I went ahead and started syncing some photos with Picasa Web Albums. I burned up the FREE 1GB that Google gives you free pretty quickly, so I went ahead and dropped $50.00 to upgrade to 200GB of storage. I’m supposed to be getting a free 4 GB wifi Eye-Fi SD card in the mail from the signup too.

There are several things I really like about Picasa. I’ve used Flickr and SmugMug pretty extensively in the past. Picasa is the only photo sharing utility that combines a local photo organizer (Picasa 3) with a online web album (Picasa Web Albums). I really like being able to organize locally with Picasa and sync with the web albums to share and backup my photos.

The facial recognition / name tagging is a fantastic feature. It becomes addictive going through photos and labeling people.

I love the tie to GMAIL and the GMAIL contacts that syncs your face tags with your GMAIL contacts.

The inclusion of video in Picasa is great, especially since I picked up the new Kodak Zi8. I love that Picasa allows videos up to 1GB.

Here’s a couple of things that Google Picasa is definitely missing, and I hope to see them add soon:
I want to be able to search ALL of my photos by the meta information. Both Flickr and Smug Mug make it easy to find EVERY picture taken on a specific date regardless of what albums the photos are broken into.

I only have a small portion of my photo uploaded to Picasa Web Albums so far, and the number of albums I’m creating is growing at an alarming rate. I can only imagine the mess I’ll have in 10 years. Picasa needs to allow the ability to nest albums. I would love to create an album labeled 2009, and then nest albums under it for any special occasions. Again, this is a feature I was used to in SmugMug.

I want better photo sharing tools. I like the fact that Picasa web albums uses the gmail contacts and groups to manage sharing, but i would like to select multiple albums at a time to set the sharing on. It takes an inordinate amount of time to set sharing on albums one at a time. Also, I would like to be able to set sharing without sending an email to the person I am sharing with. Emailing everytime a make a sharing change seems very spammy.

I want to be able to use Picasa on my own domain name, the same way I use Google Apps. Let me direct my friends and family to a subdomain like photos.techytechygeekygeeky.com.

All in all, I am really enjoying Picasa. I am waiting for Google’s development to catch up with my desires. I’m sure I will find other ‘missing’ features as I dig in deeper, but overall it is a very nice way to sort and share photos and videos.

However, I can see how this might be a useful business tool, so I am going to pick up a couple of new web cams and give the new GMAIL Video Chat a try this month. I can see how I might want to jump from a chat session with a colleague from another office to a video chat session to show off an “Important Visual”.

Important Visual

Sometimes playing a little “show and tell” can be useful during a business meeting.

Here’s a video Google posted on YouTube.com showing a little more detail:

They are:
Advanced Segmentation
Custom Reports
Data export API (private beta)
Integrated reporting for AdSense publishers (private beta)
Multi-dimensional data visualizations called “Motion Charts”
Updated user and administrative interface.

The feature I’ve been most anticipating is the addition of the Integrated reporting for Adsense. Unfortunately this is an invite only feature at this time and Google hasn’t deemed me worthy yet. (Google, if you’re reading this, hook me up!)

If you have an AdSense account, eventually you should receive the option to “integrate your AdSense account with Google Analytics”. The option will appear at the top of the Overview page once you login to Adsense.

Watch for your Invitation

AdSense Overview Screenshot

Here is the video that Google posted on YouTube giving a peek behind the curtain:

Once you have your analytics account setup, be sure to go out and install “Google Analytics for WordPress” from Yoast.com.

I am a big fan of the “Paste Special” Option that you get when you right click in excel. It lets you paste just the values of cells and not the formatting. I just now discovered how to use the Google Spreadsheets equivalent of this function.

It’s not a full featured as EXCEL’s paste special function, but it gets the job done when you want to just paste just your values or just your formatting.

1. Cut or Copy your values
2. Click on the “Paste Button / Icon”. It’s on the edit tab.  It looks like a little clipboard with a piece of paper on it.
3. Three options will appear: PASTE, PASTE VALUES ONLY, and PASTE FORMAT ONLY.
4. Select the one you want!  Viola!

