Google’s coming to Austin for SXSW

Like many of you out there, we’re gearing up for the SXSW Interactive Festival, which starts tomorrow, March 12 in Austin, TX. In just a few short hours, dozens of Googlers and YouTubers will be descending on Austin for a packed weekend of panels, demos and parties. Of course, we’ve also got a few fun things up our sleeve:

• Representatives from Google and YouTube will be speaking on more than 20 panels on a variety of subjects, including open source, mobile, real-time communication and user experience design.
• At the Google booth, we’ll be doing demos on a wide range of products, including Google Maps, Blogger, Wave, Reader and YouTube, and sessions on building apps for App Engine, extensions on Chrome and accessibility APIs and hacks for Android.
• On Sunday, our all-day Hackathon will give you the chance to get your hands dirty and build applications using a variety of Google technologies. At the end of the day, we’ll award prizes, including Android phones, for the best apps.
• We’re sponsoring the festival’s first Mothers’ Room, where nursing moms can go for comfort and privacy.

Finally, we’ll be seeing you at as many parties as we can go to at one time, including Bikehugger’s Mobile Social, where representatives from the Google Maps team will be handing out schwag and dishing dirt on how they built bike directions, the Blogger/Reader party, where you’ll have a chance to chat with members of those teams about new features, and (last but not least) the SXSW Film Closing/Music Opening, co-sponsored by YouTube and VH1.

You can read more about all of the Google happenings on our SXSW website, and follow @googlesxsw on Twitter for last-minute updates and news from Austin. We can’t wait to hit the ground running (or biking), and we look forward to seeing you there!

Posted by Emily Wood, Editor, Google Blog and Twitter team

Express yourself with the Blogger Template Designer

In Blogger’s more than 10 years, we’ve learned that blogging is a powerful way for people to express themselves. More than 350,000 words are written on Blogger every minute of every day and over the years we’ve added a bunch of features to ensure that writing those words is as easy, fun and rewarding as possible. Today, we’re happy to announce the launch of the Blogger Template Designer on Blogger in Draft, our experimental playground where you can try out the latest features Blogger has to offer. Instead of creating a lot of new templates that will grow stale over time, we decided to go beyond static templates and reinvent the whole process of designing your blog, making it even easier to express yourself online.

The Blogger Template Designer is our big first step in improving not just our template designs, but all the ways that you can customize the look and layout of your blog. If you try out the Blogger Template Designer, you’ll find:

• Fifteen new professional templates to start from (and more on their way)
• Custom blog layouts with one, two and three columns
• Hundreds of free professional background images from iStockphoto, the leading microstock image marketplace
• Customizable colors, fonts and more

Check out this video for a peek at what you can do with the Blogger Template Designer:



For more info, check out our post on the Blogger in draft blog. Give the Blogger Template Designer a test drive, and then let us know what you think!

Posted by Pete Hopkins, Tech Lead, Blogger

Now playing: Apps Script for Google Docs

The Google Apps team here in New York City is a hotbed of movie fanatics. But while planning a recent movie night, we realized we spend too much time organizing our events and not enough time discussing, debating and watching movies.

To take the hard work out of planning, we turned to Google Apps Script, which lets you write short programs that automatically perform simple actions within a spreadsheet. For example, our Movie Night script figures out which movies are playing close by and invites everyone to vote on what they’d most like to see.


Google Apps Script has been available to businesses, schools and other organizations using Google Apps since January, and today we’re excited to bring it to everyone who uses Google spreadsheets. Apps Script can be helpful for all kinds of things, from customized party invites to sending out holiday letters — in fact Apps Script can be especially helpful for those repetitive, time consuming tasks.

To help you find useful scripts, we’ve also launched a public gallery where you can check out our Movie Night script and browse other available scripts. If you’re feeling adventurous, try your hand at writing your own script and submit it to the gallery for others to use. To see the gallery or install a script in your spreadsheet, click on “Insert” and select “Script.”

Check out the Google Docs blog for more information about Apps Script, and to learn about writing your own scripts, visit the Google Apps Developer Blog.

Posted by Evin Levey, Product Manager, Google Apps

Finding awesome stuff online with Google Reader Play

I use Google Reader a lot — not only to stay on top of the news, but also to find interesting blog posts and articles. I’m always telling my friends about Google Reader, and while some of them love it, others don’t want to take the time to set it up. For those of you who fall into this second category, we’re announcing Google Reader Play, a new product that makes the best stuff in Reader more accessible for everyone. Reader Play is a new way to browse interesting stuff on the web, customized to the topics you’re interested in, with no setup required.


Items in Reader Play are presented one at a time, and images and videos are automatically enlarged to maximize the viewing experience. We use the technology behind Recommended Items in Reader to populate Reader Play with the most interesting content on the web. While you don’t need a Google account to use Reader Play, your experience will be personalized if you sign in. As you browse, you can let us know which items you enjoy by clicking the "like" button, and we'll use that info to show you other content we think you’ll enjoy.

We think Reader Play is a fun way to browse interesting items online that you wouldn’t find otherwise. We designed it especially for people who don’t want to spend time curating their own set of feeds — but folks who already use Reader can easily use it to read their feeds as well. Just click the feed settings menu on any feed in Reader and select “View in Reader Play.” We’re launching Reader Play as an experiment in Google Labs so that we can test it out, get feedback from you and then improve it as quickly as possible. Visit google.com/reader/play to give it a try, and let us know what you think!

Posted by Garrett Wu, Software Engineer

The Internet in America: A YouTube Interview with the FCC

(Cross-posted from the YouTube Blog)

If you're reading this, then you're probably on the Internet — via your laptop, your mobile phone or other handheld device, or maybe even through your television. But in 2010, millions of Americans still do not have access to the wealth of information made available on the Web. Even though the Internet was invented in the U.S. over 20 years ago, many Americans lag behind in both access to the Internet and speed of connections, which is why the Federal Communications Commission (or the FCC, the federal agency that oversees the U.S. communications industry) is launching its much-anticipated National Broadband Plan next Tuesday, to lay out its strategy for connecting all Americans to fast, affordable high-speed Internet.

After this plan is announced, you have the opportunity to interview FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, in the second of a series of in-person YouTube interviews with government leaders. (Our first, with U.S. President Barack Obama, took place last month.) Go to CitizenTube today to submit your video or text question via Google Moderator, and vote on your favorites; we'll bring a selection of the top-voted questions to Chairman Genachowski in our interview next Tuesday, March 16. The deadline for submission is Sunday night, March 14, at 11:59 p.m. PT.

To help structure our conversation with the Chairman, we've broken the interview down into seven topics. To learn more about what the FCC is doing in each area, click on the links for each topic below. Then submit your question on CitizenTube under one of the topic headings.

• Access and Affordability
• Mobile and Wireless
• Security and Privacy
• Digital Economy
• Internet in Schools
• Open Internet/Network Neutrality
• Others (learn more at Broadband.gov)

Access to the Internet has transformed almost every aspect of our economy and society. This is your chance to press the FCC on how the National Broadband Plan will work, and ask your questions about improving the Internet in America. We're looking forward to seeing your questions and hearing what the Chairman has to say.

Posted by Steve Grove, Head of News and Politics, YouTube