Robert Fruean......Inspiration at Leavers Dinner

At our recent leavers dinner held at the Addington Coffee Co-op Robert Fruean shared his inspirational life story with our year 6 school leavers, their families and school staff. Robert’s story, which has seen him overcome life threatening health issues at the peak of his sporting career, held the children and adults spell bound.

Robert spoke to the group after a wonderful meal at the café. Robert’s final words of advice was to always remember the following three phrases “Please”, “thank you”, and “I’m sorry”.

More great news sources to discover in Fast Flip

Posted by Jack Hebert, Software Engineer
[cross-posted from the Official Google Blog]

Three months ago, we launched Google Fast Flip, a service that seeks to make reading articles online as fast and simple as flipping through a magazine or newspaper. It's still early in this experiment, which is why Fast Flip remains in Google Labs. But so far our initial thesis has held up: If you make it easier to read news online, people will read more of it. Users have told us they like being able to browse content so quickly, and we've been pleased with the amount of time they have spent reading articles in Fast Flip.

We've also received good feedback from the three dozen publishers who joined us for the launch, as well as a lot of interest from others. Today, we're excited to be adding articles from another two dozen publishers representing more than 50 newspapers, magazines, web outlets, news wires and TV and radio broadcasters. Some of the new sources include Tribune Co. newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune, McClatchy Company newspapers such as the Miami Herald and the Kansas City Star, the Huffington Post, Popular Science, Reuters, Public Radio International, POLITICO and U.S. News & World Report. Now you can use Fast Flip to engage with content from even more of your favorite news outlets in an innovative way, and continue to explore topics covered by a diverse group of sources. And, through the mobile version, you can flip through all these new articles on your Android-powered device or iPhone.

While we're encouraged by the positive feedback about Fast Flip, it's just one of many experiments you'll see us try in partnership with news publishers. Our goal is to work with the industry to help it continue to innovate and build bigger audiences, better engage those audiences and generate more revenue. We're looking forward to innovating and iterating with all these new partners in Fast Flip. And if you have more suggestions for ways we can improve Fast Flip, please let us know.

The holiday season and Google News Archive Search

Posted by David Smydra, Google News Online Team

Crowded shopping malls, radio stations pumping songs about sleigh bells and chestnuts, inclement weather from coast to coast -- all signs point to one explanation. We're smack in the middle of the holiday season.

Whichever holidays you observe, you might be surprised to learn of another one to add to the roster. Two hundred eighteen years ago today, the founders ratified the Bill of Rights, which the United States officially celebrates every December 15 as U.S. Bill of Rights Day. We have President Franklin D. Roosevelt to thank for officially creating the holiday, which he inaugurated in 1941, on the 150th anniversary of the document's ratification.

I took a spin through Google News Archive Search to learn more. Searching for "Bill of Rights Day 1941," I was able to drill down to autumn of that year, where I hoped to find articles explaining how the holiday took shape. Sure enough, the St. Petersburg Times ran an Associated Press story on November 29, 1941, quoting a proclamation from President Roosevelt. In what appears to be a clear reference to the events of World War II, Roosevelt mentions the "privileges lost in other continents and countries," and how Americans "can now appreciate their meaning to those people who enjoyed them once and now no longer can." And so December 15 would become "a day of mobilization for freedom and for human rights, a day of remembrance of the democratic and peaceful action by which these rights were gained, a day of reassessment of their present meaning and their living worth."

Little more than a week later, of course, arrived "a date which will live in infamy," the attack on Pearl Harbor, which brought the United States into the war.

So when Bill of Rights Day arrived eight days later, the holiday had renewed meaning. Once again, in the St. Petersburg Times, you could find a full page featuring another proclamation from Roosevelt, the full Bill of Rights reprinted for readers, and a picture of Roosevelt with New York Mayor Fiorello Henry La Guardia. And the day after the holiday, this write-up summarized various ways that the country marked the occasion, including Chicago school girls reading the Bill of Rights "publicly at State and Madison streets."

It's interesting to see how the meaning and observance of different holidays continue to change, sometimes even just days after they have been created.

