 million each year.

Our students were really the ones that led us down the Google path. They knew these tools would work because they already used them in their non-school lives. We also decided to go this direction because of the functionalities that we believe will bring our university together, namely tools like collaborative documents, better email (with nearly 30 times the storage space that we had with our previous system!) and video chat.

The icing on the cake is that we signed a zero dollar contract for all these top-notch tools. But it’s not just about saving money—it’s also about investing in our university’s future. Google Apps helps us work better together, and we can feel the excitement building on campus as a result. Here’s a little glimpse:

Since some faculty and staff members aren’t as familiar with the new tools just yet, we also hosted a “roadshow” to spread the word and gear up training sessions tailored for each campus group or department. Our training efforts are robust (you can check it out at training.brown.edu) and we have Google Guides—enthusiastic staff and student volunteers—helping their peers with the transition. We feel confident that once people start using these tools together, they’ll never look back.

Google Voice for everyone

A little over a year ago, we released an early preview of Google Voice, our web-based platform for managing your communications. We introduced one number to ring all your phones, voicemail that works like email, free calls and text messages to the U.S. and Canada, low-priced international calls and more—the only catch was you had to request and receive an invite to try it out. Today, after lots of testing and tweaking, we’re excited to open up Google Voice to the public, no invitation required.

Over the past year, we’ve introduced a mobile web app, an integrated voicemail player in Gmail, the ability to use Google Voice with your existing number and more. Over a million of you are now actively using Google Voice, and many of the features released over the past year (like SMS to email and our Chrome extension) came as a result of your suggestions, so thanks!

If you haven’t yet tried Google Voice, we can’t wait for you to try it out and let us know what you think. Check out our revamped features page to learn about everything Google Voice can do, and if you haven’t seen it yet, this video provides a good overview in less than two minutes:

We’re proud of the progress we’ve made with Google Voice over the last few years, and we’re still just scratching the surface of what’s possible when you combine your regular phone service with the latest web technology. It’s even more amazing to think about how far communication has come over the last couple hundred years. To put things in context, we created this infographic to visualize some recent history of human communication and how Google Voice uses the web to help people communicate in more ways than ever before (click the image for a larger version):

Easier sharing in Google Docs

Today, I rarely work on documents in isolation. I share docs with teammates for feedback, help them with their design docs and presentations and regularly make my files available to all of Google.

When using applications to collaborate with others, it's important to have control over your data and how it's shared. With Google Docs, you've always been able to share documents with individuals and groups. Today, we're making it even easier with a new simplified interface that make it even easier to share and see who has access to your files. For an overview of what's new, take a look at this video:

Documents, spreadsheets and presentations can now be identified as “Private,” “Anyone with a link” or “Public on the web.” As before, all docs start out as private by default.

These new visibility options appear as a link next to the title of every doc. Clicking this link or the “Share” button takes you straight to the new interface where you can see who has access, manage sharing access and invite others to share the doc.

These improvements have started to roll out and should be available to everyone in the next week. If you’re interested in learning more about these changes and other new sharing features, check out our post on the Google Docs blog. If you’re using Google Apps for your school or business, our post on the Enterprise Blog covers how you can share docs more easily within your organization.

Bringing sixteen more apps to the Google Apps Marketplace

We created the Google Apps Marketplace to make it easier for businesses and universities to benefit from the rapidly growing ecosystem of apps in the cloud. Apps in the Marketplace come in many sizes, from bite-sized apps that focus on providing a single feature to larger standalone apps that run major business systems and processes—and they’re all conveniently integrated with Google apps.


We believe it should be as easy to discover and purchase cloud apps for your organization as it is to get mobile apps for your smartphone. And, once you install and evaluate an app, it’s easy for your administrator to deploy them to users with just a few clicks. (Check out this video to see how it works).

