As fires continue to spread through the hills of Los Angeles and thousands are forced to evacuate the area, citizens are turning to YouTube to post footage of the blaze. For example, in this video, you can clearly see the flames over San Gabriel, while this one uses a time-lapse technique to show just how much smoke is being emitted into the air:
To support his footage, YouTube user cagwa writes in his video description: “Getting very hard to breathe already and it’s going to be 104[F] today. The burning smell is extremely strong. Had to close all the windows at 7 a.m.”
Other users are capturing the work of firefighters who are valiantly trying to put out the flames. This footage shows a Los Angeles Fire Department helicopter refilling in the Verdugo mountains while fighting the fire in La Canada:
More content is being uploaded every hour — we’ll compile it and keep you posted on our CitizenTube channel.
So how many were you able to figure out? I hope you didn’t spend too much time on #7 as that was the false factoid. The images featured on the quiz included imagery from Geo-Eye, DigitalGlobe and aerial providers. I hope you had fun with the quiz; see you next time!
1) This city hosted Stage 4 and was the departure of Stage 5 in the 2008 Tour De France. – Cholet, France
2) Unscramble this: D-E-E-R-B-A-G-O – Beograde (Belgrade), Serbia
3) This port city in the Piura Region, hosted a United States air base during World War II. – Talara, Peru
4) Every October this city hosts an International Balloon Fiesta; with over 1,000 hot air balloons each year, it’s the largest hot air balloon gathering in the world. – Albuquerque, New Mexico
5) The siege of this city was the longest siege in the history of modern warfare lasting from 5 April 1992 to 29 February 1996. – Sarajevo, Bosnia
6) This is one of the oldest and largest cities in Poland. – Krakcow, Poland
7) This city was founded after the civil war in 1578, named after the infamous bridge battle the decided the outcome of the war. – Trick question!
This city houses Russia’s biggest nuclear submarine base. – Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, Russia
9) This city is approximately 244 kilometres (152 mi) from Ankara, 255 kilometres (158 mi) from Adana, 222 kilometres (138 mi) from Izmir, and 300 kilometres (186 mi) from Istanbul. – Antalya, Turkey
10) This city was founded after the Port Royal earthquake in the 17th century. – Kingston, Jamaica
Following is a more complete version of the updates in this data push:
Americas: United States: Alburqurque, Beaumont (Texas), part of the Mississippi River, Jefferson County (FL), Cass County (MO), Hamilton County (IA), Western Michigan, Portage (MI), Clinton County (MI), Eaton County (MI), Ingham County (MI), Greenville (SC), Baltimore (MD), Charles County (MD), Calvert County (MD), Dorchester County (MD), Carroll County (MD), Frederick County (MD). Canada: Surrey (BC) Peru: Talara Argentina: Salta, Santiago del Estero, Villa Mercedes, Bahia Blanca
New Zealand: Christchurch, Wellington, Bay of Plenty, Waipa
Antarctica: McMurdo Station
New 2.5m base imagery for: Mexico, Argentina, and India
For even more fun exploring the new imagery,
here is a KML outlining all the areas receiving new data. Please note, if you see an area that is updated and not in this KML file, you’re not crazy! As part of this update we are re-shuffling many of our satellite scenes to ensure that in areas where we have many satellite scenes stacked on top of each other that the newest image is visible. These are not considered ‘new’ updates since they’ve been available through Google Earth’s Historical Imagery feature.
Imagine that we’re launching a brand new advertising campaign for our new e-commerce website that sells Empanadas, my favorite food. The structure of the website is simple. We have a homepage, a few category pages that lists empanadas by type (baked, fried, etc), and hundreds of individual pages for each type of empanada (ham and cheese, steak, chicken, veggie, etc.).
Website structure
(click to enlarge)
Given this site design and our goal to sell as many empanadas as possible, let’s look at this question:
Which type of landing page (home, category, or product) leads people to purchase more empanadas?
