The Closure tools help developers to build rich web applications with JavaScript that is both powerful and efficient.

DSPL is the Dataset Publishing Language, a representation language for the data and metadata of datasets. Datasets described in this format can be processed by Google and visualized in the Google Public Data Explorer.

It's well known that Google hosts several popular javascript libraries on their public CDN. A lesser know fact is that google also hosts an number CSS themes for jQuery UI (both v1.7.3 and v1.8.7). For whatever this remains undocumented. In the past, I've had a hard time finding them, so I decided to help myself out (and maybe others) and put a list together.

Proposed standards for making AJAX-based websites crawlable.

Experiment with Google APIs.

Google Storage for Developers is a RESTful service for storing and accessing your data on Google's infrastructure. The service combines the performance and scalability of Google's cloud with advanced security and sharing capabilities.

Google evangelist Tim Bray, whose Twitter jihad against Apple’s “curated computing” dissected here earlier, says:

Kontra genuinely loathes Google right down to the ground.

This, incredibly, is the same man who started his Google “evangelism” gig with the words “I hate it” referring to Apple and its App Store policies. In his new Corporations and Emotions post, he says I hate him essentially because I hate his employer, Google.

I know it’s a currently popular meme, but what’s with all this “hating” business? I neither hate Bray nor his employer. What I wrote speaks for itself, so I see no need to explain anything further, but just in case he’s not familiar with the history of this blog, though, I have covered and praised Google on many occasions in this space, on Twitter and elsewhere: Google shows Microsoft how to connect the dots, to cite one example.

Mine isn’t anthropomorphized corporate enmity. It’s simply exposing deliberate, pervasive and sustained hypocrisy. An example of a search and ad monopolist trying to misdirect public attention away from its own proprietary and opaque cashcows by an obsessive use of the “open” mantra. If Bray dismisses that as “hating” Google, so be it.

Bray is quick to reassure us about Google:

I can testify with some force that at Google there is a notable lack of conspiratorial intent to Do Bad Things With All That Data, but then you might choose to discount that testimony because of the logo on my paycheck.

For a high visibility person who gets paid specifically to promote his company to claim he doesn’t agree with major policies of his employer would be an unacceptable ruse. So let’s briefly consider, not Bray’s necessarily biased opinion of his employer, but public statements by notable Googlers. Because in the Googleplex alternate reality:

Google CEO Eric Schmidt, on CNBC never said: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”

Google’s European competition counsel Julia Holtz never said: “If someone forced us to [disclose how our search advertising business works], it would destroy our product.”

Google SVP, Product Management Jonathan, Rosenberg, never said: “In many cases, most notably our search and ads products, opening up the code would not contribute to these goals and would actually hurt users. The search and advertising markets are already highly competitive with very low switching costs, so users and advertisers already have plenty of choice and are not locked in. Not to mention the fact that opening up these systems would allow people to ‘game’ our algorithms to manipulate search and ads quality rankings, reducing our quality for everyone.”

Google CEO Erich Schmidt, at the Abu Dhabi Media Summit, never said: “Would you prefer someone else?…Is there a government that you would prefer to be in charge of this?” when asked why we should trust Google with all the data it collects on us.

Google CEO Erich Schmidt never blamed users for the Google Buzz privacy fiasco : “I would say that we did not understand how to communicate Google Buzz and its privacy…There was a lot of confusion when it came out on Tuesday, and people thought that somehow we were publishing their email addresses and private information, which was not true. I think it was our fault that we did not communicate that fact very well, but the important thing is that no really bad stuff happens in the sense that nobody’s personal information was disclosed.”

Google never denied and, when caught red handed, never admitted to snooping WiFi data either.

And so on.

Apparently, I “hate” Google since I criticized it, but obviously Google is not in the business of “hating” others like Apple because:

Google VP of Engineering, Vic Gundotra never raised the prospect of Apple as Big Brother: “If Google didn’t act, it faced a draconian future where one man, one phone, one carrier were our choice…That’s a future we don’t want.”

Google VP of Engineering and head of Android, Andy Rubin never compared Apple to a totalitarian regime:
“When they can’t have something, people do care. Look at the way politics work. I just don’t want to live in North Korea.”