Exploring a new, more dynamic way of reading news with Living Stories

Posted by Neha Singh, Software Engineer, and Josh Cohen, Senior Business Product Manager
[cross-posted from the Official Google Blog]

There's been no shortage of talk recently about the "future of news." Should publishers charge for news online? How do they replace lost sources of revenue such as classified ads? How will accountability journalism endure? And, even more fundamentally, will news survive in the digital era? These are questions we're deeply interested in, and we've been exploring potential solutions. But what's often overlooked in these debates is the nature of the news story itself and the experience of how it's read online. We believe it's just as important to experiment with how news organizations can take advantage of the web to tell stories in new ways — ways that simply aren't possible offline.

While we have strong ideas about how information is experienced on the web, we're not journalists and we don't create content. So over the last few months we've been talking to a number of people to help develop the concept of something that we and some others in the industry call the "living story." Today, on Google Labs, we're unveiling some of the work we've done in partnership with two world-class news organizations: The News York Times and The Washington Post. The result of that experiment is the Living Stories prototype, which features new ways to interact with news and the quality of reporting you've come to expect from the reporters and editors at The Post and The Times. We're excited to learn from this experiment, and hope to eventually make these tools available to any publisher that wants to use them.

The idea behind Living Stories is to experiment with a different format for presenting news coverage online. News organizations produce a wealth of information that we all value; access to this information should be as great as the online medium allows. A typical newspaper article leads with the most important and interesting news, and follows with additional information of decreasing importance. Information from prior coverage is often repeated with each new online article, and the same article is presented to everyone regardless of whether they already read it. Living Stories try a different approach that plays to certain unique advantages of online publishing. They unify coverage on a single, dynamic page with a consistent URL. They organize information by developments in the story. They call your attention to changes in the story since you last viewed it so you can easily find the new material. Through a succinct summary of the whole story and regular updates, they offer a different online approach to balancing the overview with depth and context.

This project sprang from conversations among senior executives at the three companies. We shared thoughts about how the web can work for storytelling, and the Times and Post shared their core journalistic principles. The Living Stories started taking shape over the summer after our engineering and user interface teams spent time in the newsrooms of both papers. We're providing the technology platform, the Times and Post's journalists are writing and editing the stories, and we're continuously collaborating to make the user interface fit with their editorial vision.

Over the coming months, we'll refine Living Stories based on your feedback. We're also looking to develop openly available tools that could aid news organizations in the creation of these pages or at least in some of the features. If you're a news reader, we'd love to hear your thoughts. If you're a news organization, we want to hear your comments on the Living Story format. If you decide to implement this on your site, we would love to hear about that too. At the very least, we hope this collaboration will kick off debate and encourage innovation in how people interact with news online. To see how Living Stories works, check out the video below.

Picnic Pizza with the Principal

Today 10 children shared a pizza lunch with Ms Heath. Bayden, Caleb, Nevada, Nihmot, Jasmine, Utu, Alex, Yazmin, and Ryan had each earned 10 Green Cards for their consistant great behaviour, and wonderful Addington Attitude. The favourite varieties are Homer Simpson, and the Vegetarian Supreme, which was pronounced 'delicious' and 'very tasty' by Nihmot.

The pizzas are sponsored by Filadelfios Pizza in Beckenham. A big "Thank you" to Tony for supporting this programme in the school.

New Friend in the Vege Garden

Late last month, the Green Team put their creative heads together and came up with what will hopefully be the solution to birds eating their lettuce seedlings!! Named Spud Murphy by the younger members of the team, he now stands guard, (in his pyjamas), over the strawberries and lettuce seedlings. So far he has survived three vigorous southerly changes, a nor'west blast and the theft of his t-shirt! The lettuces are looking better already.

Same Protocol, More Options for News Publishers

Posted by Josh Cohen, Senior Business Product Manager

There are more than 25,000 publishers from around the world in Google News today. That's because Google News is a great source of readers, sending publishers about 1 billion clicks every month. Each of those clicks is an opportunity for publishers, allowing them to show ads, sell subscriptions and introduce readers to the great content they produce every day. While we think this offers a tremendous opportunity for any publisher who wants new readers, publishers are the ones who create the content and they're in control of it. If they decide they don't want to be in Google, it's easy to do. Today, we're making it even easier with a web crawler specifically for Google News.

