Creative Australia is online

Today, any Australian with a little motivation can create content and upload it for global distribution. For the first time in history, we all have a global broadcast platform at our fingertips: the internet.

The ability to broadcast ourselves, as individuals, was far, far out of reach for most of us for a long time. But today is a very different reality. So have you ever wondered what Aussies are doing, now that the tools of content production and distribution are in their hands? We have. So we got together with others in the digital space to take a look at just that.

Together with ninemsn, Yahoo!7, AIMIA, the Games Developers Association of Australia and the Interactive Games and Entertainment Association, we identified some examples of creative Australians producing great content for online distribution. This showreel includes just some of them like video blogger Natalie Tran, Christiaan Van Vuuren (better known to the YouTube audience as “The Fully Sick Rapper”) and like Keith Loutit’s time-lapse work.

Digital platforms are witnessing an incredible growth in the number of talented Australians producing content. Together, they are getting Australian stories out to Aussies and the world.

Posted by Ishtar Vij, Policy Counsel, Google Australia

How on (Google) Earth did they do that?

Recently we’ve been seeing some really diverse uses of Google Earth by Aussies. Originally started back in 2005, Earth continues to fascinate and inspire people’s creativity more than ever and we thought we’d share a few examples that have caught our eye.

Heron Island lagoon. Image downloaded from Google Earth 13 Oct. 2010. Image date 2 Aug. 2006. Image copyright 2011 DigitalGlobe and via here.



Marine conservation and preservation

Recently, researchers in Sydney have demonstrated that Google Earth can be used as a scientific tool for discovery. Dr Elizabeth Madin and her colleagues at the University of Technology are using Google Earth satellite images to understand study vegetation patterns to learn more about how small fish and urchins hide from reef predators on Heron Island. As Madin says, "To our knowledge, this is the first time anyone has used freely-available Google Earth images to identify these features, and then actually tested them on the ground to confirm that we're seeing exactly what we think we're seeing from the satellite images”. Studying reefs from Google Earth offers great perspective: scientists have even discovered new reefs in the process!



Google Earth screenshots of some of Professor Kennedy’s finds, via here.



Archaeological Innovation: Discovering treasures from the comfort of your desktop

One of the difficulties of research and discovery in the field of archaeology is the problem of access: it’s not only expensive to travel, but often politically difficult or dangerous to do so.

Professor David Kennedy from the University of Western Australia, is using Google Earth imagery to identify stone-built archaeological sites across Saudi Arabia and Jordan. Kennedy says that aerial reconnaissance is the single most powerful tool for locating and mapping archaeological sites as it can reveal sites that aren’t visible from the ground, just by observing different soil colourations or how vegetation changes. Whether it’s finding an Afghan fortress or a meteorite crater, Google Earth enables a lot of freedom to explore and discover, right from your desktop.







Understanding our own country better

Google Earth allows you to overlay photos and information to satellite pictures, too, as a way of searching and discovering new information visually. For example, Tourism Tasmania have enabled a map of Tasmania on their site using Google Earth, which allows tourists and travellers to get information on everything from visitor information centres, to car hire facilities, tours, accommodation and attractions.



Google Earth lets you fly anywhere on Earth to view satellite imagery, maps, terrain, and 3D buildings -- and from galaxies in outer space to the canyons of the ocean. You can create and save your own “flyovers” and map out your data. (Try it yourself here).



Google Earth isn’t just helping with new discoveries; it’s helping many scientists and non-profit organisations create powerful visualisations of the data that’s important to their cause. The visualisations they create help them collaborate better within their teams and get the word out to the public about what they’re working on.



We’d love to hear any stories you might have about using Google Earth - leave a comment below or contact us on our Twitter account at @googledownunder.



Posted by Kate Mason, Google Communications.

Girl Geek Dinner at Google: Pink Optional

This is a guest post by Kellie Scott, Geek Girl Dinner Organiser, Sydney.



Last week, we held our quarterly Girl Geek Dinner at Google. These dinners were first started in London in 2005 by the original Girl Geek, Sarah Blow. As a software engineer, Sarah was sick of everyone at tech events assuming that she wasn’t an engineer; after brainstorming on the train home one night, Girl Geek Dinners was born. These dinners are an opportunity for women who are passionate about tech to meet each other, hear about new ideas and generally to geek out together.

