Tag: Google

The Amazing Google MapMaker

Literally helping make the world a better place by making it- see real time edits of people

http://www.google.com/mapmaker/pulse

Map Maker’s review process allows users to easily edit content, while ensuring that data quality remains intact.

The first time a Map Maker user makes edits to a map, the edits may require review and approval before the edits will be published. Once a Map Maker user has made a few approved edits, most of the subsequent edits will go live automatically. However, some types of edits or edits in specific regions will always require review, regardless of how experienced the mapper is. In addition, some edits may require multiple reviews before the edits appear on Google Maps.

 

Why do edits need to be reviewed?

 

There are several reasons why edits are sent for review:

  • To provide feedback to new editors, and to help them understand the mapping process.
  • To provide feedback on more complex edits.
  • To ensure that sensitive edits meet the Reviewing Guidelines.

 

Learn how you can review edits in Map Maker.

 

 

 

Review some edits and get your edits reviewed faster!

When you review the edits made by your co-mappers, your edits are prioritized in the reviewing queue so that they appear above other edits. This enables other mappers to review them and your edits get published on Maps faster! from-
http://www.google.com/support/mapmaker/bin/static.py?page=guide.cs&guide=1094316

 

Best of Google Plus – Week 1 Top1/0

Stuff I like from Google Plus meme- animated GIFS  are just one of them-

  2. LIST OF GOOGLERS ON GOOGLE+

OK, this was fun to put together — love how active the Googlers are on this platform! Please feel free to add anyone I missed and share this. Circle the ones that most interest you based on what they do, or circle them all as I did 🙂

Co-Founders
+Sergey Brin
+Larry Page

VPs/Senior VPs
+Vic Gundotra (Engineering)
+Bradley Horowitz (Product Management)
+Jeff Huber (Commerce & Local)
+Marissa Mayer (Local, Maps & Location Services)

Community Managers
+Brian Rose
+Toby Stein
+Natalie Villalobos

Product Managers
+Anish Acharya (Google+ Mobile)
+Shimrit Ben-Yair
+Frances Haugen (Google+ Profiles)
+Caroline McCarthy (Marketing)
+Jonathan McPhie
+Joe Rideout
+Punit Soni (Google+ Mobile)

Engineering Directors/Managers
+Chee Chew
+Dave Besbris
+Chris Millikin

Software Engineers
+Eric W. Barndollar (Google+)
+Andrew Bunner (Google+)
+David Byttow
+Eric Cattell (Social Graph Tech Lead)
+John Costigan (Google Profiles)
+Matt Cutts (Webspam)
+Pavan Desikan (Google+/Gmail)
+Kelly Ellis
+Trey Harris (Site Reliability)
+Griff Hazen
+Andy Hertzfeld
+Matt Keoshkerian
+Todd Knight
+Jean-Christophe Lilot
+Lan Liu
+Vincent Mo (Google+ Photos)
+Dobromir Montauk (Google+ Infrastructure)
+Stephen Ng (Gmail)
+Owen Prater
+Joseph Smarr (Technical)
+Martin Strauss
+Na Tang
+Yonatan Zunger (Social)

Consumer Operations Manager
+Michael Hermeston (Google+ Support)

Developer Advocates
+Chris Chabot (Developer Relations)
+Timothy Jordan

Designers
+Brett Lider (Product/User Experience)
+Jonathan Terleski (Google+)
+Charles Warren (User Experience Lead, Google Social)

Program Managers
+Julian Harris (Technical)
+Adam Lasnik (Google Map Maker)

Tech Lead Manager
+Natalie Glance (Google Shopping)
Test Engineer
+Erick Fejta (Tester for Google Storage)

Account Executive
+Dave Miller (Local & Education)

President, Enterprise
+Dave Girouard (Cloud Apps)
3. Jokes-
I have a friend on Facebook that seemed suicidal, said he was standing on a ledge….so I poked him

4.Google Squash

5.Social Media Explained

6. Google Plus slaps Facebook AND Troopers Googling for Droids

7. Why did Google Wave Fail

8. When Google+ is available to the public..

9. Evolution

10. Safe Tweeting

Special Mentions-

 

 

 

 

LibreOffice Conference

A bit belatedly I return to my second favorite Office Productivity Software (the first being Cloud- Google Docs).

