Google Calendar opened an API for developers; Scholar received a new feature; and the AdWords team reminded everyone, again, there will be some downtime this weekend.
Yes, it’s time for that old journalistic standby where we take three little stories, combine them into one longer story, and make you the reader think we’re both resourceful, brilliant, and insightful.
Since WebmasterWorld’s PubCon Boston ended this week, the talk of the online community, at least the part that finds the search industry more interesting than 24, has been Google and its amazing financial results.
But we’ve covered those numbers already. Google’s a money magnet and the big dog in search advertising. Been there, done that, got the commemorative t-shirt and ate the commemorative burger. We’re full.
Google has offered a few other noteworthy items this week. In opening an API for Calendar, Google permits client applications to view and update calendar events in the form of GData feeds.
“GData is a new protocol based on Atom 1.0 and RSS 2.0,” according to Google. “GData provides a general model for feeds, queries, and results. You can use it to send queries and updates to any service that has a GData interface.”
That extends where users can receive information beyond the browser. The Calendar would be one place to pick up such content.
Google Scholar added a new feature for researchers. A Google Blog post from Dejan Perkovic has more about that change:
It’s not just a plain sort by date, but rather we try to rank recent papers the way researchers do, by looking at the prominence of the author’s and journal’s previous papers, how many citations it already has, when it was written, and so on. Look for the new link on the upper right for “Recent articles” — or switch to “All articles” for the full list.
Indeed, Scholar does provide some interesting resources in our sample search for “dihydrogen monoxide,” a substance that can be lethal to humans in small quantities and has been blamed for millions of tragedies going back even beyond Biblical times.
And again, the AdWords blog team reminds everyone that they will celebrate Earth Day with a symbolic system outage while they perform some necessary maintenance for a four-hour period, 10am to 2pm PDT.
So please don’t email support during that window and say, “I can’t log in to my account.” That would be evil.
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David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
