Since I’m an optimist I try to imagine they do it mainly to encourage innovation and better solutions to the world’s problems both on and offline. Even if that’s not the whole story, it’s very feel good. It infuses a sense of fun and open-mindedness since they are always a bit quirky are aimed a broad age and range of people.

Contests can be a good way to get things done and you don’t have to fly people to company headquarters either. Guy Kawasaki got his book cover designed by running a contest.

Here is a list of some Google contests (feel free to fill me in on any I’ve missed):

• Google Highly Open Participation Contest
• Doodle 4 Google competition
• Google Moon Contest
• Build Your Campus in 3D Competition!
• Google Desktop Gadget Contest

Here’s another Google contest for college students who want to assist local businesses about online marketing. It’s called the Online Marketing Challenge.

Here are some details for the Online Marketing Challenge:

• It was developed with college professors around the world
• Students get $200 worth of free advertising dollars to spend on a campaign
• Groups of students find local businesses to run an internet marketing strategy
• Starts in February 2008 and participants run the campaign on a three week timeframe

If you teach a college course (this makes me want to actually) this is a great way to give students practical experience on Google’s dime. The contest winners get a trip to the Googleplex and get to meet the developers of Google AdWords. Probably some swag too. No cash, but a bit of fun.

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All the latest news, videos and blog posts from the campaign trail will be there in your iGoogle page for you to keep track of all the latest US election news. You can even read articles about your favorite candidate, and then toggle between YouTube video news, mainstream news via Google News, blog coverage, and a Google Maps tab.

Some portion of the information on the gadget will be taken from Slate.com.

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At this point in the year, I’m more in the mood for a Santa tracker than American politics.  Still, choosing someone to run our country for four years is an undeniably important process, so it’s good to see Google paying some attention to the issue.

“[S]tay up-to-date on the latest campaign maps, news, videos and blog posts from the election trail,” encouraged Brittany Bohnet on the Google LatLong Blog.  “Add the gadget to your iGoogle homepage to follow the race.  You can choose the candidates you want to follow, or keep tabs on them all.”

Also, “Make sure to check out the maps tab of this gadget to view candidate event trails.  Try searching for your own city or state to see which presidential hopeful will be campaigning near you!”

Expect to see a lot more stuff like this coming from Google – it had an absolute overload of tools related to the Australia’s recent elections, and the company is, of course, based in the U.S.  Also, Bohnet’s title provides a clue; she probably wouldn’t be the Elections Project Manager if one gadget was the end of things.

This is neither; although we didn’t know it was going to happen, it’s actually quite logical that the Google Talk Gadget would gain support for 19 more languages.

Google puts the number at 20, yet I’m standing by my belief that “English (UK)” really isn’t all that different from what we Americans speak. 

The true 19 languages, then, are Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, and Vietnamese.

If you want to use the Google Talk Gadget in one of these languages (or just want to see what it looks like), the company’s own Katya Rogers provided instructions on the Google Talkabout blog. 

“To access the Google Talk Gadget in your language, go to the Google Talk homepage, select your language in the drop-down menu in the top right, and click on the ‘launch Google Talk Gadget’ link,” she wrote.

Rogers then continued, “Or you can simply add the Google Talk gadget to your iGoogle home page.”  This also makes sense, as product integration seems to be an area in which Google’s trying to get ahead.

While Google’s RE<C announcement was frankly astonishing, sometimes it’s nice not to be surprised; the development related to the Google Talk Gadget, though far from groundbreaking, neatly proves this point.

Gadgets are now shown in more of a search result style, along with snippets and such, as opposed to the former plain thumbnails grid*. This also gives more room to instantly show the author information, which is linked to a revamped author page.

Author pages are now bundling all gadgets identified by one email address, as provided in the module XML author info. If you have different gadget categories, you might be able to separate them via email addresses like john.doe+triviagadgets@gmail.com, john.doe+newsgadgets@gmail.com and so on (the plus operator is supported by Gmail and will still send all messages to the same account, where you can then handle them using Gmail’s filter options).

The search functionality is also still available, and you can mix and match sorting (hottest, most users, or newest) with categories (like all, news, tools, lifestyle). Adding a gadget has become easier than before, because when you click the “Add it now” button there will be no additional security warning to approve anymore… the gadget will be instantly added.

The only thing that seems to be missing on the new homepage is the quite crucial former “Add by URL” link to add a gadget of which you know the URL, but which isn’t yet indexed in the directory (though you can still use the official developer gadget to add by URL; and if the URL is indexed with the iGoogle directory, you can also retrieve the module by searching for the URL).

*A bit more like our old Google Modules.com actually.

[Thanks CHW!]

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 This Gadget, MyFacebook, shows you if you have new messages in your inbox, pokes, pending friend requests, lets you see your friends albums, friend lists and events in a popout, shows your status and a scrolling display of your friends’ statuses, and even lets you update your status right from the Gadget.

