Need Page Number In Google Docs Check Out This Tip!

The Web Worker Daily blog has a very helpful tip for all who use Google Docs. One of the thinks I know I have missed about Google Doc's is the ability to create headers and footers with page numbers. What I didn't know is that with just a bit of HTML code I could have added them myself check out Web Worker Daily's Archive Wednesday Time Saver: Add Page Numbers to Google Docs «:

I’m a web worker who is constantly using Google Docs. It’s a service that is very easy to use. It’s accessible wherever I can get online and it’s a fully functional word processor that has all the features I need on a daily basis. There are however some little things I miss from Word.

The Google Operating System recently featured a post providing a useful tip for embedding dynamic page numbers into Google Document files. The secret to the tip is a block of HTML. To add page numbers to the top of the document, hit the “Edit HTML” tab and paste in the following HTML code:

Page 1 of 1

If you want to have the page numbers at the bottom of the page, paste in the following HTML code at the bottom of the page:

Page 1 of 1

Keep in mind that these page numbers will only appear when you export to PDF.

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Here Is A Summary Of Today's YouTube API and TiVo News

YouTube is all over the news today, not only for the prospect of everyone creating their very own YouTube, but announcement that TiVo will have a direct connection to YouTube in the near future.

To start the summary off check out the Geek News Central article, Utilize YouTube to Build your Own Video Portal:

YouTube has made a pretty huge announcement that is sure to have a number of programmers burning the midnight oil over the next couple of weeks.

YouTube will no longer be just a place to get video it is changing in that it will now be platform where you will essentially have your own YouTube Portal or YouTube videos integrated into software and web applications.

People will be able to login and upload videos directly from your own website and from your website you will be able to manipulate on your site how those submitted videos appear. (still figuring this out)

This is pretty remarkable and what this does is allows publishers like me to use the infrastructure of YouTube yet mash things up in a way that will benefit my site a great deal more.

I am still wrapping my brain around the different ways we will be able to use this. It’s to bad that someone would not do the same thing for Audio as well. CNET

In response to Google's recent monetization problems ZDNet felt how Google plans on monetizing its news APIs is the main story check out YouTube’s new APIs and how Google will monetize them:

YouTube rolled out a series of new APIs that turn the site into a wide-ranging video service, but the more interesting aspect may be monitoring how Google’s monetization strategy plays into the announcement.

First, the APIs. YouTube said on its blog that its site has become a cloud video service. To that end, YouTube has announced the following API services that allow developers and partners to do the following:

• Upload videos and video responses to YouTube
• Add/Edit user and video metadata (titles, descriptions, ratings, comments, favorites, contacts, etc)
• Fetch localized standard feeds (most viewed, top rated, etc.) for 18 international locales
• Perform custom queries optimized for 18 international locales
• Customize player UI and control video playback (pause, play, stop, etc.) through software

YouTube noted that Electronic Arts is using the APIs and others are likely to follow. This YouTube as a service riff is really a no brainer, but things get interesting when you layer in Google’s monetization strategy. On Monday, Tim Armstrong, president of advertising and commerce in North America, talked up YouTube’s display ad potential.

Armstrong said Google was taking its time monetizing YouTube, but clearly sees 2008 and 2009 as big years for display ads on the video site and elsewhere. Meanwhile, YouTube gets a lot of traffic via social networking sites. These APIs will help put YouTube everywhere and Google’s ads–delivered via video and most likely widgets–will ride shotgun at some point.

ReadWriteWeb thinks the new YouTube API's may be a remarkable development check out YouTube's Could Be the Best New Platform Yet:

The video uploading platform announced by YouTube last night may not have been what many pundits expected but it could mark a major turning point for both YouTube and thousands of other sites around the web.

By allowing website owners to combine an on-site video publishing option for their users with the huge number of people looking to discover new content on YouTube, the platform will create a mutually beneficial feedback loop that will breathe new life into both YouTube and the web at large. It's also got potential to show up all the other big platform plays we've seen to date.

A Niche Community Feedback Loop

There is already a large number of niche content sites around the web that host communities interested in everything from knitting to urban drag racing. Many of those sites receive millions of monthly visitors, even though they aren't widely talked about outside their respective niches.

