Here is an example of a site showing PR3 in the Google Toolbar:

This same site is not in the Google Index:

It was Memorial Day is a United States on the last Monday of May (May 25 in 2009). Memorial day is formerly known as Decoration Day, it commemorates U.S. men and women who died while in the military service. First enacted to honor Union soldiers of the American Civil War (it is celebrated near the day of reunification after the Civil War), it was expanded after World War I to include American casualties of any war or military action.

It seems like Google is also showing respect to people who have given their life for the country by displaying a very special yellow ribbon on their homepage like the screenshot above. In the past, certain groups and people criticized Google for not changing their logo on this day, while others have congratulated Google for ignoring the holiday.

The Google homepage also showed ribbons of other colors before. A red ribbon was put up on World AIDS day, and a black ribbon was put up during bomb attacks in Madrid in 2004, and London in 2005.

This is probably not new, but I recently noticed that on the bottom of this YouTube video showing how a 80×80x80 Rubik’s cube is solved, there’s a strong copyright notice. It reads: “Notice … This video contains an audio track that has not been authorized by WMG [Warner Music Group]. The audio has been disabled. … More about copyright”. The link then points to YouTube’s copyright tips.

I really wonder, how many videos have been muted like this? Well Its pretty hard to tell exactly, but I tried doing a search in Google with search query ["This video contains an audio track that has not been authorized by” site:youtube.com] returns around 342,000 hits (including some help pages from youtube, and perhaps some regional YouTube content too).

On a separate report, there was a rumor that YouTube is to run a trial of ’pre-roll’ video ads on selected content from several broadcasters starting from today. The pre-roll ads are short video ads shown before the video you requested and could be up to 30 seconds long. Advertisements will start appearing around videos from BBC Worldwide, ITN, Discovery, National Geographic and – from today – Channel 4.

I am pretty sure this this will become your favorite Gmail feature that has been rolled out via Gmail Labs: automated message translation.

How to Enable Gmail Message Translation

If you wish to enable this cool new feature just head over to your Gmail Labs settings, and the next time you see a mail written in a language that you cant read, you can hit a simple link which reads e.g. “Translate message to: English” above your email message, and the message will magically appear in English. If you wish to change your default language for this tool, go to the general settings tab, and you’ll find a selection box labeled “Default translation language”.

I am thinking whether Google plans to roll this feature out for everyone after the initial public testing and feedback-gathering. Some of the Gmail labs products seem to be too useful to leave out in the Labs section.

These days, translations of texts we don’t understand are often triggered with a click. For instance, when I need to translate something, I usually head over to Google Translate or press the translate button in my Google Toolbar.

However in future as we see more use of translations, it may be logical for Google to auto-translate a text when its not in my default language and at the same time they can probably show a disclaimer footnote that “this message was auto-translated for you” with a link to the original.

And if this sort of features are built into the browser itself and not built per-app then it would be just great. For instance Google’s Chrome browser might one day automatically translate every web page you visit, as you visit it. But of course there are few downsides, mistranslation being one of them.

Any thoughts?

Salesforce.com has recently rolled out the Service Cloud, a customer service application that basically tries to capture the crowdsourced pools of knowledge floating across the internet from sites like Google, Facebook and Amazon, and then uses this information to better equip commercial customer service operations with useful knowledge.

The the good news is, Salesforce has already connected Twitter to the Service Cloud, allowing customer service reps using the SaaS to access tweets from more than 8 million Twitter users.

Salesforce’s CRM for Twitter basically allows enterprises to search for tweets about their companies, products and their brands. Here’s how it works. First, Salesforce CRM searches within the Service Cloud for any tweets that are relevant to a company. Then, the company can capture and monitor the conversation, creating a database in the Service Cloud that keeps track of all subsequent conversations about the company. The Service Cloud also allows enterprises to tap into company-wide online communities, creates connections to existing social networks and the blogosphere, provides SEO tools, shares the social network knowledge with business partners, and integrates customer service operations into the cloud.

The Service Cloud looks like a very useful tool to capture and then sort conversations about a particular enterprise. But what’s fascinating is how businesses want to tap into the dialogue of what’s happening on social networks, like Facebook and Twitter. Salesforce has consistently managed to provide innovative, desirable technology platforms for enterprises to merge their business operation with the web 2.0 world.

