Google Docs has received a lot of attention lately, most of which was focused on its miniscule market share.  Google would like to address that issue, and as the holiday season approaches, it’s doing so by unveiling some new templates.

If you use Google Docs, you might be pleased to know that Google is now offering templates for forms. And to start off they’ve got 13 different ones to choose from.

If you are not familiar with templates in Google Docs, to utilize them, you go to New and select from template from the pull-down menu.

Google Docs has been the subject of some not-great press over the past week or so; a ClickStream study, in particular, suggested that the productivity offering has been ignored by a lot of people.  But Matt Cutts has stepped forward with some new statistics, and it seems that the market share of Google Docs may not be quite so slim, after all.

Have you ever been involved with a petition using Google Docs? If so Google wants to know about it. Right now, they’re highlighting one in particular that is calling for the next President (which we now know will be Barack Obama) to plant an organic farm on the grounds of the White House.

The petition comes from Daniel Bowman Simon and Casey Gustowarow who ride around the country in a double-decker bus made out of two school buses that have been fused together. On top of the bus is a garden.

Google (specifically Google Docs) has teamed up with the National Writing Project to sponsor a program that lets students around the U.S. write letters to the presidential candidates in a program appropriately titled: Letters to the Next President: Writing Our Future.

Yesterday Google guaranteed 99.9% reliability for Google Apps like Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites, and Google Talk. This stemmed from a similar guarantee the company made for Gmail.

Today Google is touting the reliability of Gmail, and comparing the service to several "on-premises" solutions in terms of downtime and lost productivity. In a post on the Official Google Blog, Google Enterprise Product Director Matthew Glotzbach writes:

Google is continuing on its roll of cranking out new features for Gmail. This time, it is a few projects from Gmail Labs that let you add gadgets to Gmail. So far, you can add the Google Calendar and Docs gadgets.

The Google Docs crew made their first stop on its "Apps to School" tour, on which they stop at colleges across the U.S. and hang out with students, show off how they can use Google Docs for their class assignments, and see how studnets are already using it.  They hung with some students at the University of Southern California. They also announced some new features that should help students do just that.

Isn’t it always fun stumbling across some new feature to enhance your overall Google Experience?

Just the little things that can add so much convenience to your daily web use like the definition or movies web search features.

For whatever reason(s), Google Docs hasn’t really caught on in offices.  So, in what appears to be a Plan B, the company is attempting to show how the application can be useful in people’s off-the-clock lives.

Google Docs is growing stronger – so much so that I at first thought Hitwise’s assessment was another April Fool’s joke.  But visits to the Google Docs site have indeed more than doubled in the last year.

If you’re a creature of habit, sorry.  But if you’re either someone who appreciates efficiency or a complete newcomer to Google Docs, you may be happy to hear that application has had its menus redesigned.

Back in October, we shared news that Google Calendar was requesting permission to use Google Gears to provide offline access. We’re still waiting on that.

Now it appears Google Blogoscoped is seeing something similar with Google Docs.

Currently, my editor Brian Jepson and I are collaboratively writing the book (tentatively titled) Google Office Hacks by O’Reilly using Google Docs.

I wanted to outline the process we came up with, and maybe it’s helpful for you too for certain needs.

Google Docs Mobile went live now, after traces of it were spotted a month ago. It’s a minimalist reformatting of the “Google Office suite" for cellphone display.

Piece o’ news number one: Google intends to make Encyclopedia Britannica, as well as Merriam-Webster’s dictionary and thesaurus, available in Google Docs.  Piece o’ news number two: if you don’t feel like waiting on the Mountain View-based company, you can access those same resources right now.

The updated Google Docs & Spreadsheets offers folders for organizing documents, along with a few new enhancements.