YouTube, on the other hand, is the place to go to find video about anything. Website owners couldn't ask for a better way to make their sites discoverable than this system wherein their existing community can upload video from a niche site but new users can discover the video and links back to those sites from inside the public square that is YouTube.

Meanwhile, YouTube becomes all the more important. If niche site owners have an easy way to publish to YouTube without directing their users off site then those niche communities will be publishing more high quality content to YouTube.

Money

One question that is still unanswered is advertising and revenue sharing. YouTube will likely use display advertising on the channel pages for their new partner sites and those partner sites can do the same back at home. Almost every video ad on the web is annoying and there's no reason to get those involved.

In as much as YouTube's monetization strategy has been to run ads on the pages of trusted content partners, the company is about to get a whole lot of new trusted channels. This content may still be User Generated and thus not completely predictable, but the channel pages from high quality sites using the YouTube platform are going to be much easier to monetize than YouTube in general.

Paradigm Shift

Welcome to the era of the platform. When, years from now, the importance of platforms is recognized by the end-user market at large, it's not going to be the Facebook or OpenSocial platforms that will be known as the first big platform play. Those platforms just let developers build applications on the big sites (though Facebook may not stay that way). This YouTube offering is going to lead to some very noticeable "powered by YouTube" language around the web.

YouTube could go down in history as one of the first publishing services to really recognize the value in pointing people elsewhere. That's a big part of what's so exciting about the web today; not just letting others add value to your site, but adding value to your users' experience by serving as the source for pointers to the best things elsewhere. The YouTube platform could be uniquely good for that. (Speaking of pointing to what's good, Silicon Alley Insider broke the rumor of this move and has been providing good discussion since.)

And Finally Gizmodo: TiVo Getting YouTube:

Good news, kind of. TiVo has just announced that their networked Series 3 and TiVo HD subscribers will be getting YouTube access through their boxes sometime "later this year." While new media features are always a plus, TiVo's more recent advanced service offerings (like Rhapsody integration) have been a bit buggy. Here's hoping YouTube rolls out smoothly.

Here's the full announcement:

ALVISO, Calif., March 12 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- TiVo Inc. (Nasdaq: TIVO), the creator of and a leader in television services for digital video recorders (DVRs), today announced an agreement with YouTube(TM) that will offer access to YouTube videos directly from the TV via a TiVo DVR. The service will be available later this year to broadband-connected subscribers with TiVo Series3(TM) DVRs, including the new TiVo HD.

Every day hundreds of millions of videos are viewed on YouTube and hundreds of thousands of videos are uploaded. Upon launch of the TiVo-YouTube service, TiVo users will be able to search, browse and watch these videos directly on their television sets through their broadband connected TiVo DVRs. The combination of having the YouTube experience with the convenience and familiarity of TiVo's intuitive user interface will provide TiVo subscribers with the ability to discover and enjoy the most shared and most discussed web videos in the world on their televisions. Importantly, users will be able to log into their YouTube accounts directly from their TiVo boxes and access their favorite YouTube channels and
playlists.

"We're delighted to be working with the world's leading online video community so that TiVo subscribers can access YouTube's popular content on the TV via the TiVo DVR," said Tara Maitra, Vice President and GM of Content Services at TiVo Inc. "Being able to make available YouTube videos
to the TiVo subscriber base using one device, one remote and one user interface is another major step in our commitment to combine all of your television and web video viewing options in one easy to use service."

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Firefox's gTranslate extension uses Google Translate on the fly!

In addition to using the Google Translate widget on your web pages to translate web content with Google Translate you can now use gTranslate, a Firefox extension that lets you select some text from a web page and translate to any of the languages that Google Translate supports.

It even can replace the original text with the translation in text boxes. You can reply to a post from Google Groups or compose a Blogger post in English and then using gTranslate on the Firefox pulldown, instantly translate it to another language.

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Google's Blogger Makes Blogrolling easier with its Blog List

As you can tell by my blogs I'm a proponent of blogrolls, and Blogger has just made blogrolling much easier with their new blogrolling page element. Detailing this new feature we have a new post from Blogger in Draft called New Feature: Blog List.