And, of course, Tim Bray never started his career at Google by “hating” Apple, as his first public pronouncement.

Clearly, there’s no pattern of hypocrisy here. The problem is me, not Google. I’m “hiding behind [an] (albeit stylish) alias” and I’m an “anomaly,” as Bray puts it. Declaring opponents as being emotional, irrational fanboys, crippled by hate is a classic tactic of marginalization. Yes, it’s all my fault, I really should just let the Tim Brays, Andy Rubins and Vic Gundotras of this world convince everyone what’s good for Google is good for America.

P.S. I don’t work for Apple and never did, but a bit of gratuitous advice to Tim Bray by way of paraphrasing Steve Jobs: “For Google to win, it doesn’t need to demonize Apple.”

Filed under: Apple, Google

Google’s apparent geographic illiteracy is a screw-up of major magnitude. Advertisers are not getting their money’s worth because their ads are showing up in the wrong geography. People cannot find the places to which they want to navigate, because Google cannot tell them where the location is on the surface of the earth. Communities that rely on Google Maps to help people find and navigate to their city facilities cannot depend on the maps they serve to show the actual location of the city.

I was introduced today to Google’s Election and Issue Advocacy Team, a service designed to maximize the effectiveness of political advertising campaigns. Scott Brown’s successful Senate campaign made use of this service and paid Google’s AdWords program to ensure that Brown’s web page was the first sponsored link for any search on “Martha Coakley.”

According to what little I’ve read about this, Google offers this service to all comers. It’s a strategy that’s no doubt good for business, but one that I find disconcerting. First, Google holds itself out as a neutral purveyor of information. Should we still trust Google for its search results when it is taking money from political campaigns? Google would surely claim that its search engine is sacrosanct, and nothing would ever change other than sponsored advertising. Perhaps that’s true, but sooner or later Google will be asked otherwise tempted to tweak something in favor of a big, profitable client. Sure, that temptation might mean helping Ford over Toyota, and not Democrats over Republicans. But the very prospect of this infusing politics has, at the least, changed my opinion of Google for the worse.

Second, even if Google’s basic search results remain trustworthy, there’s the possibility that Google will now become a self-interested power broker in politics. Lawyer’s can’t represent conflicting interests because it compromises a lawyer’s independent judgment and increases the risk that confidential information will be either disclosed or used against a client. Doesn’t Google run into the same problem? Sure, Google says that it assigns different teams to clients on opposing sides of a campaign, but that is no different than the weak “Chinese wall” justification given by big law firms who want to play both sides of the street. People on “opposing” teams could easily talk about things over lunch, inadvertently disclosing information. And eventually, all teams report to someone who knows what is going on in both campaigns. That person at the top will wield considerable power. Might he or she be tempted to tip something in one direction in exchange for political favors in Google’s interest later on?

Third, Google has a lot of personal information about its account holders. Might Google not someday use that information to target ads about health care to people whose emails contain the words “health insurance” or “sick”?

Maybe this is a tempest in a pot of tea, and Google isn’t doing anything different than any other corporation or lobbyist trying to make money or gain political favor. Still, I can’t help but think that Google wields extraordinary influence over what people read and how easily they find things they want to read. Google already has financial incentives to warp what I read about its advertisers, but I guess I’m not that worried about the differences between mortgage companies or auto makers. I worry a lot more, however, when Google has incentives to influence what I read and think about those who hold elected office.

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Remember the hard battle fought to convince Google to include a link to its privacy policy on the Google.com homepage?

Remember how Google argued “we do believe that having very limited text on our home page is important” and that it was pitched as some great sacrifice to include the word “privacy” and disrupt the homepage’s aesthetics?

Apparently providing users easy access to information about their privacy is much more burdensome for Google than providing a link to where people can buy Verizon’s Droid mobile phone.

Today, Google.com features an advertising message that the Droid is now for sale, and includes a link to this page touting its benefits, and prompting users to buy it from Verizon.

Makes me long for the days when Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page proclaimed that advertising has no place in search engines:

Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. …It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media, we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers. …we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.