Publishers have always had the ability to block Google from including their content in Google's index. How? With something called Robots Exclusion Protocol (or REP) - a web-wide standard supported by all major search engines and any reputable company that crawls the web. When our crawler arrives at any site, it checks to see if there's a robots.txt file to make sure we have permission to crawl the site. With this file, or similar REP directives on specific pages, publishers can block their entire site, certain sections or individual pages. They can also give instructions on how they want us to index their content, such as telling us to exclude images or snippets of text. Furthermore, they can apply different instructions to different crawlers, giving access to some while blocking others.

The new Google News web crawler extends these controls to Google News. If they wanted to, it's always been easy for publishers to keep their content out of Google News and still remain in Google Search. They just had to fill out a simple contact form in our Help Center. Now, with the news-specific crawler, if a publisher wants to opt out of Google News, they don't even have to contact us - they can put instructions just for user-agent Googlebot-News in the same robots.txt file they have today. In addition, once this change is fully in place, it will allow publishers to do more than just allow/disallow access to Google News. They'll also be able to apply the full range of REP directives just to Google News. Want to block images from Google News, but not from Web Search? Go ahead. Want to include snippets in Google News, but not in Web Search? Feel free. All this will soon be possible with the same standard protocol that is REP.

Our users shouldn't notice any difference. Google News will keep helping people discover the news they're looking for, different perspectives from across the world and new sources of information they might not otherwise have found.

While this means even more control for publishers, the effect of opting out of News is the same as it's always been. It means that content won't be in Google News or in the parts of Google that are powered by the News index. For example, if a publisher opts out of Google News, but stays in Web Search, their content will still show up as natural web search results, but they won't appear in the block of news results that sometimes shows up in Web Search, called Universal search, since those come from the Google News index.

Most people put their content on the web because they want it to be found, so very few choose to exclude their material from Google. But we respect publishers' wishes. If publishers don't want their websites to appear in web search results or in Google News, we want to give them easy ways to remove it. We're excited about this change and will start rolling it out today. You can learn more about the details of this change on our Webmaster Central blog. If you see any problems or have any questions, please let us know.

Google and paid content

Posted by Josh Cohen, Senior Business Product Manager

As newspapers consider charging for access to their online content, some publishers have asked: Should we put up pay walls or keep our articles in Google News and Google Search? In fact, they can do both - the two aren't mutually exclusive. There are a few ways we work with publishers to make their subscription content discoverable. Today we're updating one of them, so we thought it would be a good time to remind publishers about some of their options.

Google has strict policies against what's known as cloaking: showing one web page to the crawler that indexes it but then a different page to a user. We do this so that users aren't deceived into clicking through to a site that's not what they were expecting. While the anti-cloaking policies are important for users, they do create some challenges for publishers who charge for content. Our crawlers can't fill out a registration or payment form to see what's behind a site's paywall, but they need access to the information in order to index it.

One way we overcome this is through a program called First Click Free. Participating publishers allow the crawler to index their subscription content, then allow users who find one of those articles through Google News or Google Search to see the full page without requiring them to register or subscribe. The user's first click to the content is free, but when a user clicks on additional links on the site, the publisher can show a payment or registration request. First Click Free is a great way for publishers to promote their content and for users to check out a news source before deciding whether to pay. Previously, each click from a user would be treated as free. Now, we've updated the program so that publishers can limit users to no more than five pages per day without registering or subscribing. If you're a Google user, this means that you may start to see a registration page after you've clicked through to more than five articles on the website of a publisher using First Click Free in a day. We think this approach still protects the typical user from cloaking, while allowing publishers to focus on potential subscribers who are accessing a lot of their content on a regular basis.

In addition to First Click Free, we offer another solution: We will crawl, index and treat as "free" any preview pages - generally the headline and first few paragraphs of a story - that they make available to us. This means that our crawlers see the exact same content that will be shown for free to a user. Because the preview page is identical for both users and the crawlers, it's not cloaking. We will then label such stories as "subscription" in Google News. The ranking of these articles will be subject to the same criteria as all sites in Google, whether paid or free. Paid content may not do as well as free options, but that is not a decision we make based on whether or not it's free. It's simply based on the popularity of the content with users and other sites that link to it.

These are two of the ways we allow publishers to make their subscription content discoverable, and we're going to keep talking with publishers to refine these methods. After all, whether you're offering your content for free or selling it, it's crucial that people find it. Google can help with that.

