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Interactive Map of San Diego County Fires Map, Updated October 23, 2007

Map of California Fires including North and South San Diego County.

The KPBS.org put together a excellent map of the San Diego Conty Fires. Built on Google Maps. Fires show fire icons of major fire, and you can click on the other icons for more information about the incident.

Updated 11:00 AM October 23, 2007

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Map of California Fires including LA County, Orange County, San Bernardino County, and San Diego County.

The Los Angeles Times put together a excellent map of the Southern California Fires. Built on Google Maps. California fires show fire icons of major fire, and you can click on the flames for more information about the incident. Updated by LA Times.

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Posted by Ryan Aquino, Software QA Engineer Lead, Picasa Web Albums

As someone who tests Google products daily, I know that the simplest solution is often the one that works best. In the case of online storage, whether it’s a picture, a video or an email, you should just, well, be able to store it without having to worry about whether you’ve got enough space in each particular product. That’s why the Picasa team is pleased to tell you that in a few hours we’ll be rolling out extra storage that you can purchase to use across several Google products (today, Picasa Web Albums and Gmail; soon, other applications like Google Docs & Spreadsheets). That will help make storage really useful, like letting you upload lots of full resolution images to Picasa Web Albums.

When you reach the limit of free storage (i.e., 1GB for Picasa Web Albums, 2.8GB for Gmail), consider this your overflow solution. Plans start at $20/year for 6GB (yes, $5 cheaper than before), with larger plans ranging up to 250GB. If only testing everything were this easy.

We’ll update this post as soon as we’re ready to take your order.

Update: And we’re live! To buy more storage, go here.

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Posted by Peeyush Ranjan, Engineering Manager and Hong Zhang, Software Engineer

We work hard to keep our search results as fresh as possible so that they reflect the most up to date content on the web. However, given the immense medium the Internet is, it’s hard to find all those pages that have just come into existence and make them available when people come looking for the latest information on new topics, whether it’s a highly anticipated cell phone launch, news about a popular celebrity or the latest political maneuvers. What makes providing the latest information harder is the small amount of time we have between the page creation and when we’d like to serve those results to you.

Despite these challenges, one thing should not be hard: finding the freshest results on the page. To make it easier for you to spot the newer pages among the search results, we are now going to tell you how long ago we’ve seen a page containing what we think you’re looking for.

For example, if on August 6th you were searching on Google.com for latest financial information following the Friday financial sector action, here’s how that result would have looked in the past:

From this you could only see that we crawled this page at a day level granularity. But now when you do this search you will also be able to tell how long ago we noticed this page, so you can quickly pinpoint which of these is results is likely to contain more recent information. Here’s the same example showing the annotation that tells you there’s something new in the results we’ve seen recently.

So if you’re looking for the most recent content on the web, this change should make it easier to find. And if you’re a webmaster looking to tell us about all the new content on your site we haven’t looked at yet, check out our support for sitemaps.

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Posted by Bill Weihl, Green Energy Czar

Reducing climate change by saving energy is an important effort we should all join, and that’s why we’re very glad to see the innovative thinking going into a variety of solutions. One idea, suggested by the site called “Blackle” (which is not related to Google, by the way, though the site does use our custom search engine), is to reduce energy used by monitors by providing search with a black background. We applaud the spirit of the idea, but our own analysis as well as that of others shows that making the Google homepage black will not reduce energy consumption. To the contrary, on flat-panel monitors (already estimated to be 75% of the market), displaying black may actually increase energy usage. Detailed results from a new study confirm this.

As computers become a bigger part of more people’s lives, they will consume an increasing amount of energy, which is why we’ve invested so much in making our data centers efficient and we’ve joined with others to launch Climate Savers Computing, which has a goal of reducing total power consumption by more than 50% for all computers by 2010.

There are some things you can do now to reduce the energy used by your computer, such as:

• turn on the power management features. Virtually all computers today have the ability to switch into low-power modes automatically when they’re idle; very few computers have this capability enabled! Here’s how to do it on computers running Windows XP.

• turn off your monitor and computer when you’re not using them

• turn down the brightness on your monitor

• make sure your next computer meets the efficiency standards of Climate Savers Computing (an efficient computer uses up to 50% less energy than a conventional one)

• to find the most efficient PCs available today, look for the words “EnergyStar 4.0 compliant.”

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Posted by Susan Taing, Associate Product Marketing Manager

Checkout stores are offering up to $20 in savings for the back-to-school season. Find out more on the Checkout blog.

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Posted by Peter Fleischer, Global Privacy Counsel

Cookies, IP addresses, logs — all of these are important things to understand in the context of online privacy. We try to explain them in clear and simple language in our privacy policy and FAQ. But they’re not always easy for non-techies to understand. Google is committed to being transparent about our privacy practices. We’ve been thinking about different ways to help people understand the technical aspects of online privacy, to improve transparency, and to empower you to make informed decisions about how you want to use our services. Today, we’re launching our first experiment to explain basic privacy concepts via video on YouTube. Here it is:

This video runs about 5 minutes, so we couldn’t cover everything. Over time, we hope to create additional videos where we talk about other privacy issues: what data do we collect when you register for a Google Account? or - when you search on Google while you’re logged in? or - why does Google keep server logs? But before we head down the road of sequels, we’d like to get your feedback on whether you find this video format helpful. So please watch it and tell us what you think. We look forward to hearing from you.

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Posted by Chris DiBona, Open Source Programs Manager

You’ll often hear members of our open source team say, “Every time you use Google, you’re using Linux.” It’s absolutely true. Check a Google engineer’s workstation, and you’ll probably find it’s running Linux. Do a search on Google.com, and a Linux server will return your results. Ever since Google got its start, Linux has given us the power and flexibility we need to serve millions of users around the world.

In turn, we feel a strong responsibility to the Linux community, and we’re always looking for creative ways to put our resources in the hands of Linux developers. That’s why today we became a licensee of the Open Invention Network (OIN), an innovative patent-sharing organization founded to create a legally protected environment for anyone who works with Linux.

The concept behind OIN is simple. All OIN licensees, including participants such as IBM, Oracle, NEC and Sony, agree to cross-license their Linux-related patents to the others free of charge. Patent issues therefore become a much smaller concern inside the community, and OIN members can focus their energy on writing and releasing software rather than vetting their code for intellectual property issues. It’s the legal equivalent of taking a long, deep breath.

For us, today’s announcement marks the latest development in a long, fruitful relationship with the open source community. The Google Summer of Code program has trained over 2,000 students as open source developers, many on Linux-related projects. We continue to fund external projects and host events like the Ubuntu Developer Summit and the Linux Foundation Innovation Summit. Hundreds of Googlers are submitting patches to Linux, and we’ve open-sourced over a million lines of code.

We believe Linux innovation moves fastest when developers can share their knowledge with full peace of mind. We’re proud to participate in an organization that’s making that possible, and we look forward to seeing OIN grow and thrive.

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