And I wonder if there’s any chance the presence of Bert & Ernie could be seen as a product endorsement….

Related posts: (automatically generated)Google (Quietly/Oddly) Adds Privacy Link to HomepageDisrupting Google’s homepage with a 14-charater stringOn Google’s New Homepage, Privacy Fades Away

Welcome to the Public Index, a site to study and discuss the proposed Google Book Search settlement. Here, you can browse and annotate the proposed settlement, section-by-section.

What Google does with embedded metadata.

The App Engine datastore provides a query engine and transactional storing with a simple API, all running on Google's scalable infrastructure. The Python interface includes a data modelling API and a SQL-like query language called GQL, making developing scalable data-backed apps as easy as with simple web hosting.

Google has long been seen as a stout advocate for net neutrality. So eyebrows were raised earlier this week when the Wall Street Journal revealed the outlines of a deal that the internet giant has secretly pursued with major ISPs. According to documents reviewed by the journal, Google wishes to place servers directly within providers’ domains, giving geographically dispersed users quicker access to content. Content caching of this sort is already provided by companies like Akamai to significantly enhance the end-user experience. These systems, however, are freely available on non-discriminatory terms. Google’s, it appears, would favor the company’s own content and give it an advantage over competitors.

Has Google tripped over its own principles of net neutrality? Not so, according to the many commentators that rushed to the firm’s defense, including Lawrence Lessig, David Isenberg, Ed Felten, and Timothy Lee. Net neutrality, they say, is really about preventing ISPs from prioritizing some types of network traffic over others. Enhancing network applications through content caching is an entirely different matter.

From a technological standpoint, of course, content caching and traffic prioritization have enormous differences. But it is economic factors that drive network innovation and investment, and this is the basis by which we must judge Google’s proposals. Unfortunately, none of the company’s sympathizers has explained how the incentives behind content caching differ from those behind traffic prioritization. Indeed, the pitfalls of Google’s approach are strikingly familiar: an ISP controls an “upgrade” that enhances network service (either content caching, or the rights to attach a company’s own content caches). When agreements are secret, the ISP can tailor prices to each customer, punishing those that might threaten the provider’s profitable businesses. Even when a customer is not a direct competitor, an ISP will be tempted to assess the customer’s profitability and extract as much money as possible. Such a climate could have a chilling effect on innovation.

In Google’s own defense on its Public Policy Blog, Richard Whitt admits that “if broadband providers were to…offer colocation or caching services in an anti-competitive fashion, that would threaten the open Internet and the innovation it enables.” To explain why Google’s system should not be considered discriminatory, Whitt only offers that the firm’s agreements are “non-exclusive, meaning any other entity could employ similar arrangements.” This is beside the point. An exclusive agreement is only one extreme method of discrimination, and today’s ISPs would never enter such an agreement anyway. They have vastly more to gain by selecting prices individually for various content providers.

Google, and many of its defenders, point out that content caching is already popular and vastly useful today. Far from justifying an opaque system of contracts, that is all the more reason to retain a transparent, and non-discriminatory market for caching. The future information infrastructure depends on it.

Google recently made a deal with book publishers over access to scanned books for Google Book Search. We have to be vigilant that they don't snub the reading public the way they are currently dissing the listening, writing and remixing public on Blogger.

Why you should be concerned about Google Flu Trends
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/nov/27/privacy-searchengines

The search engine has unwittingly hung a big sign on itself
advertising services for government surveillance

The title's fine, though when I submitted it I proposed
"Google Flu And Monitoring Health". I was aiming for a deliberate
ambiguity in the phrase "monitoring health" between the literal sense of
seeing where is sickness and more metaphorical sense of good
safeguards against misuse of private data. Maybe I was being too clever.

I know many people have written on this topic, but I really tried to
capture the double-edged nature here. That is, the conflict between
"That's so cool" for technical achievement, and "That's so scary" in
terms of potential for abuse. As I think of it: Technology-positive
social criticism.

I'm hoping to popularize a phrase I've used here: "surveillance engines"

[For all columns, see the page
Seth Finkelstein | guardian.co.uk.]

