Short post today: Google Notebook

(Sorry for the short post, but I’m on my way to work)

… Google Notebook.

Still not launched, so neither notebook.google.com nor google.com/notebook is showing anything.

In Yes, we are still all about search Marissa Mayer, Vice President of Search Products and User Experience reveals that Google will launch Google Notebook next week.

Google Notebook is:

“…a personal browser tool that lets you clip text, images, and links from the pages you’re searching, save clippings to an online notebook, and then share notebooks with others.”

I’ve been looking for such a tool over the past few days because I never get the idea to a great thing on the computer where I will work further on the idea.
So far I’ve emailed notes to myself, or misused an online task scheduler to keep my notes and ideas, so I’m really looking forward to Google Notebook.

Google just launched Google Trends which can give you a insight into the trends of how popular a specific keyword or keyphrase has been over time.

It lacks specific numbers, but the graphs tells some interesting stories anyway.

Here are a few examples of trends:

• Bird flu
• Cartoons
• Netscape
• Web 2.0

A really neat feature is that you can use Google trends to do comparisons such as:

• Bush vs. Kerry
• Netscape vs. Firefox vs Internet Explorer

I also tried searching for “flowerdelivery” to see if it would spike at specific times each year - Mother’s Day for instance, but all I got back was a “403 Forbidden”.

We’re sorry…

… but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can’t process your request right now.

I then tried “flower delivery” and got back two very distinct spikes plus two minor, but still very visible spikes

Google Calendar is finally out in beta, and the initial impression is that it looks nice.

The first thing that caught my eye was the “Quick Add”

Normally it can be a real pain to enter stuff into an electronic calendar because first you have to navigate to the right date, then navigateto the right time of day, then create a new entry, type in the information, and save the entry.

“Quick Add” is a bit different.

The example of what to fill in said “Dinner with Michael 7pm tomorrow” - so I copied just that - and lo and behold - it made an entry for tomorrow at 7pm that said “Dinner with Michael”

How cool is that.

So I tested Quick Add a bit more.

• Dinner with michael the day after tomorrow: Didn’t work
• Dinner with Michael 2 days from now: Didn’t work
• Dinner with Michael 7 pm next friday: Worked
• Dinner with Michael in Boston 7pm Saturday: Worked - and it even captured Boston as the location for the event
• Dinner with Michael at Joe’s in Boston 7pm Saturday: Worked - and the Google Map that can be launched had all the Joe’s restaurants in Boston flagged
• Dinner with Michael at 100 Atlantic Ave Boston 7pm Saturday: Worked - And Google Maps marked the exact location

Printing works by generating a nice PDF that you can preview before printing.

You’re supposed to be able to create an event in your Google Calendar from a Gmail email, but I’m currently missing the “Create event” option from my “More Actions” dropdown box in Gmail

You can have several calendars with Google Calendar, and they can be either Shared or non-shared (Public or Private).

And you can even differenciate between two different forms of shared access. One is total access to the events inthe calendar, and the other is access to free time/ busy time information, but without the details about what exactly it is you’re doing.

You can also grant specific people access to you calendar, which is really handy if you want a team calendar, a family calendar or are going away on vacation; You can give your team mates, the rest of the family or your secretary access to your calendar.

I’m gonna take a good long look at all Google Calendar has to offer over the next few days, because it looks really promising.

Gratz goes out to Scott Jarkoff for pointing out that Google Calendar had become available.