Posted by Karen Wickre, Google Blog teamIt's that time again, the end of a year - time to tote up Google's blogging activity for the last 365 days. First, a few bits of data about this particular blog:
- Number of posts this year: 300
- New product announcements: 15 (not counting our April 1 release)
- News about upgrades and additions to products: 87
- Announcing products in more languages and countries: 30
- Acquisitions: 12
- Unique visitors: 6,738,830 (for 8,655,830 visits)
- Languages: 511 (preferred language configured on computers)
- Top non-Google referrers: Yahoo, Digg, Slashdot, Fark
Beyond these basics, this year saw many more posts on privacy (9),
accessibility (10), and
energy and the environment (11). We blogged a good deal about Google's
people and culture, our various offices around the world, and the pastimes and passions of Googlers (26, including 2
recipes). We talked about
healthcare issues that challenge consumers (5). There were competitions including Google Code Jam and events for developers, educators and others (29). Through YouTube, there has been much
political activity (7) in the U.S. as well as in
Australia.
The posts that elicited the most reaction in terms of views and linkbacks include:
- the much-discussed
"Gphone" news
- our thinking about the upcoming
FCC spectrum auction- what the
OpenSocial APIs could mean
- how a
black screen might not save energy
- announcing the
Knol test project- building
your own Google homepageOf course, there's more than business to write about. We celebrated
National Gorilla Suit Day,
deconstructed the Valentine's Day doodle, and then
a snake went missing.
As for the Google family of blogs, there's been lots of growth this year:
42 new ones launched, for a total to 83 active company blogs. Increasingly, Googlers want to quickly and regularly convey product news and updates to various constituents, and blogs are a great way to do that. Among the most popular of this newest crop are the
Gmail blog (nearly 1.5 million unique visitors), the Orkut blogs (in
English - 3.5 million uniques; and
Portuguese - 8.8 million), and
Google Lat Long, with 824,000 unique visitors, which covers everything geographical. In addition, readers can now turn to new product blogs including those for
Google Finance,
Google News, and
Mobile. Reflecting keen interest in activity outside the U.S., the YouTube blog had the greatest number of comments for its
June post about the fact that YouTube is available in 9 more countries, followed by the August post
announcing InVideo ads.
On the ads side: there are now 6 more non-English blogs for AdSense publishers (
French,
Turkish,
Japanese,
Korean,
Italian,
Chinese). The AdWords team opened blogs for
Brasil and the
Netherlands, Japan now has
its own Analytics blog, and there are now
German and
Chinese versions of the popular
Webmaster Central. (The most popular ads-related blog is the one for
Analytics, with nearly half a million unique visitors, followed by closely
Inside AdSense and then
Inside AdWords.)
To keep current and share their work, developers got a raft of new blogs, too, including those focused on APIs for
YouTube,
Checkout,
Gears,
Mashup, and
Gadgets. Needless to say, there are now also blogs for
Android and
OpenSocial.
Two new country blogs, for the
Czech Republic and
Australia, went public, to talk about all things Google in their regions. Yet more readers congregated around the new
Public Policy and
Google.org blogs, as well as one dedicated to
online security and malware.
Despite all this activity, and the fact that a growing number of companies also host corporate blogs, the
Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki (a collaborative project begun by
Wired Magazine and SocialText) indicates that even today, just 46 of the Fortune 500 companies (about 9%), have active public blogs produced by company employees that focus on the company and its products. Let's hope in 2008 that number goes up. We think such blogs can serve users, journalists, critics, investors, and fans more effectively and directly than more traditional approaches. Apparently, so do 41,395,926 people around the world - the number of visitors to all of our blogs this year.
If you're like me, you probably get unwanted mobile phone calls often from people who accidentally but habitually dial the wrong number. You can ask your carrier to block the repeated offenders, but that option is not supported by all carriers. The Baby Toolkit blog has an alternative that may be just as good. For people who repeatedly call the wrong number, create a contact called "Wrong Number" and set your phone to silent. That way, you can save your cell phone minutes and avoid being distracted when you get a call that isn't intended for you anyway. 
Flickr's a great place to share your digital photos, but if you're concerned about others stealing your best work without crediting you, you might want to try watermarking your images. Webapp PicMarkr watermarks any selected Flickr pic or any image you upload from your desktop quickly and relatively painlessly, then lets you choose between uploading the results to Flickr or saving them to your computer. You'll have to authorize the app with Flickr, and once you do you can browse Flickr sets, select pics to watermark, and choose from several different watermarking methods. Once you're finished, you can upload the watermarked image to your Flickr account or save it to your computer. PicMarkr is a nice idea, but it'd make a lot more sense to see something like this integrated into 
Got a new MP3 player and decided it's time to gussy up your music library with high quality album art? Web site AlbumArt offers lightning fast search results for CD and DVD cover art for an impressively wide range of artists and albums. A lot of the art appears to come from Amazon, but good luck finding it as quickly by searching the source. We've actually mentioned AlbumArt 