Catching Grandmothers

Congratulations to Mary Jones the grandmother of Kahu Jones whose name was drawn out as our Duffy 'Caught being a good grandparent". Kahu nominated her because "she gets books out of the library to share with me and helps me make stuff.

We Are Sailing

Once again, our Year 6’s did us proud with their Addington Attitude during their Sailing Trip with CanSail in the Lyttelton Harbour yesterday.

It was a brilliant day with plenty of sun and wind.   We enjoyed the company of three Hector Dolphins during our trip. 

It was great to see all of the children challenging themselves in a new environment, working with such team spirit and for the teachers seeing our children achieving was magical.

It was a pleasure to be part of this wonderful day.

A quote from one of the students, “This is just like being on a family holiday.”  - It’s pretty exciting when a school experience can feel like being in a family!

Our thanks go to the CanSail Trust who offered us this wonderful opportunity. Thankyou also, for their financial sponsorship, without it we wouldn’t be able to take part in such a unique and valuable experience. 

Room 3 Reports

Room 3 have been learning to write reports. Check out this great swimming report written by Grace.

Last week we went swimming  First we got changed. Next we waited by the pool for room one to get out  After that we got into our groups. Then we started to swim . I learnt to to swim on my back. It was fun in the pool because it was so warm. 

After our swim we got out of the pool and got changed back into our school uniform. Then we went on the bus back to school. 

By Grace .

New Google News for mobile

Posted by Ankit "Chunky" Gupta (Software Engineer) and Alok Goel (Product Manager)
[cross-posted from the Official Google Mobile Blog]

At Google, we are committed to giving you a consistent user experience across products and devices, and we really value the feedback you've given us about Google News for mobile. Today we're excited to announce a completely new Google News offering for iPhone, Android, and Palm Pre users. (We already offer a mobile-optimized version of Google News for other phones, such as Blackberry, Windows Mobile, and S60, and more improvements will be coming to those in the near future)

This new version provides the same richness and personalization on your phone as Google News provides on desktop. Our new homepage displays more stories, sources, and images while keeping a familiar look and feel. Also, you can now reach your favorite sections, discover new ones, find articles and play videos in fewer clicks. If you are an existing Google News reader on desktop, you will find that all of your personalizations are honored in this mobile version too.

Google News for mobile is now available in 29 languages and 70 editions.

So pick up your mobile phone and point your browser to http://news.google.com to catch up on news anytime and anywhere. Feel free to check out more information or leave feedback in our Help Center.

Room 2 Swims

For the past 3 weeks we have been going swimming at Pioneer Pool. When we get to the pool we have to get ready to swim and wait on the side of the pool for our turn. It’s so exciting.

When room 3 gets out, it’s our turn, so we line up on the side of the pool and wait for our instructor. There is Scott, Crystal, Charlotte and Liz. They are helping us learn to swim.

We can all put our heads under the water. I like going under the water and picking up the penguin. We have to race to the end to find them. The first one back wins.

I can float like a starfish and use a board to kick to the end of the lane.

The best part is going into the deep part and jumping in doing a bomb. I can go deep into the pool.

We love swimming.                                    

Kiwa, Fuschia, Jacob and Josh 

Connecting citizens and journalists with YouTube Direct

Posted by Steve Grove, YouTube News and Politics
[cross-posted from the Official Google Blog]

Every day, people with video cameras are changing the ways we get our news. We see it during elections. We see it during earthquakes, fires and other natural disasters. We see it on our freeways, in our schools and in our public spaces. Almost any event that takes place today has a chance of being captured on camera. As YouTube has become a global platform for sharing the news, media organizations have been looking for a good way to connect directly with citizen reporters on our site so they can broadcast this footage and bring it to a larger audience.

That's why we created YouTube Direct, a new tool that allows media organizations to request, review and rebroadcast YouTube clips directly from YouTube users. Built from our APIs, this open source application lets media organizations enable customized versions of YouTube's upload platform on their own websites. Users can upload videos directly into this application, which also enables the hosting organization to easily review video submissions and select the best ones to broadcast on-air and on their websites. As always, these videos also live on YouTube, so users can reach their own audience while also getting broader exposure and editorial validation for the videos they create.



