Changes For Good

Google Inc. has quite a number of corporate blogs focused around particular products and services they offer and a number of Googlers (that is what Google employees call themselves) have personal blogs with tips, recommendations, ruminations and so forth around Google, but I have yet to see Googlers start a blog about how their employer could help save the planet. Why not? And if this is a good idea, who is going to start it?

Or perhaps it shouldn’t be manned by Googlers at all; instead people who are customers of and evangelists for Google — people like Philipp Lenssen and Nancy Blachman?

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Government and university websites are not very keen to post Google ads, for obvious reasons. They are not looking to make a few bucks off advertising to help cover their operating costs. That’s what taxpayers are for! Plus it would erode their credibility to do so. However, a number of these organizations I bet would be interested in posting public service announcements, so why couldn’t Google evolve AdSense into something that allowed .gov’s and .edu’s to post contextually-relevant public service ads without any risk of a commercial message sneaking in there?

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I would like to see all the contextual advertising networks like Google AdSense, YPN (Yahoo Publishing Network), Chitika, etc. have an option where, instead of getting a check or electronic payment to your bank account, you could donate your revenue earnings directly to a charity of your choice.

Does anybody know if an ad network is offering that already? Do you know any bloggers who donate their AdSense revenue to charity? I am thinking of putting AdSense ads on my blogs, this one included, and donating the ad proceeds to charity.

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You may have read recently in the news about how Orkut, a social network website offered by Google, is being used by drug dealers and other nasties to facilitate illegal transactions. Google has supposedly been working with law enforcement in Brazil to clamp down on these things, which is a good thing.

I wonder if an Orkut or a LinkedIn could become a social network for good? LinkedIn is a wonderful network for finding a job, or finding a prospective employee, or making new business contacts. It would be great if that service or Orkut could cater to people who want to make a difference in the world, helping them to find other people who want to make a difference in a similar sort of way, so that they could collaborate together?

Orkut, LinkedIn, you guys listening? 

(2 votes, average: 4 out of 5)

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Google has high hopes for their Google Base as you can glean from articles like this one.

Perhaps it will be an eBay killer. Perhaps not. In any event, it is a great repository for product information, classified ads, recipes and so on.

I would love to see Google Base used widely for the dissemination of lesson plans, where teachers would share their lesson plans with other teachers from around the world.

I think Google should not only encourage this, but also launch a program to facilitate it. At a minimum there should be a category called “Lesson Plans”, because a search doesn’t return anything useful. And Google should seek out teachers like they sought out video content for Google Video.

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It would be great to see an online version of the AIDS Quilt with a Google Maps-like interface with smooth panning around the Quilt. There is a Java-based viewer but it isn’t loading for me (perhaps it doesn’t work on the Safari browser). They should also allow people to add a “virtual” panel.

Google Maps-based mashups seem to be all the rage, ever since HousingMaps started it all. Even Google has gotten into it, applying their Google Maps interface to other things besides world geography, including the surface of the moon and the surface of Mars. Perhaps Google Inc. would be happy to repurpose their maps interface for the AIDS Quilt? 

(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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