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YouTube and Pulitzer Center launch journalism contest

YouTube and the Pulitzer Center have partnered together to launch Project: Report, a contest for non-professional, aspiring journalists. The contest's focus is on stories that are might not get covered by the traditional media, like community issues or personal profiles.

Over the course of three rounds, contestants are to complete an assignment that is then uploaded to YouTube. A panel from the Pulitzer Center will choose 10 semi-finalists whose subsequent round work will be judged by the YouTube community. Five finalists will advance to the final round and compete for the grand prize: a $10,000 journalism fellowship with the Pulitzer Center. Finalists will receive technology prizes provided by Intel and Sony VAIO.

The deadline for Round 1 submissions is midnight EST on October 5, 2008. The assignment: profile someone in you community, highlighting a story you think deserves to be told, in three minutes or less.

[via YouTube Blog]

More iGoogle bling

Back in January, Google launched an iGoogle themes library, providing users with a way to give some color and customization to their iGoogle pages. This week, they launched a new collection, featuring designs by designers like Vera Wang, Gucci, Kate Spade, Burberry, and styled by musicians (or, there PR people) like Radiohead, Gnarls Barkley and Bob Dylan.

[via Official Google Blog]

Gmail Labs introduces new Reply options

Gmail Labs has just introduced three new options to make replying to e-mails even easier. The features are quote selected text, default reply to all and vacation time. Quote selected text is exactly what it sounds like. Select some text (note: this does not work in Chrome or Safari right now, but will soon), hit "r" and that text is quoted in your reply. Default reply to all is great for anyone who often has to reply to a team e-mail that is not using a team list. I know this is something I often futz up. Vacation time is actually quite cool: you can set-up your vacation auto-response BEFORE you go on vacation and then schedule it in Google Calendar. Sweet.

[via Official Gmail Blog]

Open source sample Android applications

What, Googleholic covers Android again? Shocking, I know. The Android Developers Blog has posted three new open source samples to the apps-for-android project. These apps, Triangle, SpriteText and Downloader, show off techniques from the various Android APIs, giving developers a look at how certain techniques work and can be used. Triangle and SpriteText focus on OpenGL and the GLView view class.

[via Android Developers Blog]

New features for Google Docs

It's back to school season for Google Docs and the Google team launched a slew of new features. Presentations, which is celebrating its first anniversary, got a whole new interface face lift, Ctrl-Z undo capability, easy zooming and the option to decide what order objects appear, as well as new text boxes.

Google also teamed with Merriam-Webster to bring Dictionary & Thesaurus functionality to Docs, much like hitting Shift F7 (or whatever the hell the shortcut is in Office for Mac, I remapped mine to work correctly) in Microsoft Word.

In addition to definition and synonym lookup, you can also look up a term or phrase in Encyclopedia Britnanica, which is pretty cool for students. You can also search for words or images using Google Search directly within Docs.

Docs also launched a new Table of Contents template, perfect for anyone working on a school report or multi-page project.

[via Official Google Docs Blog]

Google Mobile App for BlackBerry

I love Google's BlackBerry applications. They seriously rock my world. Well, Google decided that the individual applications weren't quite enough, so they've launched the Google Mobile App for BlackBerry. This app provides easy access to all of Google's other BlackBerry apps and web-based services from one location, provides fast Google searches, search history. Even better, it supports Google Apps -- which makes it much easier to access stuff like Calendar and Docs than the old m.google.com/a/domain method.

You can download Google Mobile for BlackBerry by going to http://m.google.com in your BlackBerry browser and downloading the application. If you have Google's older BlackBerry apps installed, some modules will be replaced by the new program.

[via Google Mobile Blog]

Mobile Search adds My Location

Windows Mobile users have just been given a more efficient way to search for local addresses and businesses. Google has applied its My Location technology, which it developed to use a cell towers location information to approximate the location of your cellular phone and provide better location information, even if your phone does not have GPS, to its local search options for Windows Mobile phones. In the past, Google's local search used the last address you entered as its starting point. Now, it will use your cell tower information, so typing weather will show local weather results.

[via Google Mobile Blog]