It states:

Bloggers often feature a list of their favorite blogs, called a “blogroll,” in the sidebar of their own blog. Our latest page element, Blog List, helps you do just that, but we’ve mixed it in with Google Reader to make it even more powerful and useful.

At its most basic, Blog List displays a list of links to your favorite blogs, with an optional icon. If you link to a blog with an Atom or RSS feed, however, the Blog List can show the date of the blog’s last update or even the title and snippet of its most recent post.

You can set the number of blogs to show in the list and whether they should be sorted by update time or alphabetically by blog title.

You add blogs to your Blog List by entering blog or feed URLs directly, or by importing subscriptions from Google Reader. When you add by URL, Blogger will attempt to detect an Atom or RSS feed for it in order to show post and update information. If none is found, the blog will still be added to the Blog List, just as a simple link.

Please try this out! Add a Blog List (Or two! Or more!) to your blog and let us know what you think in the comments. We value your feedback, and will try to incorporate as much as we can before the Blog List goes big-time on www.blogger.com.

Remember: Like all features mentioned on this blog, you must log in to http://draft.blogger.com/ to add a Blog List.

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How to Embed MP3 Files With Google Readers MP3 Player

The Digital Inspiration blog is a great resource for finding out how to accomplish tasks to make your blog or web page stand out from the crowd. On of their latest posts goes into detail on how to embed MP3 files into your web page.

They go into four different players, Google Reader MP3 Player, Yahoo MP3 Player, Yahoo Media Player and the Odeo MP3 Player.

Check out Digital Inspiration - How to Embed MP3 Audio Files In Web Pages With Google or Yahoo! Flash

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Directory of100 Google Maps Mashups Available

One of the few things I can see that Google has missed is a directory of Google Maps Mashups, luckily the Google Bloggers are there to fill the gaps. Check out Geek News Central - 100 Google maps mashups:

Google maps is one of the more interesting technologies released in recent times and some of the applications that have been built on the API are delivering some cool services.

The Google Maps Mania Blog has put together a list of 100 mashups using Google maps. These range from finding a public toilet or wifi hotspot to measuring the area of a mapped location.

This is a great example of the power of an open platform. If people had to develop these applications from scratch, or license the API to use Google Maps, they would never exist. Conversely, by building a platform that other people can develop on, Google increases the value of their product.

....

Definitely check out the list though as there are some interesting ones there.

Here are the first 20 or so...

1. Find a world brewery
2. Track world terrorism
3. Find a WiFi Hotspot in the US
4. Align your satellite dish properly
5. Catch live music in your area
6. Track a US package
7. See the world at night
8. Walk in a straight line around the world
9. Explore the new 7 wonders of the world (More)
10. Map 2008 presidential campaign contributions
11. Find a public toilet
12. Track a US or Canadian flight number
13. Lookup real-time US airport status
14. Map US FAA delayed flight information
15. Find a world airport, airline or connection
16. Find out "walkscore" for house or apartment
17. Calculate US or Canadian Taxi Fare
18. Look at the clouds!
19. Explore any location on earth
20. Map US telephone area codes

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Google Spreadsheets Now Have Forms

Thats is right Google Spreadsheets now have emailable forms, which means say you want to create of list of people interested in a particular meeting, product and service you can make a Google spreadsheet containing headings for all the contact information you need and then enable forms. Once you've created your form you can send it via email to anyone you think might be interested.

All they have to do is fill in the form a mail it back, and their answers will populate your spreadsheet. You can create signup sheets, polls, advertisements to name just a few possibilities.

For more on Google Forms check out the Official Google Docs Blog- Stop sharing spreadsheets, start collecting information:

Today we're asking you to do something new: stop sharing spreadsheets.

Well... only sometimes, and only in certain situations. See, we've noticed that, in some cases, you want to collect just a tiny bit of information from dozens, scores, or even hundreds of users or more. Some of them are Google Docs users. Some of them are not. Either way, you don't always want them all mucking around with the whole spreadsheet and you're tired of telling those new to Google Docs that they don't need to switch to Gmail just to use Docs (huh? you didn't know that either?).

