Google Data

This guy shot a construction staple through his hand and now he's blogging about putting a second story on his house—by himself. Macabre? Perhaps. Good blogging? I think so.

He slides the chamber open and calls over the foreman to take a look. Turns out the gun's NOT jammed - it's empty. I shot myself with the last staple.

He writes about why he started the blog but hasn't gotten to the real work yet because there seem to be so many strange and funny things to share about the existing house. The x-ray makes me wonder how this whole thing will turn out but one thing's for sure: This house needs some serious help.

Link

Hi AdWords Developers,

IDs in reports are now available (and this time we mean it!).

As we announced yesterday, when you schedule a CustomReport you can now request for IDs to be included so you can better sync up the data with the rest of your API calls.

For the full details, please see our prior post .

We hope you enjoy the new feature and sorry again for any inconvenience we may have caused.

Regards,
Nelson Minar, Software Engineer
Rohit Dhawan, Product Manager

Last year Jennifer Garret wrote an article called New Jocks on The Blog about sports fever and blogging. It looks like things are heating up again. The spring training announcer for the Chicago Cubs just wrote in to Blogger Buzz to let us know that he's blogging from HoHoKam Park in Arizona where the Cubs are training now. So if you're a Cubs fan, you might want to get an early start this season and check out Tim Talks.

Update: Jen Garrett wrote in to point out that she was correct last year when she wrote in her bio: "Jennifer Garrett is a writer and blogger living in Boston, and the Sox are going all the way this year, baby. All the way."

Whoops... we made a mistake. The IDs in reports are not quite yet working. We'll post another message when they are available.

Sorry for the confusion.


Nelson Minar, Software Engineer
Rohit Dhawan, Product Manager

Hi everyone,

Last night, we updated the AdWords API Terms and Conditions. We made several minor changes in order to further clarify a few points and to correct a typo.

The changes are as follows:

Section II. 3c) Added "or for transmissions directly to Google, at least as secure as the protocol being accepted by the AdWords API servers.”

Section II. 3d) Added “Except as expressly permitted by Google under a separate Google product or service feature,”

Section III 2a iv) Modified existing language and inserted some language so that it now reads “The AdWords API Data in such databases may only be accessed (1) by AdWords API Clients in conformance with this agreement, (2) by intermediary tools whose sole purpose is to analyze data for or supply data to an AdWords API Client in conformance with this AdWords API Agreement or (3) by reporting tools to produce reports only for the account owner of the account from which the AdWords API Data was received.”

Section III. 2h) Added “or for transmissions directly to Google, at least as secure as the protocol being accepted by the AdWords API servers.”

Section IV. 14) Added "Google", so the sentence now reads "You and Google are not legal partners or agents, but are independent contractors.”


Regards,
Rohit Dhawan, Product Manager

In the next few weeks, British climber Gavin Bate will be attempting a solo summit of Mount Everest, for a charity called Moving Mountains. He's blogging the adventure, and will also be phoning in reports via AudioBlogger. Here are the key dates:

• 28th March - Gavin leaves UK for Nepal
• 1st April - Trek to mountains begins
• 20th April - Island Peak climb & trek ends
• 24th April - First climb on Everest
• 24th April to 17th May - Load carrying up to South Col
• 19th May to 28th - Summit window!

Here's where you can follow along. Good luck, Gavin!

Hello, AdWords developers! We're happy to announce we've added a new much-requested feature: IDs in reports. When you schedule a CustomReport you can now request for IDs to be included so you can better sync up the data with the rest of your API calls.

With IDs in reports developers can get a full snapshot of their account activity by scheduling a single report. However, please bear in mind that if a Keyword did not have any impressions during the specified period the Keyword will not appear in the report. Also, please remember that while Keyword IDs are unique within an AdGroup they are not globally unique. To properly identify a Keyword both the Keyword ID and AdGroup ID must be used together.

Enjoy the new report features, and please keep the feature suggestions coming!

The latest issue of BlackBook is all about diaries, journals and weblogs:

"Among publishers it’s an article of faith that people no longer want to read books; they just want to write them. The old adage that everyone has a novel in them is being tested as never before, only this novel has turned out to be autobiographical. From television to the Internet, the confessional is rapidly becoming the de facto mode of expression. Everyone, it seems, wants to be heard. Responding to the spirit of the times, BlackBook invited a cross- section of the blazing talents and intellects in the culture to tear a page or two from their diaries or journals and give them to us: the result is a glimpse into the daily lives, concerns, and obsessions of some of the people who shape our world."