Though we built YouTube Direct to help news organizations expand their coverage and connect directly with their audiences, the application is designed to meet any organization's goal of leveraging video content submitted by the community. Businesses can use YouTube Direct to solicit promotional videos, nonprofits can use the application to call-out for support videos around social campaigns and politicians can use the platform to ask for user-generated political commercials. The opportunities to use the tool are as broad as the media spectrum itself.

Already, we've seen ABC News, the Huffington Post, NPR, Politico, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Washington Post, and WHDH-TV/WLVI-TV in Boston using YouTube Direct. We look forward to seeing many more organizations to do the same.

To get started, visit youtube.com/direct.

Radish-O-Rama

Today, at lunch time, the Green Team harvested their first crop of radishes. These were then sliced  up and offered  to the rest of the school to try. The queue of children wanting to try a radish wound its way across the lawn, with children returning to the back of the line again and again. Some children opted for the radish with some dip.

Comments from the children included 'yummy', ' very delicious',"very sweet", "can I take some home for Dad?".  Staff had to move quickly to get a taste!!

This was a great way to introduce children to new vegetables and the Green Team plan to sow more radishes for later on the year. 

A new face to Google News Sitemaps

Posted by Andy Golding, Google News Software Engineer

Given the feedback we get from publishers, we've redesigned our interface to make Google News Sitemaps more flexible and easier to submit. [As a reminder, a Google News Sitemap is a file created by publishers which gives you even more control over the content you submit to Google News].

We're currently in the midst of an exciting transition period and need your help to avoid interruption in crawling your content.

To facilitate this transition, we'll have a six-month grandfather period during which you can continue to use the old format for any existing Sitemap that was originally submitted using the old format. Any new Sitemap submission must follow the new format. Please take a few minutes to make the shift. If no change is made by the end of the grandfather period, you'll no longer receive the benefits of having your articles crawled via a Google News Sitemap.

If your site is already included in Google News and you haven't submitted a Google News Sitemap yet, we encourage you to do so in order to manage your news content. Please visit our updated instructions for details on how to start using the new format.

Main changes in this release:

• Publication Label Pulldown Menu: The publication label pulldown menu no longer exists in Webmaster Tools. Instead, you should now attach the equivalent information to each individual article in your Sitemap, as described below.
  
  Note: For previously-submitted Sitemaps in the old format, we will "remember" the last publication label you selected from the pulldown menu and use that; however, please update to the new format as soon as you can.


• New tags: In place of the publication menu, there are now three tags that you can attach to each article in your Sitemap giving the equivalent information:


• <publication>: Specifies the name and language of the publication that the article occurs in. Required.


• <genres>: Specifies the nature of the article as a comma-separated list chosen from: PressRelease, Satire, Blog, OpEd, Opinion, and UserGenerated. Required whenever any of these properties applies to the article.


• <access>: Specifies the accessibility of the article. Choices: Subscription or Registration. Required whenever either of the choices applies.

Please visit this help article for a complete description of the new News Sitemap format.


• Title tags: Article titles can be added using the <title> tag to help us identify the right title for your articles.


• More options to resubmit your sitemap: In addition to re-submitting your Google News Sitemap through your Webmaster Tools account, you can now resubmit it two other ways: robots.txt or ping. Note: The first time you submit your Sitemap, always use Webmaster Tools.

Check out this page for more details on the transition process, and please let us know if you have questions about your Google News Sitemap. Publishers can also visit the Sitemaps section of our User Help Forum, a place to ask questions, and interact with other users and Google guides.

Create and Share custom News sections

Posted by Sharad Jain and Nilesh Agrawal, Google News Software Engineers

Today, Google News is making it even easier to follow the latest stories on whatever subjects interest you. We are happy to announce our Custom sections directory, which gives users of some of our English-language editions the expanded ability to create comprehensive sections to put on their Google News home page or share with other users.

One of the great things about online news is the ability to filter by topics. Google News has long recognized this so we've allowed users to track articles based on keywords of their choice. But it has been a little tricky at times. For example, to follow news about topics related to outer space, you would have to create a pretty complex filter.

Now, if you're using Google News and can't find the perfect section, just create your own! You can do that by adding the relevant keywords. Then, if you are happy with the resulting section, you can publish it to a directory so others can benefit.



We have created an initial set of sections to get you started. There's one on Space, and others on topics such as U.S. Foreign Policy, Global Trade, Solar Power, and Hollywood. If you like them, click on "Add this section" and they'll appear on your home page.