To answer it, we’ll use two Google Analytics features, Custom Reports and Advanced Segments, to find out exactly, in dollars, which is the best type of page. And to perform this analysis we need one of two things: 1. e-commerce or 2. goals with a goal value.
Searching for the answer in Landing Pages
First go to the Content > Landing Pages.
(click to enlarge)
This report is naturally a good place to start but it only gives us three metrics: Entrances, Bounces and Bounce Rate. I want to know dollar amount, not bounce rate. To get the value of each landing page we have to create a custom report.
Step 1) Create the Custom Report Go to Custom Reporting and create the following report:
Dimension: Landing Page Metrics: Entrances, Abandonment Rate, Goal Completed and Value per visitor
(click to enlarge)
Great. Now I know the average value for any visitor that starts on these pages. On average the value per landing pages is $0.07. This means for all people who arrive at my webpage, on average each person will buy $0.07 worth of empanadas. Not much huh? However, as you can see some pages have a consistently much better conversion rate than others. For example, my home page — /home.html — gives me a per visit value of $0.10. I’d like to compare that with my other two page types: product and categories. We could go through this list and pick out one by one which is better, or write a regular expression in the search filter box, but an easier and more flexible way to identify these page is via Advanced Segments.
Step 2) Create the Advanced Segment Take a minute to think about the layout of your website. Is there a unique identifier that let’s you segment your landing page types? If there isn’t then ask your Webmaster what you can do to get around this problem. In our example, remember that our website is very simple. Every empanada page contains the word empanada.html, every category page contains category.html, and the home page is home.html. To begin with, let’s create a category segment.
Create the “Category” Advanced Segment 1. Go to Advanced Segments>Create New. 2. Dimension: Landing Page 3. Contains “category.html” 4. Name it “Visits that land on Category.” 5. Save and Apply to report
Ouch! Visitors that land on my category pages spend an average of $0.04. Much worse than the average of $0.07. Now let’s compare with what happens when a user lands on a page of an individual empanada product page. It’s the same process as above except we use Landing Page Contains “empanada.html.”
Create the “Empanada” Advanced Segment 1. Go to Advanced Segments>Create New. 2. Dimension: Landing Page 3. Contains “empanada.html” 4. Name it “Visits that land on empanada.”
5. Save and Apply to report
Here is what we get:
(click to enlarge)
Wow! Visits that see a product page before anything else spend $0.30 on average. That’s over 7 times more than the value of the category landing pages. Which pages should we use? Our empanada pages of course! We no longer have to guess which page is best. Even if we have hundreds of different types of empanadas we can calculate to the penny the potential value of focusing our advertisements on products.
Yeah, that’s nice but how do I do the same for my website?
The above is a great example of full circle analytics. Set up goals, then create the reports and segments you best need to analyze the success of the goals. We chose to look at Landing Pages, but after you have goals, reports and segments in place, you can do most analyses.
Here are the key takeaways:
1. Most importantly your URLs must have a unique identifier (like our ?type=empanadas) so you can segment by page type AND either e-commerce implementation or a goal value.
2. Instead of thinking home, category, and product think home, broad, or specific. Usually, the more specific and focused the landing pages the better.
3. If you don’t use an e-commerce website don’t worry, you can do the same analysis. For e-commerce websites its much easier for us to calculate exact dollar return — but! we can also use goal value to calculate user value. So, if you don’t sell a product, your goal might be to have the users fill out a contact form. If for every 100 users that fill the form you can gain 5 leads that over a month spend an average of $100 each then the value of your form is 5x$100=$500/100=$5 per form completed. This goal value can also be used to calculate landing page value.
Now that you know exactly how to use Google Analytics to identify the value of your landing pages it’s time to apply the lessons to your website. How much money do your landing pages bring you?
In our last post, Heather learned how to make calls through the Google Voice homepage. Today, I want to explore why someone would link multiple phones to their Google Voice number.
