Alex loves Google so much that she wrote a cute little essay about them, and her Dad actually emailed it to Google to check out.

Alex is an avid Google user, who loves utilizing Google's tools for research on the web. Now she's very much into Geocaching.

Take a peek at Little Alex's essay, she scored a 106/100 on it!

PS. Its hosted on her GooglePages account! What a cool kid! I bet Google is going to keep its eye on her for when she gets into the working world!

Looks like another country is hot on the tail of Google service blockage.

This latest place is Myanmar, otherwise known as the Union of Burma in Southeast Asia, bordered by Tibet, Peoples Republic of China, and Laos.

Burma is a country tightly controlled by its military Government, and has been by 1992. Thus is probably why they have blocked Google.com and Gmail services. The largest ISP in the area has stated that users are prompted with Access Denied when trying to access these services. 

Google has uploaded a nice diagram and document explaining their whole process for Account Authentication Proxy for Web-Based Applications.

They also have a document explaining the Account Authentication for Installed Applications.

The Google Account is a secured account that ties in all of Google's services protected by Google authentications.

The authentication diagram illustrates the process that the user, and Google goes through to access Account information, and the particular Google service the user is accessing.  It walks through the Google Account authentication method for web based applications. 

Sightings are starting to grow with this new Google phenomenon. Google AdWords with Pictures placed above text.

Research and studies have previously been shown, and suggest, that Google AdWords tend to be more effective, and visitors are more likely to click or look at text ads when there are images around the ads. Well, looks like Google is doing some studies on its own.

The example that has been showing up most frequently is a 120x600 format, with a 90px x 100px image placed on the top of the text column.

So keep your eyes open for these appearing on your site, or your favorite sites, and keep track of your click through stats for improvements.

Louis Vuitton put the purse to Google's head in a recent trademark ruling. LV placed a trademark counterfeiting and unfair competition and advertising book on Google, stating that Google allowed merchants who sold counterfeit items to bid on the Louis Vuitton keywords in Google AdWords.

A court in Paris ruled that damages from the case be 300,000 euros, and placed another 60,000 euros for LV's legal expenses.

So not only does Google have to pay 360,000 euros to LVMH, they are also required to publish details of the sentence in four news magazines that are currently unnamed.

Google is smelling success by winning an attempt by a German court that stated that Google was attempting to weaken copyright laws.

Google urged publishers to believe that its digitizing project would not crumble the copyright laws that are in place in the country.

A German scientific book publisher started the process by asking a Hamburg court to grant an injuntion to stop scanning its books for the Google Digital Library project.

Apple recently got dethroned from the Wired top 40 company list. Google happily took top honors in the much anticipated top 40 list.

Apple's high for the last few years came from iTunes, and the crazy iPod explosion. Last year Google was sitting comfortably in second, and now that Google has been hitting home runs left and right, and maximizing their profits mainly through their advertising revenues, they have been sent to top spot on the list.

The Wired Top 40 list looks at companies that have excelled in their field, as well as were actively exploring new ideas in the marketplace.

Samsung came in at number three due to their rapid developments, and their doubling of research staff to 32,000.

Yahoo stayed in the number five rank with over 3.5 billion web pages served daily.

Poor Microsoft sits at number 36 as the desktop monopoly they once had is slowly getting replaced with online versions from startups.

Dell, Nokia, and Pixar dropped right off the list for slumping sales, lack of feature innovation, and fear that a new owner might wreck this once powerhouse of a studio.

The much anticipated Gbuy, as it was known, has now launched as Google Checkout.

The launch was rumored to be sometime later this week, and most recently on Friday as the New York Times stated.

Google Checkout makes it easier for users to buy from stores all over the web, and track packages and shipments in one convenient location.

Google's system has fraud protection, which is a great feature that ensure users are covered against unauthorized purchases, when they are are made through Google Checkout.

Google has teamed up with a number of stores, and have offered discounts and special offers through them. These locations currently include Starbucks, GNC, Bluefly, Buy.com, and Timberland, and the specific coupon is for $10 off purchases over $20. Pretty sweet deal.

