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Bottom-up journalism from the pros: News, tech and culture by Sheila Lennon

Fun with Google's newest embeddables

2:59 AM Thu, May 28, 2009 |
By Sheila Lennon    Email this author |   Email this entry


"Embedding is the new black," writes tech-book publisher Tim O'Reilly in a post that demonstrates the easily embedded Google Web Elements. The post (Google Web Elements and Google's Iceberg Strategy (Google I/O)) begins,

At Google I/O (Wednesday) morning, DeWitt Clinton announed Google Web Elements, a new simple interface layer to Google Ajax APIs. The goal is to make bringing Google features to other sites as easy as cut and paste. And indeed, the cut and paste functionality is impressive: Add news, custom search, conversations, maps and more to your site with only a few clicks. If the earlier HTML 5 announcements were for developers, these announcements are for everyone else. Any blogger can easily incorporate Google services.

No need to show this via screen shots. I can easily embed live widgets...

At the Google Maps Element page, type in an address and a title for the marker, and you immediately get code to copy and embed like a YouTube video. I'll show you how to make it display on the right like the one above at the end of this post.

My early favorite is the customizable news embed, because you can make your own. This lazy-Susan news search is a lot of fun to play with. "Rhode Island Arts" brought up some arts and some sports (oops). So I got narrower:













...And they all blink together.

Note that all paths lead back to Google, of course. O'Reilly notes,

Elements like these embedded on other pages around the web are the underwater portion of what you might call Google's iceberg strategy: a great deal of their usage is not on their own site, and so not measured by Comscore and others who measure search market share. In his keynote, Vic Gundotra mentioned that Google is now supporting more than 4 BILLION API calls daily across more than 60 different APIs.

(APIs let you, for instance, add your own markers to Google Maps and display the custom mappings only on your own site. What you create is not available on Google itself, as you're fetching a specific map layer from Google and sliding your markers on top of it.)


Back to moving that map: Not so obvious, and not explained: In the style section of this code,

· To send the map above to the right margin. I added a simple "float:right;" to the style section of its code.Text automatically wraps around it.

·To keep the text from bumping into the map, I changed "margin:0;" to "margin:8px;"


Oddly, in the map above, Google changed the Journal's zip code from 02902 to 02903. Will reality eventually have to follow Google?

The embeddables include Calendar, Conversation, Custom Search, Maps, News, Presentations, Spreadsheetsand YouTube News.

Conversation is an embeddable comments module, but you have to sign in with Google Friends Connect to use it.

Later: The Official Google Blog says, about the I/O conference,

you can follow updates on the @googleio Twitter stream; videos of all sessions will be available on code.google.com shortly after they conclude.... Videos from Day 1 of Google I/O are now available on our YouTube playlist.
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