Aside from everyone receiving a “I'm a woman in tech. That doesn't mean everything has to be pink” sticker, which was a big hit, we enjoyed a tasty sit-down dinner with drinks, fun icebreaker games and as always, interesting talks. The event held together by the brilliant MC skills of Amaya “that goth chick that works at Google” Booker.

The keynote speaker was Mary Gardiner talking about her work for newly-founded non-profit organisation The Ada Initiative which supports women in open technology and culture. Mary’s talk engaged the audience with some surprising statistics about the participation of women in open source communities and she discussed why it is important to increase the proportion of women in open technology and culture, before focusing on the Ada Initiative’s plans for addressing the problem. For more information, and to find out how getting women involved can change the culture of the open source community, check out her talk on the Ada Initiative website.



After dinner, we moved into our lightning talks section - talks of (roughly) five minutes each, on a variety of topics. The first talk by Kirsti Rawstron discussed gender streaming and the way it is affected by course costs. Googler Alice Boxhall followed, with a general introduction to website accessibility. Alice demonstrated a couple of websites through ChromeVox to show how hard it can be for a blind person to navigate the web. To wrap up, Googler Katie Bell spoke about the National Computer Science Summer School, and Girls Programming Network, demonstrating that it does pay to get girls into programming from a younger age. All of the talks are available here.

Girl Geek Dinner continues to grow here in Australia with other groups in Adelaide, Brisbane, Canberra, Melbourne, and Perth. Our next Girl Geek Dinner will be held on Thursday 8th September. For more information please sign up here and follow us on Twitter here: @GGDSydney.

Explore museums and great works of art in the Google Art Project

This is a cross-post from the Official Google Blog.

One of the things I love about working Google is that you can come up with an idea one day and the next day start getting to work to make it a reality. That's what happened with the Art Project—a new tool we're announcing today which puts more than 1,000 works of art at your fingertips, in extraordinary detail.



It started when a small group of us who were passionate about art got together to think about how we might use our technology to help museums make their art more accessible—not just to regular museum-goers or those fortunate to have great galleries on their doorsteps, but to a whole new set of people who might otherwise never get to see the real thing up close.

We're also lucky here to have access to technology like Picasa and App Engine and to have colleagues who love a challenge—like building brand-new technology to enable Street View to go indoors! Thanks to this, and our unique collaboration with museums around the world, we were able to turn our 20% project into something you can try out for yourself today at www.googleartproject.com.



You’ll find a selection of super high-resolution images of famous works of art as well as more than a thousand other images, by more than 400 artists—all in one place. And with Street View technology, you can take a virtual tour inside 17 of the world’s most acclaimed art museums, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art and MoMA in New York, The State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Tate Britain & The National Gallery in London, Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Uffizi Gallery in Florence and Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

Officer and Laughing Girl, Johannes Vermeer (The Frick Collection, New York - U.S.)

Here are a few things you can do:

Dive into brushstroke-level detail: On top of the 1,000+ other images, each of the 17 museums selected one artwork to be photographed in extraordinary detail using super high resolution or “gigapixel” photo-capturing technology. Each of these images contains around 7 billion pixels—that's that’s around 1,000 times more detailed than your average digital camera—and a specially-built “microscope view” uses Picasa to deliver these images at amazingly high resolution. You can zoom in to see Van Gogh’s famous brushwork or watch how previously hard to-see elements of an artwork suddenly become clear—such as the tiny Latin couplet which appears in Hans Holbein the Younger’s “The Merchant Georg Gisze.”

The bedroom, Vincent van Gogh (Van Gogh Museum)

Explore inside the museums: the Street View team designed a brand-new vehicle called the “trolley” to take 360-degree images of the interior of selected galleries. These were then stitched together and mapped to their location, enabling smooth navigation of more than 385 rooms within the museums. We also created a new clickable annotation feature, so you can jump from being inside a museum one moment to viewing a particular artwork the next. Once inside an image, an info panel lets you read more about an artwork, find more works by that artist and watch related YouTube videos. Gallery interiors can also be explored directly from within Street View in Google Maps.

Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy—with a view on Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus”

Create your own collection: With the “Create an Artwork Collection” feature, you can save specific views of any of the artworks and build your own personalised collection. Comments can be added to each painting and the whole collection can then be shared with friends, family or on the web using the integrated goo.gl URL shortener.

We’re incredibly excited about this project—it’s our first step toward making great art more accessible, and we hope to add more museums and works of art in time. So whether you’re a student, an aspiring artist or a casual museum-goer, we hope the Google Art Project gives you a fun and unusual way to interact with art—and hopefully inspires you to visit the real thing.