Featured writers:

• Salam Pax: "Dear Diary, 'resistance fighters' with Kalashnikovs and covered faces have spread out over the streets of our west Baghdad neighborhood."
• Alexandra Kerry: "Dear Diary, I’m going on Larry King tomorrow, my first press appearance since dad lost the presidential election..."
• Irvine Welsh: "Dear Diary, I’ve decided against taking part in Celebrity Big Brother—it would be crap being known as somebody who’s on the telly, rather than as somebody who’s actually done something."
• Ozzie Osbourne: "Tonight I’m heading down to Fountain Studios in London to hang out with my wife on the set of X-Factor, a new television show that she’s doing with Simon Cowell, from American Idol. I’m taking my jellybeans, and hopefully I’ll be close enough to pelt Cowell in the back of the head with some."
  

[via HardGuy]

OurMedia.org, a joint effort by Marc Canter, J.D. Lasica, Drupal/Bryght and the Internet Archive, just launched. From the FAQ:

"The idea is pretty simple: People who create video, music, photos, audio clips and other personal media can store their stuff for free on Ourmedia's servers forever, as long as they're willing to share their works with a global audience."

"Ourmedia's goal is to expose, advance and preserve digital creativity at the grassroots level. The site serves as a central gathering spot where professionals and amateurs come together to share works, offer tips and tutorials, and interact in a combination community space and virtual library that will preserve these works for future generations. We want to enable people anywhere in the world to tap into this rich repository of media and create image albums, movie and music jukeboxes and more."

Looks like Lions Gate Films set up Blogger blogs for a few of their upcoming movies. So far David Duchovny and Rob Zombie are blogging, and a few other DirectorBlogs are coming soon. Neat!

Wendy Cheng aka the award winning blogger XiaXue (Are you worshipping the ground she walks on?) scored an endorsement deal from a t-shirt company called LocalBrand because of her blog.

SINGAPORE BLOGGER SCORES A HIT
This Singaporean was signed on in December by a local T-shirt brand, aptly named LocalBrand, to endorse its products.

This could make the 20-year-old freelance writer the first blogger to receive a commercial endorsement deal, which has been the domain of celebrities.

Here is XiaXue's post about becoming a blogging ambassador.

If you're into newsreaders, be sure to subscribe to the Blogger Status feed — it's the quickest way to stay on top of the massages Blogger's been having lately.

Here's the URL: http://status.blogger.com/atom.xml

It just occured to me that there are Blogger t-shirts available at the Google Store. They're both comfy and we designed one to look like an old gym shirt. I love the descriptions:

Blogger T: "Sure, there are plenty of T-shirts out there. But this one is brown..."

Blogger Ringnecked T: "What better to express yourself than this handsome retro gym style T-shirt?"

They're both about $11 but you should be warned: If you get the lighter one, you may have flashbacks from fifth grade gym class. Like the time I climbed all the way up the rope and froze. I should blog about that.

Gosh, it must be Code Week or something at Google. My and Steve's project launched Monday on the Google Blog:

"We just pushed an updated version of Blogger's Atom API live, and wanted to post about it here to spread the word... In addition, we've re-launched the Blogger Developers Network (feed), as well as the moderated, companion BloggerDev discussion list."

Then today, DiBona's project launched:

"We're very happy to be launching code.google.com today. To begin, we're releasing some developer-oriented libraries and tools... We're also featuring links to all current Google APIs. Come check them out and if you'd like more information, please join our group, subscribe to our feeds, or if you're shy, us directly. And happy coding!"

I just recieved an email from a Blogger user named Wayne asking if we were going to address some of the slowness issues with Blogger. We do still update Blogger Status (although there was a recent glitch with it). Performance is a huge priority for us and we're adding a bunch of new machines right now to speed things up. New machines are not an issue because here at Google we can add them quite smoothly as needed. The real issue is power—actual electricity, if you can believe it. So now we're adding more power in addition to more machines.

We use Blogger for this blog and many of the people on our team use Blogger for their own, personal blogs. We don't have a super-special employee server that gives us preference over anyone else so we are just as frustrated with slowness and performance problems. That being said, we are just as eager as you to make this fix so things will be fast again. For more specifics, again, please check out the status blog.