Huge, interesting and important New York Times article on Google in China today.  No response on the Google Blog, but they do quote "a Chinese saying" in a new article on how you can avoid repetitive stress injuries at work.  That just seems tasteless to me.

Ok calendaring companies out there - what have you got that can beat the new Google Calendar?  I am, in many ways, sick of Google - but you have to admit they've done a very good job here.  Two coolest things in my mind:  Ajax support throughout and natural language event adding.  In other words, I can hit quick add and type "kick dog in yard at 1:30 am" and all the important details will be added to my calendar.  My goodness, it's enough to get me off my desktop calendar.  Nothing else has been so far, that's for sure.

• Nicole Simon has some philosophical thoughts to share in her review.
• Trumba blogs about the relationship between their calendars and Google's via new Trumba features that will be rolled out tomorrow.
• Looks like "who can top it" is the wrong question to ask.  See Charlene Li's great long review and comments following.  It's all about the platform.
• The Unofficial Apple Weblog (a Winc member) has a tutorial on synching your GCal with your Mac's iCal.  It's only one way, though - things you add to your GCal will be autoimported to your iCal but not the other way around.  That's probably an ok thing.

The official Google Blog pointed today to a story circulating through the Christian Science Monitor and USA Today all about how people in the developing world are having their lives changed drastically by Adsense.  People in countries with lower wages than those paid in the US, for example, don't get paid any less per click in Adsense.  On one level this is a fantastic point, simply true and too seldom pointed out.

Though there aren't any URLs to see these peoples' sites in action, the story says they are legit content providers and not sploggers.  And why shouldn't they be?  Perhaps those of us trapped in English only, US-centric webspace only come across developing world sites with Adsense when one comes by email or blog comments to pick our fat pockets.  (Of course there's no shortage of people doing the same or worse in the US as well.)  Meanwhile there's a whole world full of people out there talking amongst themselves and doing their thing online - and apparently Adsense is kissing their babbies and rescuing their kittens from trees and stuff.

Anybody care to post links to their favorite localized sites supported by Adsense and containing compelling, original content?

Ok, so I searched for the names of the people mentioned in the story and these are their sites as far as I can tell:

• http://www.nibbleguru.com/
• http://www.alleba.com  (Ouch, the company blog has 2 readers via Feedburner.  Seems like a totally legit search engine for info related to the Phillipines though.)
• http://www.freeware-alternative.uni.cc/

After much speculation and rumor, it was just announced on the official Google blog that the web based word processor Writely has been acquired as part of their strategy to offer a whole host of online services.  Writely has a copyright from Google on the bottom of the page already.  Their FAQ page has a section on it about Google, but it also still says

How much does Writely cost?

During the beta period, Writely is free.

Yet, check this out:

Will you start showing Google ads in my documents?

There are currently no plans to add advertising to the site. If that changes, we'll let folks know.

And if you were wondering like I was, it looks like Writely has added Mac support.  They still aren't taking new users yet, but there's a waiting list.

Mathew Hurst grabs a couple of graphs from BlogPulse to show that YouTube is getting more mentions and rising faster than Google Video.  He asks if it's the low resolution that makes it easy and thus more compelling for people to use YouTube.  I wonder whether it isn't some of the unhippness of Google and its plans for world domination.  I remember when some one first told me about Google and it had that coolness from the margins.  Both services allow embedding a video into your site.  Google Video seems to have less bandwidth issues and the content is arguably more high-brow if not more compelling.  Is YouTube's lead a victory of the lowest common denominator? 

Google just announced three widgets for Mac OSX:  one to post to your Blogger.com blog, another to see your GMail in a glance and a third to view your archived search history.   It's easy enough for me to watch a Firefox or Safari tab for the number of new emails in my inbox.  And my search history?  No thanks!  See the following survey from the University of Connecticut, released yesterday, discovered via SearchEngineWatch.com.

Google.org, the philanthropic arm of the Google empire, has announced that Larry Brilliant, epidemiologist and co-founder of The Well, will be its new Executive Director.  This Fast Company article six years ago called Brilliant "a man who's found himself at the center of almost every defining moment of his generation" and who is uniquely qualified to get Baby Boomer greed under control. 

Google.org supports some interesting looking initiatives right now, it will be interesting to see where that work goes with Dr. Brilliant at the helm.

Update:  See this Wired story on Briliant's first goal - an auto alert system for emerging diseases that could operate independent of any government.

Haven't seen any confirmation or anything other than the standard "we can't comment" since the rumours of Google flirting with Riya started flying. Riya (nee Ojos) uses face recognition technology to help autotag your photo collection. I got a demo of Riya from the uber-fun Tara Hunt at Tagcamp and was pretty impressed — you train the software simply by tagging a few photos of someone, and it then automagically finds other photos of that person and autotags them. It's not perfect yet, but it did make an impressive number of correct matches, even identifying photos where the person's face was turned or in shadow, etc.

Of course I'm going to complain that it's Windows-only (and IE6 only, even, blech!)... which makes it a perfect candidate for the Goog, who loves to stick it to Mac users. ;) Riya plans Firefox and Mac support in the future, so I'm complaining now while the complaining is good. Anywho — you know how rumours are, and we may still not know anything even after Riya's launch party tonight at TechCrunch central.

Om has more on the rumours.

[Via Memeorandum]

So the Google Base service that was sniffed out last month is now live. Google Blogoscoped has a nice review of the app with screenshots. Haven't tried it myself yet and honestly, I'm not that excited about it. Enough of my Base already belongs to Google, really, and it's difficult to garner any enthusiasm for Yet Another Walled Data Garden. YMMV — let us know in the comments if you're make use of Google Base and what you like/dislike about the service.