The cool search aggregator application allows users to find items on Oodle, Kijiji, Ebay and Craigslist. It also allows its users to add RSS feeds from Trulia, Google Base and others to track items, jobs, apartments and cars. The results from each site are displayed in separate panes, a.ka. TinkBoxes, within the page. The user can access the site-specific searches (on Ebay or Craigslist) by clicking on the corresponding TinkBox. Searches can be limited by both location (TinkOmatic offers over 20 geographic locations) and by type of item. All searches can be saved and refreshed whenever the user accesses TinkOmatic. The site also enables people to create advanced search filters within their RSS readers and TinkOmatic searches featured on the site.

Here’s a instructional video about the site:

One economy-relevant feature is the ability to hunt for jobs, track listings and have the job searches updated each time a user logs in to the site. And of course, it’s a useful tool to organize updated multiple classified and auction searches in one area. In theory, it’s sort of similar to Trackle, NotifyMe and Yotify, except devoted to a concentrated area. On the downside, TinkOmatic’s interface is fairly basic and could be spruced up to offer more features like email alerts. But it’s certainly a good start.

After many steamy rumors, Google Health has finally decided to store our medical records in a secure way that is more accessible, easier to understand, and useful than traditional paper records.

Since the last announcement, we actually haven’t heard too much about the service, which isn’t particularly surprising given the sensitive nature of the information involved. Recently Google has announced that it has launched a significant new feature, giving users the ability to share their medical records with designated family or close friends.

The general idea behind the feature is that in many times specially during emergencies close-family members may not know the details of your medical history, like medical allergies. Such information can be lifesaving, but sharing extremely personal medical information is not something that should be taken lightly. Google is taking lengthy measures to ensure the security of the data, associating invite links to specific Email addresses and allowing users to track who has viewed their records. All shared records are also read-only.

For those users who are less tech-savvy, Google is also launching a new feature that makes it easy to print out wallet-sized snapshots of your medical profile, which you can distribute to close family or perhaps just keep in your own wallet. The site is also launching a new graphing feature, allowing users to visualize the progress of health-related metrics like their blood pressure or cholesterol.

Embedr is a very new service which is completely free that lets you build custom video playlists from a variety of online clip sources and gives you the opportunity to aggregate the entire playlist into a good-looking widget which you can easily share on your blog or website.

It’s an elegant solution for those times you want to embed multiple videos in a blog post or on any web page without cluttering your site and forcing visitors to scroll down in order to watch all the clips you’re sharing. Creating widgets is ridicously simple, but we should note Embedr doesn’t host videos and can only pull videos from third-party services like YouTube, MySpace Video, DailyMotion, MetaCafe, Veoh, Vimeo, Blip.tv and more. The maximum number of videos you can add to one playlist is 100.

TwitBrain

You can Follow @TwitBrain and get served calculations on a regular basis (like 3 per hour). If you can become the first person to reply with the correct answer, you’ll earn one point and hopefully make your way to their top 10 lists.

BeatMyTweet

Simply follow @BeatMyTweet and do the exact same thing, but this time with word scrambles. Warning: it’s ridiculously easy so be fast if you want to be one of the first 10 to reply with the correct answer. Leaderboards here.

Beginning of this year, Google released a cool offline version of Gmail based on Google Gears. Last month, Google has started to offer an offline version of Google Calendar to enterprise app customers. But today, The Google Calendar Offline has been rolled out to every account.

Once you click on the “Offline” link at the top of the page, the application will ask you once to enable Google Gears for the Calendar. Just follow the screen and once you do that, it allows you to read your calendar when you are not connected to the Internet. A simple Google Calendar icon appears on your desktop. When you click on it, your browser opens up to show your recent schedule (it only goes back up to 1 month). For the most part, the offline version is read-only. You cannot edit existing entries until are back online. However, you can add new entries in your calender.

There are obviously some syncing issues going on here, but it seems that Google should be able to figure out how to let you edit your calendar and then sync once you are connected. Without that ability, it is a hampered product. But it is still better than no offline access whatsoever.