During the past couple months, the Knol team has been steadily adding improved tools to help you create better knols. Most notably, we've greatly expanded the number of embeddable objects to help you make your knols more graphical and interactive. We've been excited by the many uses we're seeing, and today we have one more to add to the list: PicApp.

Nice feature, looks like the knol site becomes more and more a community site like "hub pages".
I'm wondering if you write a copy for Knol, using their images, if republishing an article including images is legal.

At the end knol needs some more visitors, for sure...

Google Toolbar 6.4 for IE and Firefox adds a feature that lets you share web pages using social networking sites, mail services, bookmarking services and other sites. You can select your favorite services from the settings page or repeatedly click on one of the options to bring it to the top of the menu.

If you share links using Twitter, you'll notice a new URL shortening service: goo.gl. "Google URL Shortener at goo.gl is a service that takes long URLs and squeezes them into fewer characters to make a link that is easier to share, tweet, or email to friends. The core goals of this service are: stability, security and speed." The service is only used by Google Toolbar and FeedBurner, so there's no web interface or API for goo.gl.

Nice tool to share websites, after years Google has re-invented the wheel, hehe

I like to see more from the new URL shortener goo.gl, sad enough the service doesn't work from the toolbar right now

The web has been awash with rumors about Google Gears for the past week or two. It appears Google has quietly dropped development of the system.

I'm getting errors on my Ubuntu laptop since weeks!
The error is about that my Linux version is not compatible with current version of Gears. Firefox show a menu item called "Gears Settings", but nothing happens if you click that option.

Looks like it's over with Gears...

Google Chrome for Linux (Beta)
At Google, most engineers use Linux machines, so we certainly heard loud and clear how much they wanted Google Chrome for Linux. Just like Google Chrome for Windows and Mac, we focused on speed, stability and security, but we also wanted a high-performance browser that integrated well with the Linux ecosystem. This includes tight integration with native GTK themes, updates that are managed by the standard system package manager, and many other features that fit in natively with the operating system where possible.

Google Chrome for Linux in various GTK themes

WOW this new Chrome beta for Linux is so fast on my Ubuntu Laptop.
If some more extensions are available, its bye bye Firefox :D

One of the great things about working at Google is that we get to take advantage of an enormous amount of computing power to do some really cool things. One idea we tried out was to let webmasters know about their potentially hackable websites. The initial effort was successful enough that we thought we would take it one step further by expanding our efforts to cover other types of web applications—for example, more content management systems (CMSs), forum/bulletin-board applications, stat-trackers, and so on.

This time, however, our goal is not just to isolate vulnerable or hackable software packages, but to also notify webmasters about newer versions of the software packages or plugins they're running on their website. For example, there might be a Drupal module or Joomla extension update available but some folks might not have upgraded. There are a few reasons a webmaster might not upgrade to the newer version and one of the reasons could be that they just don't know a new version exists. This is where we think we can help. We hope to let webmasters know about new versions of their software by sending them a message via Webmaster Tools. This way they can make an informed decision about whether or not they would like to upgrade.

This will be a great feature: If you have many websites, you can't check them frequently if there are patches for all the plugins or modules.

I noticed the last weeks that Google doesn’t index all my Posterous pages and that while I point my blog Prime Blogger to a .com domain name. My first idea was a missing Google Sitemap. I tried before to add my Posterous site to my Google Webmaster Tools account, but this requires a custom meta tag on your homepage or you need to upload a unique file to your site to proof the ownership. I suggested a function for a Google Sitemap to Brett from Posterous  and he gave me the hint that I’m able to change the HTML using a custom theme and yes this is key to get your site accepted in your Google Webmaster Tools account.

Submit your XML of last 20 Posterous Blogs as a sitemap to your Google Webmaster Tools account. The article explains how proof you Posterous site ownership.

Gadgets are allowed but there is no function for YouTube videos

As I said before, its possible to add gadgets to your Wave. Add Google maps, simple polls and many gadgets from the google gadget gallery. Since Google Wave is in an early state, not every 3rd party gadget works and adding gadgets is limited. The first thing I noticed is that there is no standard function to add YouTube videos to your Wave. We (finalwebsites.com) created a small YouTube Gadget Generator to create your custom YouTube Video object. Using this generator it’s possible to create a gadget from every YouTube Video URL.

Place YouTube Videos on your Google Wave pages. Not yet a member of Google Wave? They offer 10 invites for Gwave.

The new coalition, set up with Merkel’s Christian Democrats and the Free Democratic Party says “The Internet cannot be a copyright-free zone,” in a document describing its policies. If the policies are made actual publishers could be able to claim royalties for their content. Which would mean Google would have to pay them.

The proposal is supported by publishers like Axel Springer and Hubert Burda Media. On the other hand German bloggers oppose. They believe this is only good for publishers and that it runs against the spirit of openness that characterizes the internet.

yeah right try to stop the Internet Angie!

Maybe the German Internet need some treatment as China (Google gonna filter copyrighted content).

I'm from Germany and I live in the Netherlands, surfing German sites is very strange because the "German" Internet has so many pages as other countries 5-10 years ago. Germany will have big problems in a few years if the run after the Internet facts (like they did for early computer technology)

John Resig lists reasons why Google Groups is losing the battle against spam. Google Groups is dead, John argues saying the primary problem with the service “boils down to a systemic failure to contain and manage spam. Only a bottom-up overhaul of the Google Groups system would be able to fix the problems that every Google Group faces.” Here’s one problem John lists, and I recently experienced this myself (posting the same message multiple times after it failed to show up):

It's very sad, because of all the spam (even send by group owners) Google groups is often recognized as spam in google mail. If we talk about groups moderated by google, there is a lot of posted spam and the same for blog comments.

I'm just wondering why Google has not a better solution for this (google know so much about us). Maybe Google should use akismet or other IP / email blacklists?

We're convinced that structured data makes the web better, and we've worked hard to expand Rich Snippets to more search results and collect your feedback along the way. If you have review or people/social networking content on your site, it's easier than ever to mark up your content using microformats or RDFa so that Google can better understand it to generate useful Rich Snippets. Here are a few helpful improvements on our end to enable you to mark up your content:

Testing tool. See what Google is able to extract, and preview how microformats or RDFa marked-up pages would look on Google search results. Test your URLs on the Rich Snippets Testing Tool.

Google Custom Search users can also use the Rich Snippets Testing Tool to test markup usable in their Custom Search engine.

This is a nice tool, next I like to see a tool that will replace old/wrong "snippets" much faster. If you see that your result has a bad CTR, you like to test better snippets or titles and currently it takes a lot of time until your website modifications are updated here.