Posted by Amit Sood, Head of Google Art Project

What does an Australian summer really look like?

A cross-post from the YouTube Australia blog

We’re a huge and diverse country - the sun shines in Broome, the rain pours in Toowoomba, the surf’s up in Bryon and the mist settles in the Dandenongs - and our summer is legend. Let’s share our collective experiences of this Aussie summer with the world. With your help, we want to create a map of the Australian summer on YouTube. Starting today, you can upload summer videos to YouTube, creating an archive of events, experiences and people from all around the country.



To take part, upload and follow the instructions to geotag your videos at youtube.com/mapmysummer. They don’t need to be fancy; we want to see any footage you’ve captured this summer on your video camera, mobile, or anything else you’ve got. Roaming through the Australian bush? Cricket at twilight? Your stories will generate an Australian map of summer.

To give you some inspiration, we’re also bringing you summer highlights from several of our top partners, including Tourism Australia, Universal Music, and Tennis Australia among others, and each week we’ll be featuring the best of our Australian summer from around the country. This week, check out a few of our favourites from Sydney Festival. Be sure to keep coming back to see how we’re mapping Australia through video.

So as you head out this Australia Day, remember: the world is watching! Let’s show them what our summer’s like, and why it’s so special. Start uploading today.

Ernesto Soriano, YouTube team, recently watched Australian summers past.

YouTube Play Winners Announced

YouTube Play searched for the world’s most creative art videos and after 23,000 submissions and 125 finalists, we’re excited to announce that the 25 winners have been announced overnight in New York at a special celebratory event at the Guggenheim Museum. Two Australian entries were among the winning 25: Keith Loutit's tilt-shift/time-lapse piece entitled 'Bathtub IV' and Nick Bertke's 'Gardyn'. Australian singer Megan Washington, who features as the singer in 'Bathtub IV', also performed live at the event in New York.




The winning entries will have their videos projected onto the Guggenheim Museum, and the final videos will also be on display from 22nd-24th October in the Museum. You can see the entries at the Play website.

Posted by Ernesto Soriano, YouTube Team

Four Australian finalists announced in YouTube Play

Back in June, YouTube and the Guggenheim Museum in New York organised a historic, international contest called YouTube Play searching for the world’s most creative art videos. We received more than 23,000 entries, and today, the YouTube Play channel will reopen featuring videos from the shortlisted artists, covering animation, motion graphics, documentary work and music videos.



We’re especially excited to showcase here the four Australian finalists, whose work is truly inspired, and ranges from Darcy Prendergast’s evocative stop motion glow sticks and Yanni Kronenberg & Lucinda Schreiber’s stunning chalkboard animation, to Keith Loutit’s time lapse film techniques and Nick Bertke’s feet-tapping electronica piece, ‘Gardyn’.



These finalists will have their videos on show at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York on October 21, 2010 with simultaneous presentations at the Guggenheim museums in Berlin, Bilbao, and Venice.







“Autumn Story” by Yanni Kronenberg and Lucinda Schreiber.

Yanni Kronenberg is a freelance photographer and director and Lucinda Schreiber is an award-winning Sydney-based illustrator, animator and director.







“Bathtub IV”, Keith Loutit.

Known as the pioneer of the tilt-shift / time-lapse technique, Loutit is a Sydney-based photographer and short filmmaker who first recognised how time and focus combine to support the powerful illusion of miniaturisation in film.







“Gardyn”, Pogo (Nick Bertke)

Pogo is an electronic music artist living in Perth. He is known for his work recording small sounds from a film or a specific scene, and sequencing the sounds together to form a new piece of music. In “Gardyn”, Pogo uses syllables of his mother's voice and the sounds of her backyard to create a beautiful video and soundtrack.

“Lucky”, Darcy Prendergast

Darcy Prendergast is a director that founded Dee Pee Studios, an award-winning Melbourne-based clay animation house. Darcy utilises a glow stick or coloured torch to draw an image in the sky that is captured into a video frame. This film took over 6 months to shoot.



The next stage for these finalists is to have their work judged by YouTube Play’s jury — including iconic performance artist Laurie Anderson, Japanese fine artist Takashi Murakami, music group Animal Collective, and The Wrestler director Darren Aronofsky — who will pick the top 20 videos for the Guggenheim exhibit.



Posted by Ernesto Soriano, YouTube Team