The feature is currently available in the Google News editions for Australia, Canada, India, Ireland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States, and we look forward to expanding it soon.

Please visit our Help Center for more information on how to subscribe to custom sections or create them.

Local news now available in France

Posted by Mikey Levine, Software engineer

Last year we announced the launch of local news in the U.S., and later in the UK, India, Canada and Germany. Today we're delighted to let you know that we're making this feature available for France.

The Local news section lets you keep track of current events in your area. Once implemented, the top stories for a given area will be at the top of your results, and our rankings also take into account a publication's location to promote local sources for each story.

We work hard to improve our algorithm, including its ability to understand the relevant locations for a news story and the location of the source that reports a story. We also train our algorithm to detect when a news article is reporting about a particular location and when it's not. The city of Paris (also a world celebrity) has proven particularly challenging in this respect.

How can I add Local News to my Google News homepage?
To get started, look for the local section on your front page and enter your city or postal code in the local search bar, shown here:

If you don't see this section, you can also set up your local news by clicking "Personalize this page" on the top right of the page. On the menu that comes up, click "Add a local section":

Once you've clicked on this local section link, you'll see a place to enter a postal code or city. Use the drop-down menu to choose the number of stories you'd like to see. Once you click "Add Section" you'll see this section on your personalized Google News page.

As always, we're always working to improve our product, and appreciate your feedback.

Town Versus Country

Early on in Term 3 most of Addington's senior school went to Southbridge school to play some sport. It was a great day out there, and Southbridge wanted to return the favour by coming to our school for another day of sport. So on Tuesday morning, 60 children (4 sports teams) were welcomed at our full school assembly by Nga Matiko, Te Tipuranga, and Ms Heath. After a delicious morning tea (put on by the Addington PTA), we went out to play our sports.

First was soccer, which our team won 9 :1. It was a tough but fun game. Then it was the Netball B teams turn. Again we won 9:5.  After this the A Netball team played and they lost 26:9. This was a very tough game.

Last game was the Rugby which we won 24:14. This felt really good because the teams had tied at Southbridge.

All the teams played really well and worked together to the end. They all showed resilience, persistance, passion and personal best. Fantastic Addington attitude.

After the games we all gathered together in the hall, to eat ice blocks and chat with our new Southbridge friends. Then we said our goodbyes and they hopped on the bus and set off to Southbridge.

It was a fun and spectacular day that we all enjoyed and hope to do again sometime soon.

Green Team Digs In

Early Friday morning our soil arrived in a big truck and after lunch members of the Green Team enthusiastically filled the beds and spread the soil. Now we are set to go.

P.S. Our potatoes are up through the soil in our planter box bed!!!!!

Garden Beds Up and Ready For Planting

Yesterday, members of our Green Team were very excited to see the arrival of the new raised beds for the vegetable garden. Together with Reg Platt of Fresh Harvest Planters, and Graeme Wood, (friend of the school and great supporter of the Green Team), the children assembled the two new beds. There was much hammering of nails and sawing of pegs and the beds are now all ready to go! Thank you again to Reg for making the beds, and to Graeme for his continued help and advise. 

Four cubic metres of soil will be put in them today along with some donated compost from the Strictland St Gardens. The team is all ready to get planting!!!

Loud Shirts Brighten Assembly

At today's assembly, children and staff wore their brightest, loudest shirts in support of children with a hearing impairment. With a gold coin donation per shirt, the school raised over $145 for the cause.

Room 1 have been studying the letter 'U ' and entertained the whole school with their UKELELE performance. Fantastic!! 

Participants in the Literacy Quiz were acknowledged, and Alison Holland and Dorinda Hampton were thanked by students for all their hard work getting the two teams ready for the big night.

Shirley McDonnell and Mitch Luke were presented with flowers and thanked for all their hard work in getting Te Tipuranga ready for the Cultural Festival. (Photos from this will be put on the blog in the near future.)

Jamie McAllister's Dad, Andrew, was our Duffy "Caught Being A Great Dad", and received his certificate and prize book at the assembly. Jamie nominated his Dad because he "bought him cares and shared his money with him!!"

