Google for non-profit organizations

Today is a very exciting day! I am able to complete the work on a document that can be highly useful for any not-for-profit organization craving for huge web presence. It started with an idea of using Google Grants for these organizations. Later I have added some more Google features that are available for both commerical and NFPs alike - most of them are free of cost.
Visit this document at http://www.dpo.uab.edu/~kalyan/Google%20for%20NPOs.doc
This by no means end of my work on this document. It will be constantly updated from time to time.

What can Ajax do for your website?

Newsweek has an interesting article on Ajax - its a combination of Asynchronous JavaScript, CSS, DOM, XMLHtpRequest. This technology gives a feel running locally on the desktop for your website. For example, there is no hourglass when you move from location to location in Google Maps! Read more at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10965121/site/newsweek

A slew of websites sprung up to take advantage of this technology -
www.flickr.com (photo browsing and photo sharing website)
www.writely.com (website for word documents)
www.numsum.com (website for spreadsheets)
www.voo2do.com (to-do list and priority organizing)
www.gmail.com (Google's email)

Most of them have one thing in common - circumvent desktop-based software such as MS Office.

Google Video

Google posted one more message on their blog about NBA games availability on the Google Video.
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/01/watching-nba-games-on-google-video.html
You can watch these games for $3.95 a pop.

On a side note, PlanetRead, a nonprofit organization in India is using Same-Language Subtitling to develop reading practice among 300 million illiterate people in that country. To see this methodology in action, search for "telugu folk song" in Google Video. Unarguably, movie songs are very popular in India. PlanetRead is using the same technique for movie songs to encourage people to read.

Google participates in a joint effort to combat spyware

Google along with Lenovo and Sun Microsystems launched a new website named www.stopbadware.org Permalink about this announcement is at http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/01/putting-stop-to-spyware.html
If you want to know more about Spyware, Wikipedia has good information at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spyware