Google has added themes to Gmail. The above screenshot shows the Terminal theme. Below is another called Tea House. I’ve taken to using Gmail with Apple Mail since they turned on IMAP support but this is still a welcome sight for a very old and boring interface.

more info here

• OSX 10.6 Exchange support added
• Google implements Marratech video conferencing in Gmail

Lookout Skype!

Video chatting from Gmail is as easy as sending an instant message. With our team spread out across Google offices in Sweden and the U.S., it’s been really handy in helping us work together. Just click on the new “Video & more” menu in a Gmail chat window and select “Start video chat” or “Start voice chat.” You can switch to a full screen view or pop out the chat window and change the size and positioning as you wish.

via Google Blog – SFGate.com – TechCrunch

• Skype on your next LCD TV
• Gmail Themes a welcome feature

Says they’ll be able to map an area the size of New Mexico daily.

“The GeoEye-1 satellite has the highest ground resolution color imagery available in the commercial marketplace and will produce high-quality imagery with a very accurate geolocation,” said Google spokeswoman Kate Hurowitz, adding that most commercial satellite imagery has a resolution of 60cm. “It is our goal to display high-resolution imagery for as much of the world as possible, and GeoEye-1 will help further that goal.”

via Silicon Alley Insider

• Red One by Red Digital Cinema
• Newsflash: Men like porn

Google Knol has launched. Looks interesting and at first glance I’d say this is not a threat to Wikipedia. Reminds me more of Google Answers in wiki form.

Here is a sample article, “Firefox Plugins For SEO & SEM”

Speaking of SEO, how do you think links back to your site from Knol will help you placement?

• MyBlogLog plugin working with WordPress
• Social Media Optimization project: Democrats Abroad

Google in talks to acquire Digg for 200m. Get ready for Digg everywhere.. In your mail, on your maps and in your medical records.

via TechCrunch

• Vote November 4th 2008
• Google implements Marratech video conferencing in Gmail

The most recent version of WordPress has a tab called “Turbo” in the upper right hand corner of the admin dashboard. This is where you can configure Google Gears for a speed increase in WordPress administration. The speedup is noticeable however it does not feel quite like an app running off of you drive. Promising tech however and I look forward to seeing how far they can get with offloading repetitive code chunks to my local machine rather than having to download them every time.

• MyBlogLog plugin working with WordPress
• Broadband video spot for Digi

Future similar technologies will be built into the devices you record video with enabling the import and deep tagging of video segments by specifying keywords from the timeline. That will make editing your 11 hours of vacation video all that much easier, eh?

Apparently, speech recognition technology developed by Google Research is now used to transcribe every video in the politicians channel. So when you search for “Iraq,” you can see every video where Iraq is mentioned by John McCain, by Barack Obama or by any politician. Now, many of these speeches get transcribed anyway, either in part or in their entirety — it’s not like people had a hard time Googling McCain’s statements on Iraq before. But this makes even more political content available for searching, and it also helps you find the relevant portions of these videos. Every mention of your search term is highlighted as a yellow line in the video timeline, and when you mouse over the line you get a short snippet of the transcript.

via venturebeat

• Social media for finding a job
• Bloodthirsty War Mongerer by Jill Greenberg