- Uploading to Google Video
– Google Notebook
– Jaiku
– Google Catalog Search
– Mashup Editor
– Dodgeball

Now, some notes on each.

The Google Video Team is now encouraging users to upload their videos to either YouTube or Picasa, both of which are owned by Google of course. Uploading will still be available for a few months. They won’t be removing any content that is already there.

The Google Notebook team is encouraging users to try other Google Products with notebook-like functionality like SearchWiki,Google Docs, Tasks in Gmail, and Google Bookmarks. And they claim to have plenty of new ideas for these services.

Jaiku is shutting down before it ever really got going. It is a Twitter-like service that never left invite-only status. According to Read Write Web, "Google will release the Jaiku code under the open source Apache license, so that other organizations can pick up where the Google team left off. It is not clear if current users will be able to transfer their accounts."

Google Catalog Search just wasn’t popular enough to keep around, but the Book Search Team leaves it behind with fond memories. "Catalogs helped us better understand and refine the technology we use today to scan and make the full text of books available online," says Product Manager Punit Soni. "We also learned more about how users read scanned documents online, and how to best present this type of information to them."

Mashup Editor is another one that never really got off the ground. It is still only available in limited testing. Google encourages users to instead use the Google App Engine.

Dodgeball is a mobile social networking service. It will be shut down in the next couple months. Google says they will communicate the exact timeframe shortly.

A post on the Official Google Blog talks about the company consolidating some engineering offices, by shutting down Austin, Texas; Trondheim, Norway; and Lulea, Sweden locations, though they say they intend to keep as many of the employees as possible, and just have them move to other locations.

"Our long-term goal is not to trim the number of people we have working on engineering projects or reduce our global presence, but create a smaller number of more effective engineering sites, which will ensure that innovation and speed remain at our core," says Google Senior Vice President, Engineering and Research Alan Eustace.

Google also announced that they are trimming some recruiting jobs – about 100 of them. "Our first step to address this was to wind down almost all our contracts with external contractors and vendors providing recruiting services for Google. However, after much consideration, we have with great regret decided that we need to go further and reduce the overall size of our recruiting organization by approximately 100 positions," says Google’s Vice President of People Operations, Laszlo Bock.

Big changes through Google’s organization today indeed. As far as the services being shut down, I can’t say that I will particularly miss any of them, as I haven’t thrown them much use anyway. Will you miss any of these services?

The Google Labs project called Notebook delivered a compelling way to keep track of things observed online. Browser extensions for Firefox and Internet Explorer open a small window where content can be added and shared online.

Notebooks can be set to private, but that would not be very much fun for us. For those public notebooks, Google has set up a Notebook search that queries through them just like a typical Google search.

Without knowing how many Notebooks have been set to private, it isn’t possible to tell just how greatly the market has embraced the service. If you go by public Notebooks, it looks like the service has not reached anything near the critical mass of Google search.

But it is a resource and resources are always worth a look to see what others have noted as interesting. Those items could contain a useful nugget of information that may not turn up in other searches. There’s also the usual curiosity factor involved.

Under a query for search engine marketing, 271 results come back. Some users have created Notebooks as collections of articles about SEM, while others made Notebooks about themselves.

Sometimes a result brings back a familiar name. Aaron Wall’s Notebook has references to his SEObook.com and Threadwatch sites, as well as interests in Seth Godin’s marketing ideas and Noam Chomsky’s politics.

The query for search engine optimization brings back about half the results of the SEM query, with many of the same results repeated there.

Searching for marketing delivered more results, including one public Notebook that collected a number of innovative advertising approaches appearing on multiple blogs into one Notebook.

More general queries into currently popular topics, like the PS3 and Nintendo Wii gaming consoles, only returned a few dozen responses each. Scanning a few of those entries did not show anything posted after each console launched.

As useful as Google Notebook can be, it may have been a too-late entry to a market where social bookmarking solutions like Delicious and a slew of others, with features like user comments, sharing, and tagging dominate the scene.

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What can you expect from the service?

* Clip useful information.

You can add clippings of text, images and links from web pages to your Google Notebook without ever leaving your browser window.

* Organize your notes.

You can create multiple notebooks, divide them into sections, and drag-and-drop your notes to stay organized.

* Get access from anywhere.

You can access your Google Notebooks from any computer by using your Google Accounts login.

* Publish your notebook.

You can share your Google Notebook with the world by making it public.

Via ZDNet.

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Andy Beal is an internet marketing consultant and considered one of the world’s most respected and interactive search engine marketing experts. Andy has worked with many Fortune 1000 companies such as Motorola, CitiFinancial, Lowes, Alaska Air, DeWALT, NBC and Experian.

