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Posted by Wongoo Lee, Software Engineer

We know that personalizing your blog is important. Although you can adjust templates, layouts, backgrounds and more with our Template Designer, you wanted more ways to make your blog completely unique.

Now you can use your own image as your blog background. Go to Design | Template Designer | Background, click on Background Image, and you’ll see the new “Upload image” option, which allows you to select and upload your image. There are a variety of options such as alignment, repeat, and scroll for how to display your new image. This feature…

If you’ve made a buzzer-beating three-pointer, a bending free kick goal, a diving fingertip catch, a walk-off home run or a fantastic play in whatever your sport, this is the chance to show the world what you’ve got.

Today we kickoff the YouTube & SportsCenter Your Highlight program presented by AT&T — the opportunity to have your great sports moment shown on SportsCenter (on TV!).

Go to ESPN’s YouTube channel, check out the rules and submit your great sports video before Tuesday, November 30. SportsCenter’s Emmy-winning producers will select the best videos,…

If you’ve made a buzzer-beating three-pointer, a bending free kick goal, a diving fingertip catch, a walk-off home run or a fantastic play in whatever your sport, this is the chance to show the world what you’ve got.

Today we kickoff the YouTube & SportsCenter Your Highlight program presented by AT&T — the opportunity to have your great sports moment shown on SportsCenter (on TV!).

Go to ESPN’s YouTube channel, check out the rules and submit your great sports video before Tuesday, November 30. SportsCenter’s Emmy-winning producers will select the best videos,…

[Cross-posted from the Google Mobile Blog]

Whether you’re going for an urban hike or wandering from your hotel to find that restaurant you passed earlier, you won’t have to flag down a local if you’ve got Google Maps for mobile 4.5 on Android. Maps already had Navigation and walking directions, and today we’re happy to share the perfect marriage of the two: Walking Navigation (Beta). If you need help deciding where to walk (or drive), you can now also use Street View smart navigation or the new Google Maps search bar to guide your choice.

Walking…

It’s back-to-school season in many parts of the world, so we thought we’d kick off a series of blog posts about cool Chrome extensions that can make life easier for students. These include extensions that helps students keep in touch with friends and family, research and write papers, and be more productive during the school year. Check out the Official Google for Student blog to read about today’s extensions that help students stay connected with friends at school and those back home.

Posted by Koh Kim and Meredith Papp, Product Marketing Team

Yesterday we introduced Google Instant, a change to make search fast and interactive by showing you results instantly as you type. With Instant we’ve turned search from a static HTML page into an AJAX application, just as we did with Google Maps and Gmail. You can learn more about Google Instant in yesterday’s blog post, but we also wanted to share a peek behind the scenes into some of the engineering challenges we faced in design and infrastructure.

The design challenge: relevant, not distracting
Our key design challenge was to make sure people would notice relevant results without being distracted.…

Whether you’re going for an urban hike or wandering from your hotel to find that restaurant you passed earlier, you won’t have to flag down a local if you’ve got Google Maps for mobile 4.5 on Android. Maps already had Navigation and walking directions, and today we’re happy to share the perfect marriage of the two: Walking Navigation (Beta). If you need help deciding where to walk (or drive), you can now also use Street View smart navigation or the new Google Maps search bar to guide your choice.

Walking Navigation
Walking Navigation lets you use GPS…

(Cross-posted from the Google Voice blog)

Mobile is all about getting super fast access to what you’re looking for and Google Voice is no exception. So, today we’re releasing an update to the Android app, which gives you immediate access to your Google Voice Inbox and settings via two new home screen widgets.

The Google Voice Inbox widget brings your most recent voicemails and text messages to your home screen. With the widget, you can now quickly flip through messages in your Inbox, and if you choose to select a message preview, it will open in the Google Voice app.…

When you think of Google Earth, you might think about flying to the top of Mt. Everest, surveying the ancient Acropolis, or simply finding the house where you grew up. For the past five years, people all over the world have been discovering new places to explore through our community, blogs, news articles and Gallery. Now you can go to one place—our brand new Google Earth website—to find everything you’re looking for.

The new site is loaded with lots of great content including images, videos, tours, maps and tutorials on how…

Mobile is all about getting super fast access to what you’re looking for and Google Voice is no exception. So, today we’re releasing an update to the Android app, which gives you immediate access to your Google Voice Inbox and settings via two new home screen widgets.

The Google Voice Inbox widget brings your most recent voicemails and text messages to your home screen. You can now quickly flip though messages in your Inbox with the widget, and selecting any message preview will open it in the Google Voice app.

The Settings widget gives you quick access to four…