Google+World

What a Google World it is! Google has so many free products it's tough to keep up with all of them. Google is such a mammoth of a company that I'm sure the folks at Yahoo are kicking themselves three, four times a day for not purchasing the company when they had the chance. Google offers so many products that I've decided to give them individual treatment on this site, so please be sure to visit their individual pages. Please note that I have not created separate pages for the following Google products:
 * Images
 * Translate
 * Scholar
 * Calendar
 * Gmail

While I'm thinking of it, has anyone had a look at a Google in the classroom book that has been advertised in ISTE publications? The book I'm thinking of is called //Retool Your School ////:The Educator’s Essential Guide to Google’s Free Power Apps// by James Lerman and Ronique Hicks. The claim is that the book gives teachers step-by-step instructions for using Google applications (Blogger, Maps, Picasa, Docs and so on) in the classroom.

ISBN: 978-1-56484-267-1 One of the many questions I've had burning in my brain is how is that Google can grant access to so many of its products for free. The answer came from a CNBC special about Google.
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Google Ads, which you've probably heard about only if you run a business or are in marketing, generates about 95% of Google's total profits. The ads are featured in Google's sponsored links and elsewhere. Businesses also bid on keywords. Keywords are the secret to a company appearing at the top of a page after a search. Google uses an algorithm that assigns a score to a particular site. The higher the score, the more relevant the company is to the search, the higher the company appears on a search featuring certain keywords. (I hope I explained that so it makes some sense.)

What I find fascinating and frightening at the same time is that Google stores all searches for some time. How much time until they become anonymized (new word?) and unusable is guesstimated (another new one!) at 18 months. What this means is that users leave digital footprints. Mmhmm. Google has been subpoenaed in the U.S. to provide information on individuals and their activities on the Web. I don't know what the outcome, in terms of information released, has been. The Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution protects people from unreasonable searche and seizure. HOWEVER, there's something called a 3rd Party Doctrine that doesn't apply to the 4th Amendment. Google is a third party... You connect the dots.

What to do about your searches and your activities on Google? Google CEO Eric Schmidt couldn't have put it plainer:  "If you have something you don't want anyone to know about, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first  place."

<span style="color: #000080; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 140%;">Back to the anonymization (er, how do you spell that?) process. It's not infallible. Crafty computer whizzes can still piece together your searches and trace them back to you and your IP address.

<span style="color: #000080; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 140%;">With all that said, Google claims that it doesn't misuse users' information. If it did, users would vote with their feet and Google would lose business to competitors.

<span style="color: #000080; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 140%;">At the time of the CNBC special, Google was in the process of creating a tool temporarily called Visual Search that would allow users to capture an image of something in the physical environment and match it with something on the Web in order to obtain more information about it. This sounds like augmented reality. Please see the individual page on this site about augmented reality. It seems that we're moving past the era of PCs to something called extra-sensory computing, to paraphrase the words of a Google employee featured in the show.

<span style="color: #008000; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 130%;">Are you keen on reading a blog about Google? Check out @http://www.buzzmachine.com/ The blog is buy Jeff Jarvis, a professor of journalism at CUNY. He's a hip guy despite his academic associations. You might also visit a "non-academic's" blog too. Go to Gina Trapani's @http://smarterware.org/

<span style="color: #008000; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 130%;">You might also listen to TWig (This Week in Google), a weekly podcast of news about Google (goes to show you how big it is) and other stories about tech. Consider adding an RSS feed to your reader that will make updates on TWig come to you instead of you going to it. (Take a look at the page on this site called Make the News Come to You for more information about **readers** and **RSS feeds**.) I've added an RSS feed hererss url="feed://leoville.tv/podcasts/twig.xml" link="true" description="true" number="10" <span style="color: #008000; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 130%;">The show is also available on Apple iTunes and as a video.

<span style="color: #000080; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 130%;">In the summer of 2010, Google purchased a gaming company called Slide for $182 million. The acquisition fits in with Google's new area of gaming. Will Google make games that suit educational needs? Watch this space for updates.

<span style="color: #000080; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 140%;">A fascinating piece of information: As of the first week of July 2010, Google's stock dropped 30% in a year's time. With all of the products and successes, why, why why?? Could it be due to Google's recent spending spree of over $1.2 billion in the past year?

<span style="color: #000080; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 110%;">By the way, did you know that YouTube is owned by Google?