You can read his internet marketing blog at Marketing Pilgrim and reach him at andy.beal@gmail.com.

Taking Notes With Google Notebook

… Google Notebook to their browsers; users must have a Google Account to use it. Notebook installs as an extension to Firefox, and after a restart of the browser becomes available to use. Notebook is also available to users of Internet Explorer 6.

After installing the Notebook, a link at the bottom of the browser window, Open Notebook, launches the application. By selecting text on a web page and clicking the Add Note button in Notebook, the text copies into it.

Once copied, the text can be edited, and formatted into boldface or italics. The Notebook shows the link and the URL where the text for each entry originated. Images may be added to the Notebook by right-clicking on one and selecting “Note this” from the menu.

Users can minimize the Notebook while browsing. Maximizing the Notebook sends the user to the Notebook web page, where all of the entries made in the Notebook may be viewed.

Multiple Notebooks may be created, and they can each be tweaked by adding section headings to help organize the information. The service supports dragging and dropping the notes into or out of those sections as desired.

Like events in Google Calendar, Notebooks can be published and made public or kept private. Once made public, other users can search for them from the Google.com/notebook page. Notebooks can be set back to private if desired.

People who enjoy collecting bits and pieces into lists will like Notebook. The functionality lets users create, organize, and reorganize the information in a Notebook as needed. In a FAQ for the service, Google lists the features available.

Also, Google has an unmoderated group established for Notebook, where some users have already suggested some desired features, like more limited sharing options instead of just public or private, or the addition of labels like those used in Gmail to help find clippings posted in multiple notebooks.

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Notebook looks like it is designed to be a flat out del.icio.us competitor, allowing you to gather content from around the web, add metadata like categories and, if you like, publish the information.

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Andy Beal is an internet marketing consultant and considered one of the world’s most respected and interactive search engine marketing experts. Andy has worked with many Fortune 1000 companies such as Motorola, CitiFinancial, Lowes, Alaska Air, DeWALT, NBC and Experian.

You can read his internet marketing blog at Marketing Pilgrim and reach him at andy.beal@gmail.com.

Our managing editor Mike McDonald took in the chicken parmigiana and Grape Crush during Google’s Press Day, and found that Google wants everyone to know they haven’t taken their eye off of what brought them into global prominence and everyday vocabulary.

“Yes, we are still all about search,” Marissa Mayer, Vice President of Search Products and User Experience, titled her Google Blog entry, which echoed her comments from today. At the media event, Google unveiled an updated Desktop and three new products.

The Google Notebook will be available next week, but when it arrives, Mike said users will find it works as a browsing assistant. Users will be able to take notes with it as they search, and copy text and images to the Notebook.

“We want people to be able to take the expertise they have and contribute it directly to Google,” Mayer said when introducing Google Co-op. The wildly rumored Google Health appears, for now, to be an offshoot of Co-Op.

In the Co-op beta, users will be able to contribute knowledge and expertise about topic areas like health, electronics, travel destinations, and automobiles. “We can have users offer their own annotations to URLs,” said Mayer, in reference to the feature that permits users to label relevant pages.

Part of that social media construct lets users create specialized links of labeled content to which other users can subscribe. Then, the provider’s labels and subscribed links are added to the user’s search results for relevant queries, Google said.

Google kicked off Co-op in English-language countries, worked with partners to annotate travel and health links, and created dozens of specialized links to content like restaurant and movie information.

The Google Labs team debuted Google Trends. “For the first time ever, Google is making it possible to sift through billions of search queries from around the world to see what people are thinking about,” said Mayer.

Trends will work similar to Zeitgeist, and will allow users to “observe the collective interests of all Google users to gain general insight into topics,” according to Google. “Google Trends aims to provide insights into broad search patterns. It is based upon just a portion of our searches, and several approximations are used when computing your results.”

Google Desktop Beta received an update to version 4. Also, Google announced the arrival of Google Gadgets. Google also made a software development kit available for Desktop 4.

“Gadgets are drag and drop applications/enhancements that work within the Google Desktop environment,” said Mike. “Google Gadgets are similar to the Google personalized start page. Gadgets are little apps you can add to your Google Desktop, for example a calendar, maps, weather info, etc.”

Once installed, Google Desktop asks if the user would like it to build a personalized home page as well. For users who work on different machines, the Gadgets synchronize between them. “It really makes your computer easier, more interesting and more fun,” said Mayer.

Mayer commented on all of the products on the Google Blog, too. “Our new products offer a pretty wide range of services and capabilities, but they have one thing in common: They all enhance and improve the search experience for our users.”

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