Posted by: Tania Bedrax-Weiss, Software Engineer
If you’ve ever wanted to let your users only see content that is free to use and share (such as through Creative Commons), here are a few tips on how to do it. Assuming you’ve indicated the CC license in your pages, you can now specify that you want only content with specific licensing terms to show up in your CSE. We’ve made available four labels for CSE creators to use based on the CC licenses:
- free_use_share (by-nc-nd)
- free_use_share_commercially (by-nd)
- free_use_share_modify (by-nc-sa)
- free_use_share_modify_commercially (by-sa)
You can either use one of these labels as a background label to restrict all of your content to these terms, or you can reference these labels in the facet items section of the CSE specification and they will be exposed to users as additional refinements in your CSE. Note that these are filter labels; you cannot boost according to these labels.
As you generate content, please keep in mind that there are a number of ways Creative Commons licenses may be added to an HTML doc:
- with <rdf:RDF>…</rdf:RDF> in the HTML head or body
- using <meta name=”DC.rights” content=uri of cc license>
- using <a rel=”license” href=uri of cc license>
- using <rdf:RDF>…</rdf:RDF> in a comment
If your documents use any of these methods, we likely already have licensing information. See for example: http://joshua.smcvt.edu/linearalgebra/ that illustrates method number 3:
<a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/"> ...
and also illustrates method number 4:
<!-- <rdf:RDF xmlns="http://web.resource.org/cc/" ... ><License rdf:about="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/">...</License></rdf:RDF> -->
See the file source for the complete text and don’t forget to visit our Webmaster Central for more information.
For me, life moves pretty fast, and with so much stuff going on it’s easy to have things fall through the cracks. The other day I missed an important meeting because I forgot to open up Google Calendar after restarting my browser (don’t tell my manager). Sometimes I just need a little help to stay on top of all the information that breezes by.
Our new experimental release of Google Talk helps solve this problem – it’s called Google Talk, Labs Edition. It has all the features of the Google Talk gadget (but runs outside a browser), plus it adds new desktop notifications that remind you of appointments and alert you the moment messages arrive. There are notifications for Google Calendar appointments, Orkut scraps, Gmail messages, and Talk chats (of course). My favorite part? The snooze feature on Calendar notifications! Now I can put off that reminder for a few extra minutes without worrying about forgetting the meeting.
Give Google Talk, Labs Edition a try and let us know what you think!
Jonathan McPhie
Associate Product Manager
Here at Google, we’re committed to helping build a clean energy future and reducing our carbon footprint. And now Google Talk is part of the solution. We don’t know about you, but we were surprised to learn the inconvenient truth that every character (byte) we send in a message results in about 0.0000000000000000034 metric tons* of CO2 being released into the atmosphere! So if we can reduce the number of characters we send when we chat with all our friends, we can help the environment at the same time.
Teenagers (and some adults) must be aware of this, because they already reduce their character usage by abbreviating words and dropping vowels when they send IM and SMS (text) messages. We think this is a great idea. If all our millions of users started using IM-speak, we’d save hundreds of millions of wasted (and environmentally damaging!) characters.
For example, if we want to say:
As far as I'm concerned, you can give me the twenty dollars you owe me when I see you later.
You could save more than 50% in wasted characters by saying:
AFAIC, U can gve me the 20 $$ YOM whn I CUL8R.
In honor of Earth Day (3 weeks from today: April 22, 2008), on that day our Google Talk servers will start automatically sending your conversations using IM-speak instead of normal words. But you can help save some computing power (and more wasted energy!) by shortening your conversations yourself.
We know you’ll all want to practice your IM-speak, so we’re helping by introducing a new translation bot, en2im@bot.talk.google.com, which will translate your conversations into IM-speak, to help you get used to the new lingo. Add this user to your roster, or use our convenient new chatback feature to start a conversation with the bot by clicking the badge below:
You’ll be doing your part to help the environment. If you get a message with an abbreviation you don’t understand, send just that abbreviation to the bot and it will translate it back. And parents: as a side bonus you’ll finally understand what your kids are saying! Kp on chttng, & CUL8R!
The Google Talk Team
* It takes about 2.5 Watts to power a 1Gb/s link [1]. 2.5 Joules/s / 1Gb/s = 2.5e-9 J/b * 8 b/byte = 2e-8 Joules/byte. The average emissions cost of electricity in the United States is 0.605 metric tons of CO2 per MWh [2]. 1MWh is 3.6e9 Joules. So to produce 2e-8 Joules, we emit about 3.36e-18 metric tons of CO2.
[1] C Gunaratne, K Christensen, B Nordman. Managing energy consumption costs in desktop PCs and LAN switches with proxying, split TCP connections, and scaling of link speed. Internation Journal of Network Managment, 15(5), September 2005. See slides
[2] US Department of Energy. Electric Power Annual 2006. Table ES (Divide
total CO2 emissions by total electricity generated.)
