Posted by Bindu Reddy, Group Product
Manager
Last year, we shared our
href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/01/look-ahead-at-google-video-and-youtube.html"
id="k6vm" >vision
focus on organizing all the web's video. We have a lot of new
features to tell you about, so head over to the
Google Video blog for more information about our new look.
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Posted by Bindu Reddy, Google Video
Product Manager
When your friends and well-intentioned acquaintances tell you that
you've made a mistake, it's good to listen. So we'd
like to say thank you to everyone who wrote to let us know that we
had made a mistake in the case of Google Video's Download to
Own/Rent Refund Policy vs. Common Sense.
To recap: we decided to end the Google Video download to own/rent
(DTO/DTR) program, and are now refocusing our Google Video
engineering efforts. The week before last, we wrote to Google Video
DTO/DTR program customers to let them know that videos they'd
already bought would no longer be playable.
We planned to give these users a full refund or more. And because
we weren't sure if we had all the correct addresses, latest
credit card information, and other billing challenges, we thought
offering the refund in the form of Google Checkout credits would
entail fewer steps and offer a better user experience. We should
have anticipated that some users would see a Checkout credit as
nothing more than an extra step of a different (and annoyingly
self-serving) kind. Our bad. Here's how we're hoping to fix
things:
We're
giving a full refund — as a credit card refund — to everyone who
ever bought a video. We'll
need you to make sure we have your most recent credit card
information, but once we know where to send the money, you'll
get it.
You can still keep the Google Checkout credit that you've
received already. Think of it as an additional 'we're sorry
we goofed' credit.
We're going to continue to support playing your videos for
another six months. We won't be offering the ability to buy
additional videos, but what you've already downloaded will
remain playable on your computer.
We take pride in moving quickly, and we think this philosophy helps
to create lots of new and innovative products. But it also leads to
errors that — upon reflection and your feedback — we need to
rectify. This was one of them. We make mistakes; we do our best not
to repeat them — and we really do try to fix the ones we make.
That said, the very least that our users should expect from us is
that our mistakes be new and innovative, too. 
We appreciate your responses, and hope our actions convey just how
seriously we take everyone's feedback.
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Posted by Bindu Reddy, Product
Manager
Today we're excited to announce
existing content collection efforts like web crawl, Google
Sitemaps, Google Print and Google Video. Google Base enables
content owners to easily make their information searchable online.
Anyone, from large companies to website owners and individuals, can
use it to submit their content in the form of data items. We'll
host the items and make them searchable for free. There's
here.
Some organizations are already using Google Base. Here are a few
examples.
"Students need as much information as possible when they
are searching for the right college or university. Google Base
helps us reach students and parents and deliver more of the
information they need when making important college
decisions." - Hal Higginbotham, President,
CollegeBoard.com
"We want to use knowledge and information about the
environment to help motivate more responsible public and private
action. With Google Base, we can bring the public key insights on
sustainability issues – like climate change, human health, and
resource consumption – and bring about change." – Amy Cassara,
Senior Associate, World Resources Institute
"CareerBuilder.com's business model is built on
providing employers with as many avenues as possible to connect
with job seekers. Feeding our jobs to Google Base further extends
our distribution network, providing employers with added support in
marketing their open positions." - Richard Castellini, VP of
Consumer Marketing, CareerBuilder.com
"We compile an enormous amount of valuable data on fine
art and artists, and we want collectors, dealers, students and art
aficionados to have easy access to this information. Google Base
enables us to reach more people researching art and get them the
information they need." - Brent Peich, Director of Marketing,
Artnet
"Our mission is to make it easy for small businesses to
use the web to drive in-store sales. Google Base gives us an ideal
outlet to promote and distribute content about local products more
broadly." - Kendall Fargo, Founder & CEO, StepUp
Commerce
Right now, there are two ways to submit data items to Google Base.
Individuals and small website owners can use an interactive user
interface; larger organizations and sites can use the bulk uploads
option to send us content using standard XML formats.
Rather than impose specific schemas and structures on the world,
Google Base suggests attributes and item types based on popularity,
which you can use to define and attach your own labels and
attributes to each data item. Then searchers can find information
more quickly and effectively by using these labels and attributes
to refine their queries on the experimental version of Google Base
search.
This beta version of Google Base is another small step toward our
goal, creating an online database of easily searchable, structured
information. As always, we welcome
feedback and ideas.
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