The system works by visiting a participating store through sponsored links with a shopping cart icon. When you see this icon, you know that that retailer is a participating member of the Google Checkout program. If you have a Google Account, or Gmail login, you can checkout extremely fast, no signing up or anything. All you have to do is review your order and wait for your shipment.

Best of all, Google tracks all of your shipments in one convenient location. Displaying the Order Date, Item, Seller, Status, and the dollar Amount of the item.

For Retailers, Google has also made the whole process of selling a lot easier, without the hassle. Through their Google Base program, retailers can easily set up storefronts. Then through Google Checkout, retailers can attract more leads, and convert more sales through Google's secure checkout process. Google has fraud prevention tools, so retailers won't have to worry about hackers.

So is the new Google Checkout a Paypal killer? We will have to see. But knowing Google, it will be very competitive and extremely user friendly. That combined with the integration with all of Google's other products like AdWords, Google Base, and Gmail, make this one mean tool.

Dell is planning to launch a technical support issue map, with the help of Google Earth Pro.

The Dell Google Earth map will show users how Dell is responding to technical support issues worldwide. The new service is said to be named Platinum Plus.

Dell has said that the mapping application will help medium and large businesses simplify their system maintenance by seeing the status of open service requests on their own machines.

Google unleashed a new version of its popular Desktop application. Google Desktop 4. And it's out of Beta!

The new Google Desktop has the added bonuses of 27 languages and a Google Desktop Gadget Designer development environment that lets users create their own very special gadgets. Best thing is, you don't even need to know code! The tool has a gadget user interface that makes it extremely easy to design your own gadget without hand coding xml.

For people looking for extra cash, Google is hosting a Google Desktop Gadget Contest specifically for developers. And yes there is a prize. A sweet prize of $8000 in Cash Prizes!

So button up your gadget gloves, and start developing. Google has this special contest open for the next month! All the best!

For any readers that do decide to develop a Google Desktop Gadget, drop a link to it in the comments, with a little description, and I will profile them when the contest is over.

UPDATE:

Google Desktop Gadget Contest ends on Monday, July 31st
$5,000 to the first place winner
$2,000 for second place
$1,000 for third place

For More.. http://desktop.google.com/contest.html

Google and Ebay are pushing people to enjoy free WiFi through their jointly funded company FON.

The two companies are set to offer Linksys routers which are normally listed in upwards of $70, for $5 in an effort to promote customers to share their web connection with neighbors and passerby's.

FON is a company that pushes people to share their internet connection, to offer everyone in the world free WiFi service. FON is set to become the largest WiFi community in the world.

Google is THE number one search engine in the world. Almost anything can be found through their ingenious engine. However, sometimes important information that sits on servers can fall victim to the latest indexing technology if it is not protected.

Recently, a North Carolina school fell victim to Google's indexing technology, when Social Security numbers, and test scores for students were left in an open part of the server just waiting for people to view them.

The school district was contacted immediately when a relative of one of the students performed a search and found out about the concern. Google responded by taking down the information from its search records when it was notified of the issue.

The information was said to be password protected, however it looks as though there was another party involved that had put the information in a non password protected area.

Oh ya. Google has full length movies care of some nice people who have uploaded them.

Coolz0r has listed off some great oldies. Like as in cult classics that are available in their entirety on Google Video. They include Night of the Living Dead from 1968, The Mark of Zorro, 1920, and the Phantom of the Opera from 1925.

These versions are great! So stop working for an hour or so, pop some corn, and put your feet up on your desk and relax, care of Google Video.

Geoportal was unleashed to the world recently, providing extremely high resolution imagery of France.

Geoportal will only show France imagery, and has over 400,000 images, with 3,700 maps that are said to be updated every five years. It also has the extreme ability to get users 20 inches off the ground! There will be 3d imagery, as well as an interface that will be switch able between aerial to detailed mapping.

There was a National Geographic team that has developed the Geoportal tool.

Unfortunately, I was unable to get onto the Geoportal and evaluate it, as the server seems to be down due to extreme traffic.

Google is gaining strength month after month in the search field. It is in its 10th consecutive month continually growing market share.

Google grabbed up another 1% share, landing at 44.1%. While Yahoo continues in second place at 27.9%, and MSN at 12.9%.