Which part of the US has been googling WikiLeaks the most?

Here's a clue - 10% of all U.S. federal procurement money is spent in this state. 

Clue #2, this state hosts several federal agencies which include  the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Defense, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and others.

Ta-dah!

What's in Virginia? Besides the headquarters of several federal agencies? About 263,552 federal employees and retirees according to 2008 stats, not to mention a host of defense contractors that call the state home.  And within Virginia, the most googlers come from -- Sterling --

What's in Sterling, Virginia?

Screen capture above from Google Insights for Search which "analyzes a portion of worldwide Google web searches from all Google domains to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you've entered, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time." The snapshots change according to search parameters.

Probably just interesting to nerdy cats like us ...

Video of the Week: Ross and Cohen talk 21st Century Statecraft at Google

Below is a clip of the 21st Century Statecraft talk at Google with Eric Schmidt, and the State Department's Alec Ross & Jared Cohen earlier this year (Mr. Cohen has since moved to Google as Director of Google Ideas).

Eric Schmidt (Chair and Google CEO) and Jared Cohen, by the way have co-authored a piece in the November/December 2010 of Foreign Affairs, Digital Disruption, Connectivity and the Diffusion of Power. where they write:

The advent and power of connection technologies -- tools that connect people to vast amounts of information and to one another -- will make the twenty-first century all about surprises. Governments will be caught off-guard when large numbers of their citizens, armed with virtually nothing but cell phones, take part in mini-rebellions that challenge their authority. For the media, reporting will increasingly become a collaborative enterprise between traditional news organizations and the quickly growing number of citizen journalists. And technology companies will find themselves outsmarted by their competition and surprised by consumers who have little loyalty and no patience.
[...]
Continuous innovation -- and the increasing population of the interconnected estate -- will pose new, difficult challenges for people and governments the world over. Even the best-informed and most active users of technology will find themselves caught in a blur of new devices and services. In an era when the power of the individual and the group grows daily, those governments that ride the technological wave will clearly be best positioned to assert their influence and bring others into their orbits. And those that do not will find themselves at odds with their citizens.

The article is available here (registration required).

Related articles

• Google Grabs State Dept Star Jared Cohen for Foreign Policy "Think/Do Tank" (fastcompany.com)
• Jared Cohen and Eric Schmidt co-author Foreign Affairs piece (tech.fortune.cnn.com)
• Jared Cohen starts Google Ideas (tech.fortune.cnn.com)
• Andrew Rosen: Alec Ross' Odd Tweet About 21st Century Statecraft (huffingtonpost.com)
• Jared Cohen Becomes First Director of Google Ideas (devex.com)
• Eric Schmidt on Google's Foreign Policy [VIDEO] (mashable.com)

State Dept's Top Twitterati Jared Cohen Moves to Google

Photo from Children of Jihad

This news is going to make our blog friend, The Skeptical Bureaucrat sad.  According to Politico's Laura Rozen, the State Department's top twitterati, Jared Cohen is moving to Google, not to Mountain View but to New York. Excerpt:

State Policy Planning staff official Jared Cohen informs colleagues of his last day after four years at State for a new job with Google.

E-mail below:

    From: Jared Cohen
    Sent: Tuesday, September 07, 2010 6:21 PM
    Subject: Jared Cohen Next Steps and New Contact Info
   
Dear Friends and Colleagues,

    Last Thursday, September 2nd, was my last day in government. After four years on the Secretary of State’s Policy Planning Staff, I have accepted a job as the Director of a new entity at Google called “Google Ideas”. I will also serve as an Adjunct Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

    Google Ideas will combine the models of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, a think tank, and a private sector company, with resources to implement. In this sense, Google Ideas will be a think/do tank that strives to bring together diverse perspectives from multiple industries to generate new ideas, approaches and solutions to security, social, economic and political challenges in the world. At the Council on Foreign Relations, I will focus on counter-terrorism, counter-radicalization, and 21st century statecraft. Please see my interview with Foreign Policy Magazine, which describes Google Ideas in greater detail: http://tinyurl.com/2ateola

Read the whole thing here.

You can still follow him at: http://twitter.com/jaredcohen

The folks over at C Street who were "trying to get this guy shot in the head,” when the new administration came in (Alec Ross quote), might like to rethink about that dream job at Google.