We're really excited to bring you forms! Create a form in a Google Docs spreadsheet and send it out to anyone with an email address. They won't need to sign in, and they can respond directly from the email message or from an automatically generated web page. Creating the form is easy: start with a spreadsheet to get the form, or start by creating the form and you'll get the spreadsheet automatically.

Responses are automatically added to your spreadsheet. You can even keep a closer eye on them by adding the Google Docs forms gadget to your iGoogle homepage, created by software engineers Valerie Blechar and Sarah Beth Eisinger (in her first month at Google!). It lists your recent active forms, with new responses highlighted. Add this gadget to your iGoogle page:

At Google, we've already been using it for signups, surveys, and miscellaneous mischief. And we can't wait to see what you do with forms in Google Docs.

P.S. Navigate all the extra data you're collecting with the new freeze columns feature. It's been our most requested feature for twelve months, but we hope you'll cut software engineer Eric Bogs a break since he's only been here for a few!

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How To Measure Distance Between Two Locations Using Google Maps

Digital Inspiration has a nice post on what you can do with Google Maps besides just finding how to get where your going. If you've ever wanted to know the distance between two buildings, you can find it, if you want to know the difference in the distance between to routes you can find out.
Check out Digital Inspiration: Measure Distance Between Two Locations Using Google Maps:

Google Maps has a neat feature that lets you calculate distance between two points anywhere on the Earth - you could use this to measure the approximate distance between two cities or to calculate the size of a local football field or to know how far is your new office from home.

In the above example, Google Maps helps us measure the length of Manhattan Bridge between Brooklyn and New York that lies over the river.

To measure distances using Google Maps, click the “My Maps” tab on Google Maps website and select the “Distance Measurement Tool” - now select any two points on the map with your mouse and the distance will appear in miles (or kilometers).

Google Maps uses straight lines to calculate the shortest distance but if you are looking for more accurate numbers, trace the complete route by clicking at all the curves and deviations as below:

In this example we measured the distance between the car parking of Taj Mahal and the actual monument - one has to cover 1.4 km on foot before he gets in.

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Use Issuu To Embed PDFs in Web Pages

With Issuu (pronounced “issue”) you can now embed PDF files in web pages and view them in a very nice viewer, if you have a need for displaying reports or other static documents in your website or blog it might be worth taking a good hard look at what Issuu has to offer.

For a more on Issuu check out Digital Inspiration - Convert PDF Files Into 3D Magazines, Embed in Web Pages - Issuu:

Issuu (prononced “issue”) is an impressive service where you upload PDF documents and they are instantly converted into 3D flip magazines which you can embed in blogs or websites.

Your visitors can turn the pages of the PDF with their mouse or jump to any specific page by clicking the thumbnail image of the page. In other words, Issuu makes your PDF files look almost the same as a physical publication but in a browser.

While Scribd and Slideshare also support PDF files (See “How to Embed PDF Documents in Web Pages“), Issuu offers two main advantages - they allow you to upload large PDF files (upto 100 MB) and their inline PDF player looks absolutely amazing. You even get to decide the colors and the PDF player dimensions.

Issuu is free and a perfect place for sharing PDF files especially the ones that contain photos, illustrations, PowerPoint slides or your design portfolio. Spend five minutes and you’ll love this PDF service for sure.

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Google Gears Enabled Google Docs Being Tested

According to reliable sources including Google Blogscoped, a Gears Enabled version of Google Doc is currently being tested. So soon we will have one less reason to use Office, we'll be able to do all the same things we do today on Google Docs online, offline and then when we have online access, we will be able to sync our changes back to the online versions...

For more on on on going testing check out Google Blogscoped - Google Docs Offline Access:

In a post Philipp made last week about writing a book in Google Docs, he said:

Working with Google Docs requires an internet connection. In my case, I need this internet connection anyway [...] your mileage may vary (and who knows, Google may also release Gears-support for Google Docs in the future).

After playing around with one of Google’s not-so-private experimental sites, I can confirm that offline access is currently being tested.

...

After enabling offline access and confirming the security warning for Google Gears, my documents started to synchronize, just the same as feed items synchronize in Google Reader. (In case you encounter any error messages, Google allows you to reset and disable offline access through the offline access"

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