The AJAX Libraries API is a content distribution network and loading architecture for the most popular open source JavaScript libraries. By using the google.load() method, your application has high speed, globally available access to a growing list of the most popular JavaScript open source libraries.

I hope that these recommendations will prove equally appealing to those who think that Google can do no evil and those who think it does only evil. Perhaps they will prove equally frustrating. The settlement is good as it stands, but it could stand to be better.

The Google Spreadsheets Data API allows client applications to view and update Spreadsheets content in the form of Google Data API feeds. Your client application can request a list of a user's spreadsheets, edit or delete content in an existing Spreadsheets worksheet, and query the content in an existing Spreadsheets worksheet.

The appenginepatch project consists of two packages which make it easier to develop Django projects for Google App Engine. The minimum supported Django version is 1.0.

This article will walk you through the process of starting a new Django project and getting it running on Google App Engine by reproducing the initial steps of creating the Polls application from the official Django tutorial. At each step the changes required for the App Engine environment are highlighted.

This class extends the Maps API's standard GMarker class with the ability to support markers with textual labels.

This class lets you add a control to the map which, when clicked, will let the map user zoom by dragging a rectangle on the map.

This namespace contains functions that you can use to easily create dynamically sized and colored icons.

This class is used to manage visibility of hundreds of markers on a map, based on the map's current viewport and zoom level.

The Google Earth Plug-in and its JavaScript API let you embed Google Earth, a true 3D digital globe, into your web pages.

I’ve long complained about how it takes at least 2 clicks to get to Google’s privacy policy from its homepage (3 clicks if you count its new Privacy Center splash page). And that’s only if you happen to click on “About Google,” and then happen to find the “Privacy Policy” link at the bottom of that page. Nowhere on Google’s homepage, nor on its search results page, will you find the words “privacy policy.” A user must actively seek out the world’s largest search engine’s privacy policy — one would never search for something, and then notice there is a privacy policy, click on it, and suddenly learn about the information Google collects and what they do with it.

This lack of visibility is coming to public attention: the New York Times notes that Google is battling with the Network Advertising Initiative, a trade group that sets standards for companies that collect data for use in targeting advertising, over the NAI’s demand that members provide “clear and conspicuous notice” of how they collect and use data. The NAI says that website’s homepages should provide a link to their privacy policy. Google, in short, doesn’t want to mess with the clean aesthetics of its homepage, arguing that “By simply typing ‘Google privacy policy’ into the Google search engine, consumers can easily find not only our privacy policy, but additional information about privacy.”

Wow — rather than adding a 2-word link in small blue letters at the bottom of its homepage, Google thinks you should subject yourself to its data collection regime in order to find its privacy policy (remember, Google’s TOS, which also cannot be found on the homepage, states that you agree to the Terms of Service “by actually using the Services”).

If you are concerned about the privacy of your search queries, and want to learn about what Google’s policy is, you need to search for its policy, and have that query logged in the servers in Mountain View.

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Carl Malamud: Suggesting that students interested in furthering the public domain... start harvesting documents from the public taxpayer-financed web sites at UMich and re-injecting them into the public domain?

Let’s say you run an internet company whose primary function is to help individual locate and access information available on the World Wide Web. Let’s say your mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” and you’re very good at it, processing over half of every Web search performed in the United States.

Now, let’s also note that you are good people, always trying to do the right thing, not be evil, and so on. As such, you likely recognize the following statements as being sound and reasonable:

freedom of speech and freedom of the press are fundamental human rights, and free use of the Internet is protected in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which guarantees freedom to “receive and impart information and ideas through any media regardless of frontiers”
the rapid provision of full and uncensored information through the Internet has become a major industry in the United States, and one of its major exports, and
political censorship of the Internet degrades the quality of that service and ultimately threatens the integrity and viability of the industry itself, both in the United States and abroad
some authoritarian foreign governments such as the Governments of Belarus, Burma, China, Cuba, Egypt, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam block, restrict, and monitor the information their citizens attempt to obtain
technology companies in the United States such as Google, that operate in countries controlled by authoritarian governments have an obligation to comply with the principles of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights
technology companies in the United States have [often] failed to develop adequate standards by which they can conduct business with authoritarian governments while protecting human rights to freedom of speech and freedom of expression

If you accept these premises, and you’re a company dedicated to making the world’s information accessible and useful to all citizens — while not being evil — it would be appropriate for you to take certain measures to “develop adequate standards by which they can conduct business with authoritarian governments while protecting human rights to freedom of speech and freedom of expression.”

