Over the past few months, myriad sites across the web (including Google News) have adopted the +1 button to help start conversations. But there hasn’t been an easy way for signed-in users to see what news articles your friends are enjoying — until now.
Starting today, the Spotlight section will sometimes include articles that your Gmail contacts and people in your Google+ circles have publicly +1’d. You can see their profile pictures and click through to their Google+ profiles, just like on Social Search. And of course you can +1 the stories too, expressing your opinion and optionally sharing with your circles.
Here’s what Spotlight looks like with social annotations:
We hope this change helps you find more great articles to enjoy, and gives more power to your +1s.
In honor of Thanksgiving in the United States, we thought it appropriate to discuss a frightening trend that comes to mind during this holiday: turkey attack videos.
In October, this video of a news producer getting harassed by a wild turkey (with the camera rolling) became a viral hit, picking up over 450,000 views.
Meanwhile, these children decided to play bullfighter with a turkey, that is until the turkey got fed up. This clip from the Philippines just took off this week in time for the holiday:
Seriously, these turkeys are fearless. This one was captured on video in January going right after a mail truck:
If there was a whole holiday dedicated to your demise, you might be angry too. Angry enough to ruin a children’s soccer game.
Some of the top rising searches today on YouTube are tied to some Thanksgiving traditions both new and old. There are lots of searches (and newly uploaded videos) from Ohio State’s famous annual Mirror Lake Jump.
Meanwhile, others search for info on Adam Sandler’s Thanksgiving song — you can learn to play it on guitar yourself here — while others seek out clips from the classic Peanuts “Charlie Brown Thanksgiving.”
PROTECT-IP is a bill that has been introduced in the Senate and the House and is moving quickly through Congress. It gives the government and corporations the ability to censor the net, in the name of protecting “creativity”. The law would let the government or corporations censor entire sites– they just have to convince a judge that the site is “dedicated to copyright infringement.”
The government has already wrongly shut down sites without any recourse to the site owner. Under this bill, sharing a video with anything copyrighted in it, or what sites like Youtube and Twitter do, would be considered illegal behavior according to this bill.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, this bill would cost us $47 million tax dollars a year — that’s for a fix that won’t work, disrupts the internet, stifles innovation, shuts out diverse voices, and censors the internet. This bill is bad for creativity and does not protect your rights.
