Google Code Blog announces the launch of the Google Developer Podcast (subscribe here), covering:
- Interviews with Google engineers, discussing areas of their expertise
- New features, applications, and APIs that matter to developers
- Open source projects that we work on and/or care about at Google
- Projects that use our APIs and applications in interesting ways
- News and events that we all care about, including the Google Summer of Code.
speaking of access statistics: seems like Google is starting to roll out a complete revamp of their Analytics product. like smime, the update hasn’t appeared for me yet, but the dynamic graphing-tools alongside extended reporting features shown in this screencast look promising…
there’s a decent recording of John Batelle interviewing Google’s Eric Schmidt at last weeks Web 2.0 Expo on YouTube…including the funny part where Schmidt denies Google Office Docs, Spreadsheets & the recently announced presentation-module being in competition with Microsoft Office 
(though I tend to agree, on the level of functionality).
btw: tv-channel ARTE had an interesting geek-special yesterday, including feature-film “Pirates of Silicon Valley” - a must for every true geek, this movie tells the story of the early days of Microsoft and Apple. plus: documentary “Who’s afraid of Google?”, which is also available online (link).
update: ARTE is going to repeat both programs this week:
pirates of silicon valley: may 26th, 15.15
who’s afraid of google: may 24th, 1:25
Google is further narrowing down the space for niche mapping-mashups like frappr and flagr (and to some extent even more complex apps based on the Maps API, like austrian newcomer Tupalo) by releasing their My Maps feature. My Maps lets anybody create geo-mashups without the need to code, including photo- & video-annotation. sharing of maps is currently read-only, but I guess collaborative editing is the next logical step (click for some of my places).
(via GigaOM)
connecting the off- with the online, Spanning Sync promises bidirectional synchronisation between (muliple instances of) Apple iCal and Google Calendar. utilizing iSync, the application also syncs up mobilephones and iPods. the downside? after getting you hooked during the 15days free trial, Spanning Sync costs 65 USD once or 25 USD a year, which seems quite a lot for a little sync-app (via R/WW).
when will Microsoft release a free, ad-supported online version of their office-suite? will it be called Office Live? and will it happen before Google’s lightweight office-apps finally include a featureset that will be a sufficient replacement for mainstream-users? a - though quickly altered - blog-post from within Microsoft leads to new speculation at TechCrunch.
Freebase - currently in private beta - is generating some buzz (Tim O’Reilly, John Markoff, N. Carr - who describes Freebase as the first major Web 3.0 app). Freebase is a massively distributed, collaboratively-edited, freely structured database - or, as O’Reilly puts it - a folksonomy-based approach on weaving the Semantic Web:
“But hopefully, this narrative will give you a sense of what Metaweb [the company that created Freebase] is reaching for: a wikipedia like system for building the semantic web. But unlike the W3C approach to the semantic web, which starts with controlled ontologies, Metaweb adopts a folksonomy approach, in which people can add new categories (much like tags), in a messy sprawl of potentially overlapping assertions.”
now here’s a cool iTunes-plugin: iConcertCal automatically retrieves upcoming events matching your music library and displays them within iTunes. current sources seem to be a bit US-centric, but that could be fixed by mashing with upcoming.org.
going to be released on monday, RatePoint will be adding avatar-rating and social networking features to SecondLife. quite amazing, considering it’s based solely on SL’s scripting language.
37 Signals is joining the growing number of wellknown sites supporting OpenID with their upcoming CRM-tool Highrise.
here’s one for the weekend: another Google-song
Simeon Simeonov has more details on a possible Google Phone (or Gphone). sources remain undisclosed, so its unclear if his claims on the Gphone’s vector-based presentation layer, the size of Googles product team and the planned distribution (involving multiple carriers in fulfillment of Google’s own marketing) can stand up to reality.
back from London and the first thing I notice is Techmeme overly cluttered with news about Google, which finally did what so many have expected and demanded in the past: launched feb 21st, Google Apps Premier is a subscription-based, corporate version of the application package launched in late summer 2006, including the already well-known Gmail, Calendar, Talk, Docs & Spreadsheets. for 50 USD per year & user, Google offers 10gbyte mail-storage, 24/7 phone support and a guaranteed uptime of 99.99% for email-services . it doesn’t take a major in business administration to realize that these numbers undercut offerings of Microsoft and others by _far_.
moreover, the comparison chart of Google Apps Standard and Premier edition unveils that the paid service lets users opt-out of contextualized advertising in email and includes an additional application for resource-management, which could be an indication on where Google Apps Premier might be heading in the near future. TechCrunch’s Marshall Kirkpatrick hits the nail with his headline: “It’s G-Day“, extensive coverage all around the web can be found at Techmeme.
as of yesterday, Google finally reports back RSS subscription-numbers to content-publishers, which basically means that feed-statistics like FeedBurner can now include the number of readers subscribed to a feed through Google Reader or the personalized Google homepage (this wasn’t possible before, meaning that probably thousands 
of readers wouldn’t show up in your feed-stats). in case you - like me - wonder how this works, Google simply embeds the number of current subscribers into the http-request fetching the feed:
User-Agent: Feedfetcher-Google; (+http://www.google.com/feedfetcher.html; 3980 subscribers; feed-id=1794595805790851116)
as a bonus they’ve also added an FAQ aimed at publishers.
btw, according to my own FeedBurner-stats, Google Reader’s marketshare among RSS-readers seems to rise:
so Google finally devoted some time on solving an algorithmic phenomenon causing astonishment among net-newbies as well as amusement in geek-circles since years: the Googlebomb finally has been disarmed. as things go with search/ranking algorithms, Google Blogoscoped can only guess on how the mathematical solution of the problem looks like - but it’s probably based on the likeliness of inter-links between otherwise separated link-networks. however, main reason I’m blogging this is that the “utter incompetence” bomb aimed at former austrian minister of finance K.H.Grasser is listed among the most famous bombs ever
