Unlocking access to millions of books

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Unlocking access to millions of booksPosted by Adam M. Smith, Director, Product Management

We've always said that in a sense, Google Book Search is as old as Google itself. Back in their Ph.D. days, Larry and Sergey dreamed of a way to make it easier for anyone, anywhere, to access the information held within the world's books.

Today, we're excited to announce an agreement with U.S. authors and publishers that dramatically expands access to millions of books online, taking us one big step closer to fulfilling that dream. If approved by the Court, this agreement will unlock access to millions of out-of-print books to the benefit of users, authors and publishers.

To read more about the agreement, head over to the Official Google Blog. To read more about what this means for users, check out our microsite.

Google Labs adds Calendar, Docs gadget to Gmail

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Google Labs adds Calendar, Docs gadget to Gmail

Googlegadgets One of my native Google Apps dislikes is that the apps themselves are pretty disjointed. Sure there are links to the other apps if you're in one, but there's a productivity benefit to having certain data types on the same screen. You could go the Greasemonkey route of course, but Google just made the experience a little better with two new Labs features.

Within Gmail, you can now add an agenda view by hitting Settings, Labs and enabling the Google Calendar Gadget. Likewise, you'll see a Google Docs Gadget that offers searchable access to your docs, spreadsheets and presentations. While it's no big deal to have another browser tab open when you jump between Google Apps, it's nice to have an option that makes Gmail more like a client app. One of Outlook's strengths for example, are the many views that offer all of the at-a-glance data you need to be productive. While these new Gmail features don't offer the same elegant functionality, they do bring the web app closer.

Evernote

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Evernote

Shared by timlauer
Jon Hicks takes another look at Evernote. I too am finding this to be quite a useful tool for organizing information such as receipts, paper documents that for some reason my district does not send out as electronic files, and snapshots of things like white board notes and items notes with a mobile phone image...

I’m not sure if there are new features in there, but recently I’ve been changing my mind. Part of the reason for this is the iPhone app: it becomes a way of collecting data when I’m out – voice notes, text notes and photos, which can then be synced and searched later.

Using WordPress and Google Reader Notes to Make Blog Posts...

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I've never been much of a long form blogger. Maybe that's why I have been attracted to tools such as Flickr and Twitter. Anyway for the 3 or 4 folks out there who have bothered to look, you may of noticed that for much of the past few months my weblog remained dormant. I've been busy with school and doing lots of writing for my staff and community, just not much that makes it on to my weblog.

During this time, I have also begun to use Google Reader as my main tool for mining RSS feeds and keeping up with news and content related to my work and interests. Both on my computer, and on my phone, Google Reader is the tool I use to keep up with news related to school, my profession, and things that I am interested in. In addition I have started to utilize the share feature in Google Reader. This tool allows you to note items and share them with others. In addition Google Reader also has a notes feature that allows you to add an annotation to items that you share from your reader. Both the Share and Notes tools create unique pages that list the items shared or noted. In addition both also produce an RSS feed. There is also a bookmarklet that you can install in your browser that will let you add any page you visit to your Google Reader Shared Items.

I have been looking for a way to incorporate my Google Reader notes into my blog. While sidebar plugins are available, I have been looking for a way to make items noted in Google Reader appear as posts in my WordPress blog. I recently found a WordPress Plugin called WP-O-Matic that will allow you to grab RSS feeds and repost the contents on your blog. While not a perfect solution, and one with a few bugs, I have begun to use it and for the most part am happy with the solution.

Here is how it works. I installed the WP-O-Matic plugin in my WordPress installation. WP-O-Matic has quite a few features and can be used to create custom feed collections for posting. In my case I just set it up to follow the RSS feed from my Google Reader Notes. Once configured properly, WP-O-Matic will grab your latest Google Reader Items with Notes and publish them to your site. My initial results were problematic because the items were being posted multiple times. I did some research and found a fix to this problem and since have been quite happy with the work flow. The first screencast below demonstrates how notes work from within Google Reader and how I use the WordPress plugin to grab them and repost them in my blog. The second screencast show how to use the Note in Reader bookmarklet to post from any web page.