Google

• A bad time to flash your bra 4 hours ago Google Sightseeing
  This week Google launched an absolutely massive update to Street View in Hong Kong, Macau, and in particular, the UK. With an incredible 96% of British roads now visible, there were always going to be scandals about what was discovered. While some are making objections to the passing car in their own special way, others aren’t [...]
• New in Google Maps: Biking Maps 6 hours ago Google Tutor
  Google Maps added a cool new feature just in time for summer: you can now get directions for bike trips around US cities. Unfortunately, this feature has yet to come to Canada, but once it does I’ll be an avid user. The coolest part is that Google maps will show you which roads are perfect [...]
• Reader Play: A Cool New Feature from Google Reader 1 day ago Google Tutor
  Don’t worry, Google Reader is not going to be replaced, but the Google Reader team did come up with a cool new feature. It’s called Google Reader Play and is an experiment in Google Labs. Google Reader Play is all about the visual experience. It uses the same technology as recommended items to find content you [...]
• Google Street View Hong Kong 1 day ago Google Blogoscoped
  Google released Street View imagery for Hong Kong. Hong Kong is a fun and busy place where it's easy to get lost, perhaps less so with these photo maps. [Thanks Keith!]
• NOW LIVE: Street View update covers 96% of UK roads 2 days ago Google Sightseeing
  In an absolutely enormous update, Google have in the last few minutes launched brand new Street View images for the whole of the UK ? bringing the total coverage to a reported 96% of all UK roads. The images cover roads from Land’s End to John o’ Groats, and actually extend all the way beyond, right [...]
• Reader Play, Google's Slideshow of Interesting Stuff 2 days ago Google Blogoscoped
  OK, I can see myself waste some time with this. Google Reader Play is a casual, push style way to feed yourself distracting/ enlightening/ inspiring snippets, imagery and videos. You can star a specific page, Like it or share it, but just jumping from page to page using the bottom navigation works too. Note Reader Play is personalized. Google writes, "We use the technology behind Recommended Items in Reader to populate Reader Play with the most interesting content on the web. While you don?t need a Google account to use Reader Play, your experience will be personalized if you ...
• No, we can't translate "Yes we can" 2 days ago Google Blogoscoped
  Ten years ago, the best-available translation software analysed the source text to determine its structure: subject, object, nouns, verbs, phrases, etc. From the structure tree, a new text could be generated in the target language. The precise details of Google's translation algorithms are not published, but the structure tree is not the main mechanism. Instead, there is a corpus -- an enormous database of parallel works. These are works available in more than one language as a result of a previous human translation. Based on equivalents found in the corpus, Google obtains translations for various multi-word fragments from the source text, then blends those together into what is usually a coherent sentence in the target language. The system doesn't work so well on fragments that weren't translated in the c ...
• Hampi 2 days ago Google Sightseeing
  The village of Hampi is a site of Hindu pilgrimage and the location of the former capital city of the Vijayanagara empire. Its temples and ruins are a World Heritage Site collectively known as The Group of Monuments at Hampi. The Monuments can generally be grouped into three sections; the Sacred Centre, the Riverside Ruins and [...]
• The Street View Best Streets Awards 4 days ago Google Sightseeing
  Forget the Oscars – these are the awards that count at Google Sightseeing! The guys at Google are planning to expand their Street View coverage of the UK in the near future, and to get us in the mood they asked the public to vote for their favourite British streets in three categories: the most [...]
• Variable Speed for YouTube Videos 4 days ago Google Blogoscoped
  If you've opted in to YouTube's HTML5 experiment, the videos will play in your own browser's player, instead of in an Adobe Flash player. This was discussed in the Forum a few weeks ago. YouTube can serve HTML5 videos if you have an HTML5-capable browser with the h.264 video codec (i.e. Chrome but not Chromium, Safari v4+, or IE with Google Chrome Frame). Videos containing ads continue to use the Flash player. YouTube has implemented a variable speed control for their HTML5 videos. Next to the play/pause button is a small arrow. When clicked, it opens up a panel containing a slider and two icons: a hare and a tortoise. As you can probably gues ...