After choosing your Google Voice number, you’re asked to add at least one forwarding phone that will ring when people call your Google number. Heather chose to link her cell phone to her Voice number. The Getting Started Guide shows how you can sync multiple phones to your Voice number. When I read this, a question immediately popped up in my mind – why would I want to do this?
Once you link your cell phone, home phone, and perhaps your work phone, you’ll be able to control which devices ring based on who is calling your Google number. You can assign certain callers to ring your cell or your work phone (or both), and can forward some calls straight to voicemail or directly to the spam folder. I can see it now: family members ring my cell and home phone. Friend who only calls when she wants to gossip? Sorry – straight to voicemail without ringing.
By linking multiple phones to your Voice number, you’ll also be able to switch phones mid-conversation. For example, my sister calls my Voice number and I pick up my work phone to speak to her. I chat with her for a few minutes, and then I realize its time to go home. Instead of telling my sister I’m going to hang up and call her again on my cell phone, I simply press the * on my work phone, and my other linked phones will ring. I pick up my cell phone, hang up my work phone, and continue chatting with my sister on my cell. Seamless!
We recently shared an update on the Google Apps Blog about new features in Google Sites, the web creation and publishing application included in Google Apps. The new features let you copy your site, use more options to search, and more easily announce updates. Since these features are useful for anyone who uses Google Sites as part of the Google Apps Premier or Education editions, we wanted to make it easy for you to read about the features.
Posted by Ellen Leanse, Google Enterprise team
Get timely updates on new features in Google Apps by subscribing to our RSS feed or email alerts.
We spend a lot of time thinking about how information travels around the globe. After all, there are Googlers living and working in dozens of countries — and we’re pretty sure our products are used in many more. So we’re familiar with the need to translate information across borders, and we’ve been working hard to build the technology to enable you to do just that. Today, we’re excited to announce that we’ve added nine new languages to Google Translate: Afrikaans, Belarusian, Icelandic, Irish, Macedonian, Malay, Swahili, Welsh and Yiddish. That means that Google Translate now supports 51 languages and 2550 language pairs — including all 23 official EU languages.
The translation quality of these newest languages is still a little rough, but it will improve over time — and we’re continuously working to improve quality for all languages supported by Google Translate. We’re also working to integrate Google Translate into some of our other products; you can already translate emails within Gmail, webpages using Google Toolbar, RSS feeds in Google Reader and most recently, documents within Google Docs. For more information about Google Translate and these latest additions, check out our post on the Research Blog.
Have you gone road tripping to find the world’s best BBQ? Does your Aunt Mindy have an awesome collection of outdoor gnomes? Is there a must-see monument in your own backyard? Visit My Journey and share your memorable American journey in three minutes or less. Let the Lonely Planet team and the YouTube community decide whether you’re worthy of a professional seven-day assignment in San Francisco, to be featured on LonelyPlanet’s website and YouTube channel.
In addition to the trip, the winner filmmaker will receive video equipment and advice from the Lonely Planet team on how to take your reporting skills to the next level. You have until October 28 to submit your entry, and there are five contest categories covering everything from the great outdoors to big city life so you don’t have to reach the Grand Canyon to make your mark. (Sorry, all entries must reflect American journeys and only American users can enter this contest.)
Need some inspiration to get started? Check out these sample videos that transport you to Los Angeles, Cape Cod and New Orleans. You’re always showing us new ways to look at the world, and we can’t wait to see your proudest American journeys. Enter your videos here. My Journey is presented by The T-Mobile® myTouch™ 3G.
A month ago, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Katherine Sebelius put out a call asking you to raise awareness about how citizens can steel themselves against the H1N1 (aka, “swine flu”) virus. Today, the HHS announced the 10 best citizen-created PSAs — and you get to vote on the winner.
