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.