July 9, 2011

LibreOffice Conference Registration Is Open

Filed under: Conference, Meetings — Florian Effenberger @ 20:26

The registration for the LibreOffice Conference, taking place in Paris from October 12th to 15th, is now open. Everyone interested in joining the first annual meeting of the LibreOffice community is invited to register online at

http://conference.libreoffice.org/conference-registration/

to help the organizers in planning.

The LibreOffice Conference will be the event for those interested in the development of free office productivity software, open standards, and the OpenDocument format generally, and is an exciting opportunity to meet community members, developers and hackers. It is sponsored by Cap Digital, Région Île de France, IRILL, Canonical, Google, La Mouette, Novell/SUSE, Red Hat, AF 83, Ars Aperta and Lanedo.

The Call for Papers is also open until July 22nd, and paper submissions will be reviewed by a community committee.

We look forward meeting you in the heart of France, celebrating the first year of LibreOffice, and discussing the plans for the next months.

The Steering Committee of The Document Foundation

http://conference.libreoffice.org/conference-registration/

 

Official LibreOffice Conference

Conference Registration

Please enter your personal data to register for Paris, Oct 12 – 15, 2011.

 

List of All Libre Office Announcements-

http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/announce/

 

Review of Google Plus

After resisting for two weeks I have decided to write a Google Plus review. This includes both the changed designed parameters, the invite growth features and all of the main sub-items and activities you can do in the G+  Stream, Share, Hang Out, Pictures, Circles.

Since I have 2500 people in my circles and I am in 91 circles

To keep it simple – I have noted the following 6 main sub-points.

1) Content Dissemination-

 

  • Sharing Blog Articles
  • Micro-Blogging
  • Sharing Pictures

2) Online Professional Networking  and 3) Online Personal Socializing

4) Spam Control / Malware /Phishing/Porn Protection

5) Time Cost versus Networking Benefit

————————————————————————————————————————————————————–

1) Content Dissemination-

  • Sharing Blog Articles

 

Sharing is as simple as Facebook but the design makes it simpler.

Note G+ uses lower number of colors, bigger fonts, slightly bigger icons to reduce the appearance of clutter.

Contrast this

with this-

 

Interesting to see that G+ has four types of media to share- besides writing the status/micro-blog (unfettered by 140 characters). Note these show icons only with hover text to tell you what the icon stands for.

Photo,Video,URL,Location (which seems to be Twitter like in every share)

Facebook has 5 types of Sharing and note the slightly different order as well the fact that both icon and text make it slightly more cluttered- Status (which is redundant clearly ),Photo,Link,Video,Question

G+ thus lacks polls /questions features. It is much easier to share content on Facebook automatically as of now- but for G+ you need to share the URL privately though. There exist G+ meme-s already thanks to re-sharing in G+ plus which seems to be inspired by Tumblr (?).

In addition Google has made your Google Profile the number one SERP for searching your name, so there seem clear tied in benefits of SEO with content disseminated here.

G+ has sharing in circles whereas Facebook has only Everyone, Friends, Friends of Friends ,Customize.  This makes G+ interface slightly better in tweaking the spread of content to targeted audience esp by Bloggers.

