The Literacy Project:
Google’s latest endeavour in conjunction with 826NYC, LitCam and
UNESCO’s Lifelong Learning Project was released recently and has managed to turn a few heads.
The Literacy Project, according to Google, is
“A resource for teachers, literacy organisations and anyone interested in reading and education, created in collaboration with LitCam, Google, and UNESCO’s Institute for Lifelong Learning.”
The website is currently a well packaged stop for most of Google’s existing services tweaked for a specific cause. There’s
- BookSearch: To find books about literacy, reading promotion, and education.
- Scholar : Search for literacy-related content across many disciplines andsources: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles,from academic publishers, professional societies, preprintrepositories, universities and other scholarly organizations.
- Video : See what literacy organisations, schools, and educators around the world are doing – or share your wisdom with the world.
- Maps : Find literacy organisations around the world.
- Blogger : Share your knowledge with the world by creating a “blog” – short articles and stories that you write for others to read.
- Groups : Discover forums on literacy projects and ideas, or start your own debate.
Whats interesting to note is that the website can be currently viewed (directly through the website) in two languages: English and Deutsch. Why is that interesting?…umm ??
Google Code Search:
This is Google’s attempt to take on the likes of Krugle and Codefetch is here and its called Code Search.
“Code Search crawls and indexes publicly hosted archives (.tar.gz, .tar.bz2, .tar, and .zip) and CVS and Subversion repositories, making them searchable in one place”
With an index of approximately 11 billion pages this is sure to provide the distressed coder a code or two. However codes received from here might be licensed so ensure you are not in breach of any laws when you try to make use of it. And they also have something called the GData Feed which is the API made available for Google Code Search.
UPDATE: The Google Code Search is in reality so very effective that a small experiment by the folks at deathbycomet.com managed to get passwords from the wordpress wp-config files. [I am pretty sure that this is applicable only to wordpress powered blogs not wordpress hosted ones]. You can read all about it in their post title ‘Some of your db passwords are belong to us’
Google Code:
What do Google employees do in the 20% of the time that they allocate for personal projects? Google Code is exactly what they do. If you fancy a chance to work on some of Google’s projects this is the place for you. They have tons of API’s and code made available that one can use to develop something new.
Now to more older news:
Google Zeitgeist:
Zeitgeist: The general intellectual, moral, and cultural climate of an era
Haven’t you always wanted to know what the world is searching for? And perhaps you would like to have that result tailored to know the top queries for a particular category and maybe even on a monthly or even weekly basis? If the answer is yes then make sure you stop at Zeitgeist.
And while we’re at Zeitgest i just have to mention something interesting that they use for Zeitgeist. TIs called the Pigeon Rank. I could try to explain it to you but you wouldnt understand…neither did I. All i did grasp after reading the page was that this technology is Trademarked by Google.
Before everyone starts complaining about how long this post is I’ll close..BUT only after telling you about one more thing.
HELLO:
“When you use Hello, you get to see your photographs together with your friends online. You don’t have to wait for huge email attachments to download or upload your pictures to a public website. Just point at a picture and you can tell the person who sent it exactly what you think. With just one click, you can get the original high-quality, full-sized file to print.”
I couldn’t tell you what it is that you might encounter in this application and thats only because i havent tried it out myself. However if you fancy giving it a try make sure you read the What is Hello page before doing anything. I sincierly believe its something thats worth a try.
If you already havent done so ‘Give Google a Try‘.
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