Take a look at the finalists’ videos on the HHS YouTube channel or spin through this playlist:
Have your say about which ad you think is most effective in increasing knowledge and prevention of H1N1. The winner will receive $2500 and have his/her PSA aired on live television. Voting ends at midnight on September 8.
Have you ever clicked the “Reader” link at the top of your Gmail inbox and ended up in Google Reader, kind of unsure about what to do next?
We realize this happens from time to time, so to help people get started with Reader, we asked a bunch of prominent journalists, techies, fashion critics, and foodies for their lists of favorite sites and blogs. We compiled their reading lists and made them accessible to everyone at google.com/powerreaders, where you can explore and subscribe to lists from Thomas Friedman, Arianna Huffington, Paul Krugman, the editors of Lifehacker, Boing Boing, Kottke.org, and many more.
Whether you’re new to Google Reader or already have an extensive reading list, we hope this will be a good place to find great stuff to read. And if you want to create your own reading list to share with others, you can do that too.
Sophisticated, useful and cool applications are being developed everyday through the open Google Analytics API. We’re loving what we’re seeing. Basically, developers are grabbing their data from Google Analytics and slicing and dicing it, mixing it and mashing it with other data and applications, creating dashboards and widgets, and innovating some of the coolest stuff a data driven person could hope for. For example, we’re really impressed with an app called Trendly which makes it easier to find important movers and shakers among your data via an innovative new interface, cutting down on the time you need to monitor your profiles. The team who built Trendly is using it as their one stop Google Analytics dashboard. We asked the team to share how this application came about, and here’s what they wrote:
How many of you can afford to pay someone to monitor your analytics full time? We can’t. We’re a small startup, and we just don’t have the resources to make that happen.
We use Google Analytics to track visits to our website, www.dabbledb.com. We’d love to have someone watching the hundreds of keywords, referrers, and campaigns that drive traffic to our site, someone who would send us a quick email whenever something really interesting happened: “Hey guys, thought you’d like to know that your average visitors from ‘online database’ doubled last week, and it’s staying there – guess that SEO is working!”
So, using the Google Analytics API, we created Trendly, a monitoring and visualization tool which you can look at anytime and easily see what’s changed. In short, Trendly uses mathematical models to take noisy data like this:
and figure out when significant changes have happened, marking it like this: According to Trendly, our average daily visitors from the search words “online database” went up from 18 to 32 in mid-January, and then up again to 50 in early February. Also, Trendly sends us periodic emails to let us know about changes like these, saving us a lot of time. It also prepares a news feed with attractive charts that put the changes into perspective relative to everything else that’s going on. Take a look at this – it calls out significant changes and makes them easy to notice with a timeline on the right.
When we first built Trendly for our internal use, we cobbled it together by screen-scraping and downloading exports from Google Analytics. But part of what made this tool exciting to us is that it solves a pretty universal problem. Trendly is your analyst until you can afford to hire a full time analyst. Heck, it probably keeps a clearer log of important changes than an analyst would! And with Trendly, you can delay this much longer since it cuts down your worflow by hours per week.
The new GA Data API allowed us to share it! With no signup and a couple of clicks, anyone can authenticate with Google and authorize us to grab their data and generate the reports. Suddenly our internal tool became a new product offering which can help any Google Analytics user. Give it a try and see for yourself.
What the guys at DabbleDB built is amazing. If you have developed a useful new tool or integration on top of Google Analytics, drop us an email at analytics-api@google.com. If it’s innovative and useful we’ll highlight it to our readers on this blog.
This city houses Russia’s biggest nuclear submarine base.
Once you link your cell phone, home phone, and perhaps your work phone, you’ll be able to control which devices ring based on who is calling your Google number. You can assign certain callers to ring your cell or your work phone (or both), and can forward some calls straight to voicemail or directly to the spam folder. I can see it now: family members ring my cell and home phone. Friend who only calls when she wants to gossip? Sorry – straight to voicemail without ringing.