  • For sharing Photos– G+ goes in for a whole new separate tab (one out of four) whereas Facebook treats photo sharing less prominently.
  • Google has lesser white space between photos, (The Facebook way used to be just snap photo by iPhone and send by email to auto-post), and the privacy in sharing photos is much better in G+ as the dropdowns in Facebook are not as granular and neither as nifty in icon design.
  •  
  • Also I like the hover and photo grows bigger feature and the auto import from Picassa (but I would like to auto-import into G+ from Flickr just as I can do in Facebook)
  • Google Plus also has a much more detailed version for sharing videos than photos as compared to Facebook  -upload Photo options  versus
  • G+ has much more focus on auto-sharing from mobiles

 

 

 

2) Online Professional Networking  and 3) Online Personal Socializing Organizing Contacts in Google Plus and seperate privacy controls make it easier to customize sharing without getting too complex. You can make as many circles and drag and drop very easily instead of manually clicking a dropdown box. Effectively speaking Facebook has just 4 kinds of circles and it does not distinguish between various types of friends which is great from philosophical point of view but not so goodn enforcing separateness between professional and personal networks. Note Facebook privacy settings are overwhelming despite the groovy data viz

4) Spam Control / Malware /Phishing/Porn Protection 

Spam Control in Facebook versus in Google Plus- note the different options in Google Plus (including the ability to NOT reshare). I am not aware of more enhanced protection than the ones available for Gmail already. Spam is what really killed off a lot many social networks and the ability to control or reduce spam will be a critical design choice

5) Time Cost versus Networking Benefit

Linkedin has the lowest cost in time spent and networking done. If G+ adds a resume section for jobs, recruiters, and adds in Zynga games, the benefit from G+ will expand. As of now G+ is a minimal social network with minimalism as design ethos.

(Zynga would do well to partner with G+)

 

How to use Video chat on Facebook

  1. Just go to http://www.facebook.com/videocalling
  2. Get Started
  3. See this. You will need to download and install something on your computer.And calls are just one on one (Unlike Google Huddle which can have upto ten people and also doesnot need any installer -esp if you use Chrome)
  4. Send a video message if your friend is not available. (that beats Google Huddle which doesnot seem to have the video inbox feature yet)

 

Cyber Attacks-Protecting your assets and people from cyber attacks

Cyber Attacks-Protecting your assets and people from cyber attacks

Everyday we hear of new cyber attacks on organizations and countries. The latest attacks were on IMF and 200,000 accounts of Citibank and now the website of the US Senate. If some of the most powerful and technologically advanced organizations could not survive targeted attacks, how effective is your organization in handling cyber security. Sony Playstation, Google Gmail, PBS website are other famous targets that have been victimized.

Before we play the blame game by pointing to China for sponsoring hacker attacks, or Russian spammers for creating Bot Nets or ex Silicon Valley /American technology experts rendered jobless by off-shoring, we need to both understand which companies are most vulnerable, which processes need to be fine tuned and what is the plan of action in case your cyber security is breached.

Which companies are most vulnerable?

If you have valuable data, confidential in nature , in electronic form AND connectivity to internet, you have an opening. Think of data as water, if you have a small leakage all the water can be leaked away. To add to complexity, the attackers are mostly unknown, and extremely difficult to catch, and can take a big chunk of your credibility and intellectual property in a very short time.

The best people in technology are not the ones attending meetings in nicely pressed suits– and your IT guy is rarely a match for the talent that is now available on freelance hire for cyber corporate espionage.

Any company or organization that has not undergone through one real time simulated cyber attack or IT audit that focuses on data security is very vulnerable.

Which organizational processes need to be fine tuned ?
Clearly employee access even at senior management needs to be ensured for both technological as well as social vulnerability. Does your reception take the name of senior management if cold called. Do your senior managers surf the internet and use a simple password on the same computer and laptop. Do you have disaster management and redundancy plans.
A wall is only as strong as its weakest brick and the same is true of organizational readiness for cyber attacks.

What is the plan of action in case your cyber security is breached?
Lean back, close your eyes and think your website has just been breached, someone has just stolen confidential emails from your corporate email server, and complete client as well as the most confidential data in your organization has been lost.

Do you have a plan for what to do next? Or are you waiting for an actual cyber event to occur to make that plan.