You can get Google information in interesting ways.
I’ve never really covered Google as a beat reporter, but from what I’ve heard from others on staff and in journalism, the press has a notoriously tough time dealing with Google: After all, the company is on top of the world, its executives have everyone grabbing for their time and well, the company can just plain afford to pick its spots for when it wants to talk to the press. But of course that’s not to say Google isn’t forthcoming with information.
Google broke its Chrome OS news last Tuesday night on its company blog and set off the press feeding frenzy. Earlier in the day, it revealed plans to dump the beta label from a bunch of its products such as Gmail and Google Apps.
Garnering much less attention is Google’s Research Blog, but you can pick up some interesting tidbits there as well. What I like about it is that most of the posts appear to come from real researchers, not just handlers. On the downside, the posts are infrequent.
But there is a fresh post to chew on from yesterday regarding the Google Research Awards Program. It turns out that Google is a pretty big focus at university labs these days (for more on network research, see our Alpha Doggs blog) . Among those recognized by Google include Columbia University Professor Shree Nayar, who is working on a camera for kids that would exploit Google technologies such as Picasa, and Thomas Funkhouser, a Princeton University researcher who is working on ways to create 3D models of cities based in part on Google Street View technology.
Google Research gets the word out more frequently via Twitter, which is an increasingly popular form of communication for a bunch of tech labs.
