You’re not in Kansas any more – Google’s new name and logo.

xkcd – Not so much a joke as an awesome gimmick that caters well to its core readers

Google Translate For Animals – We can all be Dr. Dolittles now! (Great video in here)

MapThatPad Telepathic Helmets - MapThatPad introduces finding apartments without typing a key or moving a mouse!

YouTube - Watch any YouTube video in an ASCII rendition (TextP) and save Google $1/second in bandwidth costs.

• Twitter growth: To follow up an twitter’s growth chart from a couple weeks ago, it has now surpassed New York Times in terms of pageviews (although still lagging behind CNN at the moment, but catching up rapidly).

• WordPress now has post-by-email:  I guess it was just a matter of time before WordPress added this (but I must say it took them a while). They say imitation is the best form of flattery, so hats off to Gary and Sachin.

• Indian elections: With the month-long general elections going on in India, its amazing to see how fragmented the political landscape is there. We often complain that the 2 party system is not enough, so its interesting to follow whats going on in a country that’s facing a completely different problem. There are more parties than you can keep track of creating a the need for multi-party coalitions just to make up a majority to win. As a result, you have volatile governments that are as stable as the coalitions that comprise them.

• A collection of UI design patterns: Great collection of screenshots of various webapps grouped by function. A handy reference when thinking about design.
• Yahoo! Query Language: This has apparently been out for a while but I came across it recently. Yahoo! lets you make SQL-like requests to web sites and web services and returns the results in JSON or XML. An extremely easy way to grab and process any information you need.
• Google’s Conent vs. Search advertising study: Ditto on the timing but this has some pretty interesting conclusions. Some take-aways are:
  • On average content advertising was found to be as cost-effective as search (when comparing CPAs)
  • Median advertiser had a 28% lower conversion rate on Content compared to search
  • Smaller advertisers (spending less than $1,138/mo) perform better on the Content Network than search when compared with larger advertisers (spending more than $6000/mo) – increase in % conversion coming from content (30% vs 10%).

Hacking TIME’s Most Influential Person poll: Great inside look on a massive job that took place to hack’s TIME’s reCAPTCHA algorithm. Amazing how they optimized each step to finish the hack in time.

Twitter Growth: More than doubling its user growth in 1 quarter thanks to the likes of Ashton Kutcher, CNN and Oprah.

Designing a new Ad Product: Interesting analysis on how to design and implement a new ad product done by imeem. With the ad industry so much in flux, approaches like this seem to be the best bet to optimize advertising for a given product/medium.

SickCity: A cool and aptly timed use to twitter data. Twitter’s promise lies in these long tail categorizations and groupings of the millions and millions of tweets in their database, as a function of time and location.