The Google App Engine currently supports Python, but now Google employee and creator of blogging community LiveJournal Brad Fitzpatrick posts this bit: <<I'm happy to announce that the Google App Engine team has given me permission to talk about a 20% project inside Google to to add Perl support to App Engine. To be clear: I'm not a member of the App Engine team and the App Engine team is not promising to add Perl support.

Google Maps walking directions had been spotted by some users before, and now they're being rolled out for everyone, as Search Engine Roundtable reports. Try this directions search in New York , for instance, and you'll see the "Walking" link on top activated )though this isn't just restricted to US locations, as a test search in Germany showed(. Google has the following disclaimer following their "beta" notice: "Use caution when walking in unfamiliar areas.

You can emulate selection boxes using HTML layers, but you may also want to provide a traditional HTML form selection box using the <select> element. If you do so, how can you spice up that form element anyway? There's a couple of things you can do. The <optgroup> element groups together and labels as set of items. A style applied to an <option> can add colors. And then there's some nice Unicode symbols, like stars )★( or checkmarks )✓(,

Pixelisation in the forum and Ionut at the Google Operating System blog mentioned the Google Docs documents editor now has a full-screen mode )not to be confused with the older full-width page view(. You'll find it in the menu View -> Full-screen mode , and hitting escape switches back to the default view. Does anyone know how to bookmark a Google Docs document so that it always opens in full-screen mode though?

Google announced they're aquiring Russian ads service ZAO Begun from Rambler Media for $140 million. [Thanks Pavel !] [By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Google Acquiring Begun | Comments ] [Advertisement] Want to advertise here? Your ad will show in the blog and feed.

RedWine.com, one of those ads-only websites potentially profiting through Google. Google pays domain parkers by allowing them to run a special AdSense program. Titled " Google AdSense for domains ", this program now reportedly triggered a class-action lawsuit which alleges "that Google committed fraud, business code violations, and unjust enrichment by selling ads that were unlikely to generate conversions".

Google released a layout templates directory for Google Docs *, the application suite consisting of Google Documents, Spreadsheets and Presentations )Google's kind of web-based light-weight Word, Excel and PowerPoint(. You can sort templates by target application, like Spreadsheets, or by category, like "Resumes" or "Personal Finance". Then you can look at a preview and if you like a style, hit the "Use this template" button to fill it with your own content.

Here's something that made the frontpage of popular social news site Reddit.com yesterday... a submission titled "A 15 year old from South Wales used his new Visa debit card to order cigarettes, alcohol )etc.( ", pointing to a page at money.co.uk allegedly from July 15th, 2008, by author Charlotte Cardingham. This sounds oddly familiar to the last "hoax news to attract backlinks" story. However,

The Vacationeers released sequel videos to what they call The Googling , dealing with existing Google services gone "different": Part II: Google Moon Part III: Google My Maps Part IV: Google SMS Google Maps is their original older clip, in case you haven't seen it yet. And as it's supposed to be a five-part series, there may still be one clip coming. [Via Google Operating System . Image by vacationeers.] [By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Google Maps Predicts the Future,

Google released a well-working iGoogle gadget in which they extract text information from video content. The Elections Video Search gadget - its standalone page can be accessed as well - lets you search for keywords across YouTube's US politician channels, like Barack Obama's. Clicking on a result item will load the video in question into the player embedded in the widget, with the specific occurrences of the word in the video color-marked on the timeline.

The Wall Street Journal writes: <<Google Inc. and Viacom Inc. have agreed to allow Google to anonymize YouTube visitor data before complying with a judge's order to deliver the data to Viacom as part of a broader copyright lawsuit. Google-owned YouTube announced late Monday night that the parties had agreed to allow it to substitute actual user and visitor IDs and internet protocol addresses with other unique values to help protect user privacy.

The JavaScripted SWFObject is a popular way to include Flash files. Recently, Google announced better support for crawling Flash files, and in an update they added to their original post , they now also say: <<For our July 1st launch, we didn't enable Flash indexing for Flash files embedded via SWFObject. We're now rolling out an update that enables support for common JavaScript techniques for embedding Flash, including SWFObject and SWFObject2.>> On another note,

Radiohead teamed up with Google to show their music video for the song "House of Cards," visualized using 3D data. Google also offers an interactive app to let you see this data )it may take some time to load but once it's done, you can play the video and pan & zoom at the same time(, a Making Of, and a download of the points data as Comma Separated Values file. [Thanks Pixelisation!] [By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Radiohead and Google Partnering to Showcase 3 .

On this page , grab the image to the right and slowy drag it over the other stripes layer below it... [Image by Rufus Butler Seder.] [By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Stripes )Interactive Picture( | Comments ] [Advertisement] Google books at eBay : background info on Google, AdWords, AdSense, Blogger and more.

The graphics in Google's 3D chat world Lively shine, but behind the scenes the Lively team also seems busy squashing many early-release bugs. And since some days, Lively got its first social phenomenon, too: the almost meme-like creation of cyber sex rooms. Not that there's anything wrong with that, or is there? To see what Google thinks let's ask Lively's community guidelines , which state: <<We don't allow nudity, graphic sex acts, or sexually explicit material.

[Ad campaign by Newell-Emmett agency, from the Taschen book "A History of Advertisement".] [By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Passive Smokers,

Odd. Google Trends' "Hot Trends" feature, an aggregated overview of recently popular search queries, shows a swastika today in one of the top spots. A swastika has been used as a symbol for different purposes in the past , like in Hinduism and Buddhism, but it was also used by the Nazi party. Could this possibly be some kind of defacement group-effort )or scripting(, trying to sneak a Unicode character into Google trends? After all,

Ionut of the Google Operating System blog has screenshots of a Google News design experiment , apparently showing to a portion of users )I can't see it, can you?(. On the frontpage )of at least the science/ tech section(, there are now a couple of more visual modules, like a "featured photo" section.

Here is list of questions with tips and tricks for Google's 3D chat world , Lively . If you have a question that's not answered here please ask in the comments, and if you have a tip, please post it too )this page will be updated as new information comes in(. What's Google Lively? Lively )apparently code named Fiji and Google Rooms, and previously nicknamed Google Metaverse by some outside Google( is a three-dimensional chat world by Google.

Have a look... . [By Yorit . Via Andy .] [By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Google Images in the Real World )Pic( | Comments ] [Advertisement] Google books at eBay : background info on Google, AdWords, AdSense, Blogger and more.