Related articles by Zemanta

• Jared Cohen starts Google Ideas (tech.fortune.cnn.com)
• Google taps State Dept. vet for Google Ideas (news.cnet.com)
• Report: State Dept. Official May Go To Work For Google (webpronews.com)
• As BoomTown Said: Google Hires Policy Wonk for Policy Wonking [Voices] (voices.allthingsd.com)

Google Buzz: Think Before You Click

A lot of virtual ink has been spilled on Google Buzz since its rollout last week especially relating to privacy issues. Here is the Google team’s recent take:  Millions of Buzz users, and improvements based on your feedback and A new Buzz start-up experience based on your feedback:  On Saturday, Google announced some forthcoming changes via its Gmail blog:

For the tens of millions of you who have already started using Buzz, over the next couple weeks we'll be showing you a similar version of this new start-up experience to give you a second chance to review and confirm the people you're following.
[…]

Second, Buzz will no longer connect your public Picasa Web Albums and Google Reader shared items automatically. Just to be clear: Buzz only automatically connected content that was already public, so if you had previously shared photos in an "Unlisted" album or set your Google Reader shared items as "Protected," no one except the people you'd explicitly allowed to see your stuff has been able to see it. But due to your feedback Buzz will no longer connect these sites automatically.

Third, we're adding a Buzz tab to Gmail Settings. From there, you'll be able to hide Buzz from Gmail or disable it completely. In addition, there will be a link to these settings from the initial start-up page so you can easily decide from the get go that you don't want to use Buzz at all.

This may be a great idea for some, but it's not for me.  If you want to skip this hassle after the Buzz splash screen (the one that says Check out Buzz and Nah, go directly to Gmail), select Nah ... and go to your Gmail account.  Scroll down to the bottom of your Gmail page and click on "turn off Buzz." Buzz should disappear from the left-hand side bar of your Gmail. For good measure, check that your Google profile is also configured to your desired privacy setting.    

Related Items: 

• Opting Out of Google Buzz
• How to Do Everything in Google Buzz (Including Turn It Off)
• Buzz off: Disabling Google Buzz
• Google Buzz: "Are You at Work? How About a $.99 Big Mac From McDonald's, Three Blocks Away?"
• Google Alters Buzz to Tackle Privacy Flaws - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com

BlogNotes: Moving to Google Feedburner

Just a quick note -- apparently since Google's acquisition of FeedBurner on June 1, 2007, they have been moving the FeedBurner application to Google hardware, software, and data centers. Feedburner publishers including Diplopundit have recently been asked to move their feeds from Feedburner to Google Feedburner.

There should not be a loss of service with the feeds during this transition process. All feeds.feedburner.com URLs will redirect readers to feeds hosted by Google. Readers will continue to receive Diplopundit feeds.

But if you do encounter troubles with receiving my feeds, please be patient. According to Google FeedBurger, everything should return to normal within 72 hours of the move.

Google Vote Mapplet - Live!

A quick update on the Google mapplet that provides voting location. We wrote previously about this here. It went fully functional in the last day or so. Check it out here: http://maps.google.com/vote. Please verify your voting location with your voting officials, especially if there is no early voting in your place.

Google Vote - 28 Days to Election Day

Google has rolled out a nice mapplet that hopefully will help rock the vote this year. Google Vote currently at http://maps.google.com/vote, will provide voting location, registration information and more. All voting location information won't be available for another week (mid-October) but the site is already useful for checking out days left to register by mail (not a lot left, hurry!), in-person registration deadline, information about voting by state, and the state voter's hotline or contact person.

Some bloggers have speculated that this project started out as a Google 20% project but has now become fully supported (although this is still not on display in Google Labs). Once voting information are fully loaded, voters should be able to generate driving maps to their voting places. Until then, please check with your state and local election officials to verify your voting location.

Roll the Google Vote video below:

Google "In Quotes" and the Presidentiables

Google Labs has just opened a new project to the public called In Quotes. The feature allows you to find quotes from stories linked to from Google News. The Google release says that direct quotes, are concrete units of information that describe how newsmakers represent themselves. Google News compiles these quotations from online news stories and sorts them into browsable groups based on who is being quoted. The quotes and their speakers are determined automatically by a computer program and the company does not guarantee the completeness or accuracy of the information that we see on screen

You use a pull down menu to determine the different sets of people you want to compare about a particular topic. The feature currently allows you to choose and compare quotes from political candidates and other political figures. When you click the Spin button, the quotes will rotate and the system will display two new quotes for you to compare. This way you will be able to compare multiple quotes about a specific topic from the two speakers you've chosen. There are 20 political figures available in the United States version of the site (including the leading candidates from both parties who are displayed by default), with other editions available for Canada, India, and the UK. There are also 20 current topics on display from Iran and Iraq, to human rights and immigration. It is in Google Labs for a reason; it still needs refining on how each keyword is used. But it's fun to tinker with. Check it out!