New Content in Google Calendar

Google Calendar has added some new content that they call web content events. These are web-based general-content type modules, such as local weather forecasts, moon phases, and the like, that link to individual days in your calendar. To activate the weather forecast and other modules, just click the Settings link and fill in the appropriate blanks. It's a small but useful addition to the Google Calendar application.

University Lectures on Google Video

Here's something neat. The University of California at Berkeley is using Google Video to deliver selected college courses. You can download and view more than 250 hours of lectures and symposia free of charge, via the university's own Google Video page. This is a great use of new Internet technology!

New Picasa Features

Picasa is one of my favorite Google applications, and Google has just released a new, updated version of the photo-editing program. New features include:

• Picasa Web Albums, for sharing photos with others over the web
• Save feature for saving photo edits for use in other programs
• Convert time-lapse photos into movies
• Search photos by color
• Create screensaver from photos
• Integration with Google Earth, so you can tag your photos with location information or place your photos on a Google Earth map

Check it out!

New Google Earth Content

Google has added a ton of new multimedia content to Google Earth. Go to the Featured Content folder in the Google Earth sidebar, and you'll see links to content from National Geographic magzine, the Discovery Network, the National Park Service, and other parties. It's fun and interesting stuff, and worth checking out. (You get the content automatically when you start up Google Earth; it's streamed to you live over the Internet.)

New Google Spreadsheet Features

Jonas at My Uninstalled Life posts that Google has added some new features to Google Spreadsheets. These features include:

• Totally public spreadsheets, so anyone can view without an explicit invitation (as long as they have a Google Account, that is)
• Simpler spreadsheet URLs (makes sharing easier)
• You can obtain a list of people to invite from Gmail or Google Calendar
• More cell formatting options
• More currency formats
• Ability to have more lines of text in each cell
• Ability to merge cells on multiple rows at once
• Ability to import larger file sizes
• New print feature
• PDF export
• Support for Open Document Format (ODF)

And don't forget my Digital Shortcut electronic book, Using Google Spreadsheets, available for online purchase and download now!

Google News Archive Search

Google News has added a cool and useful new feature. Google News Archive Search lets you search more than 200 years of historical newspaper archives. When you do an archive search, links in the left-hand pane let you narrow your search by date or by publication. Resulting pages are either HTML or PDFs of scanned newpaper/magazine pages; some of the results are free, link to paid newspaper archives.

This is a great way to do historical research -- another great addition to the suite of search features offered by Google. Check it out!

Google Stop Words

Reader Tams Bixby wrote in requesting a complete list of Google stop words -- those common little words, like "a" and "how," that Google automatically excises from all search queries. (You can force Google to search for stop words by putting a "+" in front of the word in your query, of course.)

Unfortunately, Google doesn't list all their stop words, so compiling such a comprehensive list is a hit or miss affair. That said, here's a site that attempts to list Google's default English stop words. Yeah, I know it's not a complete list, but at least it's a start -- and it has links to stop words in other languages, too.