We’ve added some great new apps since we launched in March and today we’re bringing you 16 new apps to the Marketplace. They represent a cross-section of the innovation happening on the web around integrated applications, where information is shared between applications allowing people to get their work done, faster:

• Jive: Jive Social Business Software combines collaboration, community and social networking software, allowing you to engage employees, customers and the social web.
• Harvest: Harvest is a simple time tracking application that makes it fast and easy for businesses to track billable hours and create invoices.
• Floorplanner Pro: Floorplanner Pro provides a quick and easy way for real estate agents and facilities professionals to create and share interactive floor plans in both 2D as 3D.

Check out our post on the Enterprise Blog for more information on all 16 apps, or go right to the Marketplace.

Take a test drive into the cloud

We’ve talked about the power of cloud computing and how millions of businesses have already gone Google by switching to Apps. But sometimes it’s hard to imagine what working in the cloud would really mean, and frequently, people ask us how they can better understand the benefits of Google Apps specifically for their business. How would online collaboration really affect your workplace? And how could increased email storage or integrated IM and video chat actually impact your company’s productivity?

To answer some of these questions, we’ve created the Go Google cloud calculator to let you take a test drive into the cloud. Whether your company is big or small, brand new or been around for a while, this tool will give you a sense of the benefits of going Google in an easy-to-understand way. Here’s a quick demo:

Once you take a spin and learn about the potential cost and time savings, the tool will create a custom URL, presentation PDF, spreadsheet or even a poster that you can share with other decision makers within your business as you discuss going Google.

To show you a real-life example, we asked one our customers, Smart Furniture (you may remember them from their recent guest post), to test-drive the tool for us. And here’s their poster:

So if you’ve been thinking about moving your business to the cloud, take a couple minutes and see what it would be like to go Google. Be sure to tweet and share your results. The Go Google cloud calculator can be found at www.gonegoogle.com

Happy 1st birthday, Google Wave!

Last week, we opened sign-ups for Google Wave to everyone as part of Google Labs and made it available for all Google Apps domains. Here is the quick (seven minute) update on the state of the product from this year's Google IO conference:

Today, it's been a full year since the Wave team first got on stage at the Moscone Center and demoed a new vision for communication and collaboration to a crowd of developers. In a guest article on the Huffington Post last week, Lars described innovation and working on Google Wave as a rollercoaster—and this year has certainly been a fascinating ride. For the past year, I've had the pleasure and the challenge of explaining why this new technology is useful. Unlike some other products that I have also been lucky enough to work on, Wave is not a more advanced approach to a known application like webmail or the browser. It's actually a new category, which can be kind of hard to wrap your head around.

I work in Wave every day, and we have identified a number of clear use cases for getting things done in groups at businesses and at schools. But people also ask me how I use Wave outside of work to understand how they should start using it themselves. As it turns out, the ways I use Wave aren't revolutionary or groundbreaking—I communicate about everyday things, but it is these incredibly ordinary and important communications that are transformed in unexpected ways when you use Wave.

I wave with my family—with my mom, who is across the country, and with my sister who is a graduate student. We're all on different schedules and very rarely all online at the same time. In one wave, we decided what to wear for a friend's wedding—adding suggestions for each other with links and pictures, updating the wave as we had side conversations and made decisions. My mom and I chatted about my dress choice when we were both online, and then my sister was easily able to catch up later, adding her ideas. It kept all three of us up to speed in one place, rather than having several phone conversations, emails and chats. Sharing these small personal projects in a wave removes the little bits of friction to make the discussions more dynamic and productive.

From talking to other people who use Google Wave, I know I'm not alone. I've been struck by the really personal nature of communicating and working together in Wave, and the emotional response people have to their first uniquely wavey experience, what we call the "Wave a-ha moment." For many people it's the live typing that does it; for others it's the first time they create an in-line reply, embed a YouTube video or edit someone else's text.

You really do have to try it to believe it, though—so if you checked out Google Wave six months ago and found yourself at a bit of a loss, take another look. The product is much faster and more stable and we have templates and tutorials to help you get started. Next time you find yourself taking notes while you are on the phone, do it in a wave and add your colleagues, or pull a couple friends or family members onto a wave for a small project... like going to the movies.

for more post visit : google blog