i love my job.

Our team just finished writing for the Fall/Winter big book, which is one of the biggest books of the year (with over 700 pages). Every time we finish a big book, whether it's the Spring/Summer one or the Fall/Winter, our boss Steve takes our team out for a celebration. Most of the time, it's a late breakfast at IHOP or a fun lunch. This time, we're going to lunch and then out for a movie...but the best part is that we can leave after the movie at like 2! It's basically like an afternoon off just for doing our job! Umm... how much do I love my job? A LOT.
Yay for Horton Hears a Who! I'll tell y'all how it goes :)

P.S. Speaking of JCP catalogs, take a look at this one from 1977... Pretty funny stuff (as well as the captions!).

Google App Engine + Google Data APIs: A Match Made on the Web

Posted by Marzia Niccolai, Google App Engine Team



Don't you think it'd be cool if you could blog about a party, add it to your calendar and invite all your friends in one fell swoop? After the party, how about viewing photos and videos from the event in the same application? The Google Data APIs make all this possible, and your Google App Engine apps can use feeds from Google services to display and update information for a particular user stored by these services.




The Google Data APIs team just released an update to the Google Data Python client library which includes support for Google App Engine. With this library, your app can now use AuthSub to gain access to your users' feeds.




Jeff Scudder, member of the Google Data APIs team and the main contributor to the Google Data Python client library, has written an article that takes you through all of the steps necessary to use Google Data feeds in your Google App Engine application. He's even added his sample application to our Google App Engine sample code project.




Try out it, and let us know what you come up with!

New mobile image ads

Posted by Alexandra Kenin, Product Marketing Manager, Mobile Ads

The mobile ads team is happy to announce the launch of mobile image ads. These look like standard image ads for desktop web pages but they are smaller to fit on mobile screens and they run on the mobile content network. Take a look at the mobile image ads example page to see samples. Also, watch the video below to see my interview with Sanjay Agarwal, a mobile ads engineer, and his demo. Note that all mobile image ads are keyword-targeted, are priced on a cost-per-click basis, and must link to a mobile web page.

For advertisers, mobile image ads serve as a branding tool and have shown to have good clickthrough rates. Advertisers using mobile image ads will also benefit because we only show one image ad per mobile page. For publishers, mobile image ads provide added flexibility. They can now choose to show text ads, image ads, or a mix of both and Google will dynamically return the ad that we expect will perform best at the time the ad is shown. Publishers who are already using AdSense for mobile content just need to update their AdSense code to start displaying mobile ads on their site.

For those of you who are mobile web surfers, mobile image ads provide a new way to interact with mobile content. Contextual targeting keeps ads relevant, and with only one mobile image ad shown per page, you can uninhibitedly browse mobile websites while clicking only on the ads that interest you.

Mobile image ads are currently available in Australia, China, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Russia, Spain, the UK, and the US. As always, leave questions and comments below or on our YouTube channel.