To accomplish this, you might reasonably institute policies to help protect freedom of access to the Internet, which would include the following minimum standards:

Data that can identify individual users should not be hosted in Internet restricting countries, where political speech can be treated as a crime by the legal system.
The company will not engage in pro-active censorship.
The company will use all legal means to resist demands for censorship. The company will only comply with such demands if required to do so through legally binding procedures.
Users will be clearly informed when the company has acceded to legally binding government requests to filter or otherwise censor content that the user is trying to access.
Users should be informed about the company’s data retention practices, and the ways in which their data is shared with third parties.
The company will document all cases where legally-binding censorship requests have been complied with, and that information will be publicly available.

Seems reasonable, and the right thing to do.

Now, given all of this, it is apparent your company is concerned with how your policies and practices might impact human rights across the globe. So, even if you’re not comfortable committing yourself to the above standards (which would be surprising given your philosophy), you certainly would want to at least:

form a Board Committee on Human Rights,
provide said committee with funds for operating expenses,
adopt regulations or guidelines to govern said Committee’s operations,
empower said Committee to solicit public input and to issue periodic reports to shareholders and the public, at reasonable expense and excluding confidential information, including but not limited to an annual report on the implications of company policies, above and beyond matters of legal compliance, for the human rights of individuals in the US and worldwide

That seems reasonable. Of course, you might be concerned about how such a committee might impact company business decisions, so you would be sure to note that the formation of a Board Committee on Human Rights wouldn’t restrict the power of the Board of Directors to manage the business and affairs of the company.

Simply put, the Board Committee on Human Rights would review and make policy recommendations regarding human rights issues raised by the company’s activities and policies. It could be an effective mechanism for addressing the human rights implications of the company’s activities and policies as they emerge anywhere in the world.

These two proposals — taking a stance against Internet censorship and forming a Board Committee on Human Rights — seem reasonable, right? Especially for a company pledged to not be evil?

Well, two shareholder proposals suggest Google take these very actions: Proposal 4 offers the anti-censorship language outlined above, while Proposal 5 suggestions the formation of a Board Committee on Human Rights with the duties and restrictions I note here.

Google is recommending that shareholders vote AGAINST each proposal. (This is the second time Google has opposed the anti-censorship proposal.)

I urge all shareholders in Google Inc. to vote FOR these reasonable and ethical proposals when they receive their proxy statements.

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Tom Slee on the [Barbie] Google results and how they've changed now:

... this search is basically owned by Mattel. Clicking the top link takes
you to a pink page with "Think Pink" written in the middle of it, and
the majority of the sites feature pink prominently.

No more defining the cultural symbols of our day for you,
nine-year-old girl! Quit the self-aware political discourse and get
back to dressing that doll in gender-appropriate colours (as selected
for you by Mattel).

In other words, people who point to Google results as some sort of
mass-mind or harbinger of popular will, often neglect (or wilfully
ignore) that there's quite an industry around them. And that industry
interacts with other senses of industry, bringing us back to where we
were before in terms of corporate control of media.

Google is a capitalist tool—and a useful one. Better, surely, to face the coming storm on that foundation, than on a trite slogan that could be your undoing.

“I don’t think we’re ideologically bound to only computers, only algorithms,” Mr. Cutts said. In fact, he said, Google has combed through its own Web pages to remove all references to “automatic ranking.”

"Awesome global media company"? "Hot, cultural favorites"? Shittiest PR blog ever or subtle mockery of their new partner Viacom?

"Yahoo! has a regrettable logo, but Google, your mom made your logo. You were running late that day, and she drew it in the car on the way to the meeting."

Cartoons crafted to attract lucrative keywords.

A greasemonkey script for clipping Google videos.