1. Google Ads must be from genuine user interest. Any method that artificially generates clicks in prohibitied.

2. Clicking on your own ads for ANY reason is prohibited.

3. You may not ask visitors, pay visitors or otherwise encourage site visitors to click your ads. 

4. You may not “fool” people into clicking the ads by using graphical gimmicks or misleading labels.

5. You may not promote sites displaying ads through unsolicited mass emails.

6. Google ads can only be displayed on sites that adhere to Google’s content guidelines.

7. Sites displaying Google ads may not include:

Violent content, racial intolerance, or advocacy against any individual, group, or organization

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Content regarding programs which compensate users for clicking on ads or offers, performing searches, surfing websites, or reading emails

Excessive, repetitive, or irrelevant keywords in the content or code of web pages

Deceptive or manipulative content or construction to improve your site’s search engine ranking, e.g., your site’s PageRank

Sales or promotion of weapons or ammunition (e.g., firearms, fighting knives, stun guns)

Sales or promotion of beer or hard alcohol

Sales or promotion of tobacco or tobacco-related products

Sales or promotion of prescription drugs

Sales or promotion of products that are replicas or imitations of designer goods

Sales or distribution of term papers or student essays

Any other content that is illegal, promotes illegal activity, or infringes on the legal rights of others 

Stolen copyrighted material

Deceptive or manipulative behavior intended to trick search engines or site visitors

Pop-ups or pop-unders that interfere with the site navigation, change user preferences, or initiate downloads

8. Adsense code must be placed into pages without modification.

9. Adsense ads may not be integrated into a software application.

10. Up to 3 ads can be displayed on each website page.

11. A maximum or two Adsense search boxes may be placed on a page.

12. Up to 3 link units may be placed on each website page.

13. Adsense for search results pages may show only a single ad link unit.

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15. No element on the page may obscure any portion of an ad.

16. No Ad may be placed on any non content based website pages.

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18, Google ads and search boxes are not to be published on websites that also contain other ads or services formatted to use the same layout or colors as the Google Adsense Ads.

19. You may have other ads on your site, they may not be confused with Google Ads.

I was hunting for a way to use my Google Bookmarks with Chrome when I ran into a couple of cool Google Chrome tricks and a couple of things I really don’t like about Chrome.

First off, I learned that Google didn’t build in support for very many of it’s own features.  I’m not sure if they just wanted to avoid the accusations that they just built a browser to promote their own products, or they just haven’t gotten around to it yet. In any case, I use quite a few of Google’s offerings, so I would like them more integrated into Chrome.

1. There is no way to sync the Google Chrome bookmarks with Google Bookmarks.  This kinda stinks because I don’t ever use browser bookmarks.  Bookmarks belong on the cloud, so I have all of mine stored with Google. So, Google, please eliminate the “in browser bookmarks” and let me have easy access to my bookmarks stored on the cloud.

You can still add bookmarks to Google Bookmarks withing Chrome.  You have to select “always show bookmarks tab” from the little wrench icon in the upper right corner of the browser, or you can just hit “ctrl-b”.  Then you have to drag the Google Chrome bookmarklet to the browser bar (You can find the bookmarklet here). Any time you visit a webpage that you want to save to your Google Bookmarks page, simply click the bookmarklet in the bookmarks bar.

2. I HATE the backspace button being used as a shortcut for the “Back” button to go the previous page in the browser history. I have navigated backwards in my browser SEVERAL times when I was just trying to delete the text in a form field. 

3. Have you ever closed a tab by accident? I’ve done it several times, usually while cleaning up the browser space and getting rid of the dozens of tabs I’ve opened throughout the day. Here’s the fix, just press Ctrl+Shift+T to open the last closed tab, or open a new tab and check the “Recently closed tabs” section on the right side of the page.

4. If you ever need more space in a text area, you can resize it by grabbing and dragging the lower right corner of the text box.  I find this really useful when you’re blogging.  The text box in blog tools never seems to be the right size, so you can easily grab it and make it bigger or smaller. I really enjoy this one, and am actually making use of it RIGHT now while authoring the post.

5. Interested in using Chrome, but you don’t want to be all “look at my Google browser.” Then check out Chromium, Google’s open-source version of the browser. Google is either very sincere in helping the open-source browser project movement to help “move the web forward,” or at least they want to make you believe they are. Anyway, check out the Chromium homepage here, or click here to see the latest snapshots for windows to install it. You’ll probably want the directory closest to the top of the page, and download mini_installer.exe to install it. Enjoy having a browser that lacks Google branding, or jump in an help make the internet a better place to surf. Be wary, the open-source browser may be less stable than the Google Chrome version.

6. In Firefox you can drag tabs from one browser session to another.  This was pretty cool, but I always wanted to drag a tab right out of the browser into it’s own browser session. Well, you can’t do it with Firefox, but you can with Google Chrome. I’m a browser spawning fool, and I love it.

Click Here to read about it.

Click Here to read the comic about it.

Click Here to download it.