Techno Babble

Google provides the ability to create business presentations using a recent addition to its office software suite.

In addition to Documents and Spreadsheets there is now an option to create a Presentation.

The functionality provided is sufficient to create reasonable presentation material but without all the bells and whistles offered by the current version of Microsoft Powerpoint.

As with the other document types within the suite, multiple users can access and contribute to the creation of the presentation. When complete, the presentation can be published and made accessible to anyone with a web browser.

You can watch the following video which describes ideas behind the Google Documents concept

To find out more, visit the home page at

http://documents.google.com

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Talking about Gigapixel Images, it looks like there is a new feature in Google Earth that incorporates photos into the Earth Environment.

You can try it for yourself by switching on the “Gigapxl Photos” layer beneath the “Featured Content” layer. This will show placemarks for the available locations with gigapixel images.

There’s a sample video showing the feature in action

and an accompanying article on the Google Earth Blog here

http://www.gearthblog.com/blog/archives/2007/08/new_photo_viewer_wit.html

Here’s a sample - the Angels Window , Grand Canyon at the starting point

and zoomed in …

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The latest version of Google Earth provides an option that allows you to flip around and see the sky from that location.

But it’s a bit more than blue sky and clouds. The Sky option enables budding astronomers to browse Space and provides the ability to search through and view over 1,000,000 stars and 200,000,000 galaxies.

Other options allow you to browse and learn more about pre-selected interesting features.

Here’s NGC 5128

You may need to update to the latest version. Google Earth is available from

http://earth.google.com/

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snippet …

Back to the real subject of this article

Online video is no longer just fun and games: You might actually learn something.

The University of California at Berkeley said on Tuesday that it is using Google Video to deliver college courses, including lectures and symposia, free of charge, the first university to have its own featured page on Google Video.

The site is at http://video.google.com/ucberkeley.

As an initial offering, the university has put up a library of more than 250 hours of video for public viewing. Most of it previously was not available online, Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said in a statement.

“Coursecasting” is a growing trend in educational technology, enabling students and the general public to download audio and video recordings of class lectures to their computers and portable media devices. Berkeley has been offering a limited set of material since 2001.

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In August Google was sued by an organization called Copiepresse, which represents a number of newspapers in Belgium. It argued that the Google search engine and news site breached these publications’ copyright.

Recently, a court ruled in favor of Copiepresse and ordered Google to remove these publishers’ content from both Google.be and Google News. The court also required Google to post its ruling to the home pages of Google.be and Google News Belgium.

The decision of the court is due to be reconsidered in November.

Interesting questions are raised by this case … does this mean you should never reference text from another website explicitly?

Typically a Google web search will reveal a snippet of the item and a link to the originating source requiring a user to visit the original website to view the full article. There are techniques available (robots.txt) that prevent indexing of content.

I wonder if any of these newspapers have an RSS headline feed? Does content published in this way become public domain?

In a somewhat related case, the Agence France-Presse (AFP) have been fighting Google in court since March 2005 over indexing its news content. (This is possibly because the AFP have a deal in place with sites such as Yahoo! News to license and carry its articles).

eDrawings is now available for SketchUp…

The eDrawings Publisher for SketchUp is a free add-on to SketchUp that allows uses to export their models to eDrawings format

The eDrawing publisher for SketchUp is available for download from the SketchUp Website

http://www.sketchup.com/?section=downloads.

Here’s the Eiffel Tower as an eDrawing

eiffel.exe

Perhaps the Google 3D Warehouse will start using eDrawings rather than the static images they currently use.

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A couple of interesting new items available from Google Labs

http://labs.google.com/

Google Notebook enables you to clip and gather information while browsing the web, in your own Notebook which can be accessed from any computer.

http://www.google.com/googlenotebook/overview.html

Google Trends allows you to compare the worlds intetrests in your search topics. Enter a number of topics and Google will report how often they’ve been searched for over time along with other associated information.

http://www.google.com/trends

For example,

This shows a comparison of the search terms “SolidWorks” (in blue) and “Autodesk Inventor” (in orange).

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Hardly a month has passed since the purchase of SketchUp by Google and now a copy is available FREE for personal use.

Google SketchUp (free)

Google SketchUp (free) is an easy-to-learn 3D modeling program whose few simple tools enable you to create 3D models of houses, sheds, decks, home additions, woodworking projects – even space ships. You can add details, textures and glass to your models, design with dimensional accuracy, and place your finished models in Google Earth, share them with others by posting them to the 3D Warehouse, or print hard copies. Google SketchUp (free) is a great way to discover if 3D modeling is right for you.

Google SketchUp is free for personal use. No registration is required.

Details at

http://sketchup.google.com/product_suf.html