Highlighting the diversity of content in Google News

Posted by Rawan Hakeem, Google News Online Team

As you may know, we've always included some blogs from news organizations in Google News. However, we've heard from some of our users that the way we displayed these blogs in Google News was not very clear. To address this, we're now visibly marking articles published on a news blog with a "(blog)" label attached to the publication's name.

The same sources that were there before will still be available, and nothing will change in our rankings to impact where or how often they appear in Google News. We're making this change to ensure a high quality experience for our users and help them find these types of articles.

Here's an example to illustrate our change: this article from the blog section of the New York Times is now displayed under the name [New York Times (blog)].

If we crawl a blog-formatted site, all of the blog's articles should be assigned the "(blog)" tag. If you notice sites that are labeled incorrectly, please let us know.

Read news fast with Google Fast Flip

Posted by Krishna Bharat, Distinguished Engineer, Google News
[cross-posted from the Official Google Blog]

One problem with reading news online today is that browsing can be really slow. A media-rich page loads dozens of files and can take as much as 10 seconds to load over broadband, which can be frustrating. What we need instead is a way to flip through articles really fast without unnatural delays, just as we can in print. The flow should feel seamless and let you rapidly flip forward to the content you like, without the constant wait for things to load. Imagine taking 10 seconds to turn the page of a print magazine!

Today we're adding a new experiment to Google Labs: Google Fast Flip, accessible at fastflip.googlelabs.com. Fast Flip is a new reading experience that combines the best elements of print and online articles. Like a print magazine, Fast Flip lets you browse sequentially through bundles of recent news, headlines and popular topics, as well as feeds from individual top publishers. As the name suggests, flipping through content is very fast, so you can quickly look through a lot of pages until you find something interesting. At the same time, we provide aggregation and search over many top newspapers and magazines, and the ability to share content with your friends and community. Fast Flip also personalizes the experience for you, by taking cues from selections you make to show you more content from sources, topics and journalists that you seem to like. In short, you get fast browsing, natural magazine-style navigation, recommendations from friends and other members of the community and a selection of content that is serendipitous and personalized.

To build Google Fast Flip, we partnered with three dozen top publishers, including the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, Salon, Fast Company, ProPublica and Newsweek. These partners will share the revenue earned from contextually relevant ads. This gives publishers an opportunity to introduce new readers to their content. It also tests our theory that being able to read articles faster means people will read more of them, driving more ad revenue to publishers.

The publishing industry faces many challenges today, and there is no magic bullet. However, we believe that encouraging readers to read more news is a necessary part of the solution. We think Fast Flip could be one way to help, and we're looking to find other ways to help as well in the near future.

We've also made a mobile version of Fast Flip with tactile page flipping for Android-powered devices and the iPhone, so you can browse on the go. This is accessible at the same address.

Go to Google Labs and give Fast Flip a spin. If you have suggestions to make the service better, please let us know. We'll keep working on new ways to improve your news-reading experience. Happy flipping!

Erin Simpson Show comes to Addington

On Wednesday, Dan Costello and Will Alexander, presenters with the Erin Simpson show, visited School for  our Duffy Role Model Assembly. Dan and Will were welcomed by Te Tipuranga, and handed out Duffy books to selected children. 

They shared their favourite books with the children, the 'Complete Works of William Shakespeare', and Dr Seus 'Oh the Places You'll Go'. Dan read his Dr Seus book to the assembly and encouraged the children to keep following their dreams. 

After lots of questions about the Erin Simpson show, and a "few" autographs, Dan and Will were finally able to leave.  

Surprise For the Seniors

On Tuesday morning an enormous truck drove into the playground and parked up outside Rooms 9, 10, and 11.  The truck contained a long awaited surprise for the senior students....... Fantastic new desks and chairs to go in the recently renovated classrooms!!!! It was all hands on deck to help unload and then unwrap each desk, and stack of chairs. Very exciting!!! This new classroom furniture is all in place and our old worn tables stacked up ready for disposal later next term.(More about that later)

Google News is fluent in Arabic!

Posted by William Kanaan, Middle East and North Africa Product Manager

We're delighted to announce the launch of four new Arabic editions of Google News for Egypt, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Users in these countries can now access their country-specific news editions and get the latest headlines in topics such as Business, Sports, Entertainment and more.