Getting it to work is tricky. After you’ve installed the Gadget, click the Facebook logo to login to your Facebook account. You’ll get a prompt to authenticate the Gadget, and entering your username and password should launch Internet Explorer. If it doesn’t work, you’ll need to open Internet Explorer (not your default browser, it has to be IE) and add https://login.facebook.com, http://login.facebook.com and https://facebook.com to your trusted sites list. To do so, click Tools>Internet Options, the Security tab, click Trusted Sites, then Sites, then add the sites. Start with the first site, then if it doesn’t work, add the next, and so on, until you can log in.

After you’ve logged in the Gadget, click its settings icon and add the feeds it requests. Do not select the option to show your friends’ albums, because it really does take forever to load. You can have multiple instances of this Gadget, so you can keep tabs on more than one Facebook account at the same time, as you can see in my screenshot.

There’s a lot going on in this Gadget, so take the time to figure it all out. It’s worth it. It may have some flaws, but this Gadget is already one of the best I’ve installed, and I’ve installed hundreds. Check out the Gadget page on Facebook to discuss with other users, and go to the Gadget author’s blog for more information and answers to your questions.

Conclusions and insights from this should obviously be taken with a pinch of salt as this is a pretty homogeneous group, but some of the answers to Guy’s questions were stunning to me, and I consider myself extremely savvy.
 

You can see the entire Veotag video here, which has the wonderful feature of bookmarking different parts of the video with hyper links (which I have done in the bullet points).

• In this panel of 6 people 2 of them (girls) send over 4000 text messages in a month
• Very few of them watched more than a couple of hours of TV a week and all of it was tivo’d so all ads were skipped
• Almost all of them subscribed to or at least read wired
• Almost all of them are on Verizon
• When asked what gadget or service they would want they almost all wanted a converged mobile device that held everything all their content, music, video, and acted as a billing device so they could buy stuff
• All of them were on myspace or facebook (no surprise there)
• None of them knew what RSS was
• Non of them wrote a blog but most read them
• Only one of them knew what a wiki was but they all used wikipedia

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Sometimes the ways of Google are unfathomable.

The Gadget Ads bring interactivity to the ad unit. It’s a website within a website, as Google demonstrated in its collection of success stories. The Gadget Ads created for the Angelina Jolie film, “A Mighty Heart,” and the Honda Civic Tour featuring videos from Fall Out Boy, stand out.

Viewers can embed these gadgets to their iGoogle homepages. The expansion of Gadget Ads will see them populate ad units on the AdSense content network, “and on any other ad network that uses Doubleclick’s DART solution,” according to the product’s FAQ.

Though our source could not comment on DoubleClick at all, an odd position considering that note about placement appears as an AdWords answer, we did learn that the focus of these technically demanding ad units will be the Fortune 1000. It’s a sensible idea, as the richness of the Gadget Ads medium requires more effort and resources than other units.

Successful brand names probably have the best opportunities to pull off a compelling Gadget Ad. Very few are going to sponsor music tours or get Angelina to sign on to a project, not that those are necessary to create such an ad.

Our contact said Google will work to expand the program, currently in beta, to all advertisers as soon as possible. We asked about how Google plans to measure the success of Gadget Ads, a question which our source deflected.

“Gadget ads are a natural step in the ongoing evolution of online advertising,” said our source. “As users engage with these new interactive ads, advertisers are not able to reach target audiences but connect with users in a engaging way. We measure success by how users respond to these Gadget Ads.”

Advertisers will certainly have the ability to measure success. A list of interactions with a Gadget Ad gives the advertiser the opportunity to quantify actions taken with the ads by viewers.

Developers can use whatever tools they prefer to construct a Gadget Ad, as they are in many cases creating a micro-site for the format. Such ads can incorporate HTML, but developers should want to take advantage of the interactivity available by using Flash or JavaScript elements as well.

Marketers will have the option to set targeting and pricing options, as they do with other ad choices. That will let them balance their budgets with the desired reach of a Gadget Ad campaign.

Gadgets have been one of Google’s many bright spots, our source said, with over 14,000 gadgets available as part of a growing trend toward adopting them. If used effectively, Gadget Ads should help Google achieve its stated aim of providing useful and relevant advertising to its viewers.

Senate Prepares Grill For Google

Google will find out if the $580,000 spent on lobbying this year, and the addition of in-house lobbyists to complement the firms they employ in Washington, will have yielded a good return on investment.

The Washington Wire blog at the Wall Street Journal said Google will face the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights on September 27th for a 2 pm examination of the merger.

Washington Wire blogger John R. Wilke expects Microsoft and Yahoo to have participants in attendance to challenge Google’s attendees over the transaction. Microsoft in particular has stridently objected to a deal that could create an online ad monopoly, in their view.

Scott Cleland of Precursor is expected to attend, and present the case for blocking the merger on antitrust grounds. Thomas Lenard, acting president of The Progress & Freedom Foundation, will appear in support of Google’s proposal.

We noticed Google has a little something going on with DoubleClick already, related to their debut of Gadget Ads. One of the help questions related to the new product noted that Gadget Ads will run on DoubleClick’s DART network as well as sites participating in Google AdSense.

A Google spokesperson contacted for additional details about Gadget Ads could not comment further on DoubleClick’s role in participating with the new service.

We’re betting the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee won’t appreciate ‘no’ for an answer next week.