With more than 40 million Arabic-speaking internet users across multiple countries, we understand the need to provide our users with the most relevant news for their region. Like all Google News editions, our computer-generated Arabic editions aggregate headlines from thousands of news outlets around the world, group similar stories together and link directly to the original sources that publish these stories. This enables users to search for topics they're interested in, and read a wide variety of perspectives from different sources. It also enables publishers to expand their reach to a wider audience, thus increasing traffic to their site.

If you'd like to see a site included in Google News, or would like to send feedback our way, please contact us.

We're very excited to offer this service to our Arabic users in Egypt, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, and we look forward to covering the rest of the Arab countries in the near future!

Google News Tips for Publishers

Posted by Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead
[cross-posted from the Google Webmaster Central Blog]

During my stint on the "How Google Works Tour: Seattle", I heard plenty of questions regarding News Search from esteemed members of the press, such as The Stranger, The Seattle Times and Seattle Weekly. After careful note-taking throughout our conversations, the News team and I compiled this presentation to provide background and FAQs for all publishers interested in Google News:



Along with the FAQs about News Sitemaps and PageRank in the video above, here's additional Q&A to get you started:

Would adding a city name to my paper—for example, changing our name from "The Times" to "The San Francisco Bay Area Times"—help me target my local audience in News Search?

No, this won't help News rankings. We extract geography and location information from the article itself (see video). Changing your name to include relevant keywords or adding a local address in your footer won't help you target a specific audience in our News rankings.

What happens if I accidentally include URLs in my News Sitemap that are older than 72 hours?

We want only the most recently added URLs in your News Sitemap, as it directs Googlebot to your breaking information. If you include older URLs, no worries (there's no penalty unless you're perceived as maliciously spamming -- this case would be rare, so again, no worries); we just won't include those URLs in our next News crawl.

To get the full scoop, check out the video (filmed by Michael Wyszomierski of our Search Quality Team) or the Google News Forum Publisher FAQ!

Suggest on Google News

Posted by Corrie Scalisi and Ari Shotland, Software Engineers

Like many of our users, we were very excited when Google Suggest was incorporated into Google.com almost a year ago. The feature provides real-time suggestions while you search.

Today, we're happy to announce that we've enabled Suggest in all of our Google News editions in English, French, Italian, German and Spanish. The feature can make your experience searching Google News better by helping you formulate queries, saving you keystrokes, correcting spelling mistakes and exposing you to queries you might not have thought of. The goal of all that? To get you to the articles you're looking for as quickly as possible.

As you can see, we've tuned our algorithm so that it presents suggestions that are particularly relevant for news-related queries:



We are working on enabling Suggest in other editions of Google News, so stay tuned!

Fantastic Performance at Cultural Festival

Last night 80 children from throughout the school, put on a most amazing performance at the Christchurch Town Hall, as part of the Christchurch Primary Schools Cultural Festival. The children were in two groups, the Junior Nga Matikao, and the Seniors as part of Te Tipuranga.  

Te Tipuranga had brought with them their kete of knowledge handed down to them by their treasured Tipuna. The children had photos of their special family members and ancestors in the kete.

During the performance two children used sign language to communicate  the  words of the waiata. 

 Nga Matikao celebrated the different cultures of our school in a colourful and lively performance. 

" I was really nervous, but when we got on stage everybody knew what to do and it was awesome! It made me real proud to be supporting my own school and I saw lots of my old friends from last year. "       Steve

"I got to wear my great, great, great Aunties piupiu, I felt very proud. And our girl's pukana at the end was 'funtastic' "      Brooke

"It felt good. I knew all the people liked us because they clapped and clapped"    Ben

Parents and Addington staff were very proud of all the children.

Conductive Education - One Small Victory but the Battle Continues

We have just been notified that our Therapy Funding has been reinstated. While this is great news unfortunately it is only for children who are presently on our school roll. We will not receive funding for any new students enrolling at our school. There is a review of Special Education to take place next year.

Check out this article in the Press Newspaper Saturday 15 August 2009. 

New Planter Box Arrives

Last Friday the Green Team was also busy assembling a planter box. This was kindly donated by Reg Platt of Fresh Harvest Planters. Reg delivered and then helped the Team to assemble the box. This planter is high sided so that our Conductive Ed children can access them from their wheelchairs. A big thank you to Harvest Planters for this. The school will be purchasing two more raised beds for our planned vegetable gardens, and the children are busy planning what they would like to grow.