Join Life in a Day today for its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival

This is a cross-post from the YouTube Blog.

On July 24, 2010, thousands of people around the world uploaded videos of their lives to YouTube to take part in “Life in a Day,” an historic cinematic experiment to document a single day on earth. From Australia to Zambia, more than 80,000 videos, totaling 4,500 hours of footage, were submitted to the project. After months of hard work, Oscar-winning director Kevin Macdonald and a team of editors have created a 90-minute documentary film that gives a surprising, honest and entertaining self-portrait of our world.

While “Life in a Day” will be officially released later this year, tonight you have a very special opportunity to tune in to the world premiere direct from the 2011 Sundance Film Festival. The premiere will be followed by a live Q&A with Kevin Macdonald and key contributors to the film. You can submit questions for the Q&A here.

Today’s stream begins at 12pm on the Life in a Day channel. You can catch a rebroadcast on Friday, January 28, at 7pm in your local time zone, captioned and subtitled in 25 additional languages, with an additional option for audio description (AD) in English.

We hope you enjoy the film!

Tim Partridge, Product Marketing Manager, recently watched “Life in a Day: A new type of filmmaking”.

Retiring real estate on Google Maps

This is a cross-post from the Google Lat Long blog

At Google one of our key philosophies is to take risks and to experiment. To that end, in July 2009 we announced the ability to find property for sale or rent directly on Google Maps. This is one of the “search options” next to the search box on Google Maps, and is currently available in the US, Australia, New Zealand, the UK and Japan.

In part due to low usage, the proliferation of excellent property-search tools on real estate websites, and the infrastructure challenge posed by the impending retirement of the Google Base API (used by listing providers to submit listings), we’ve decided to discontinue the real estate feature within Google Maps on February 10, 2011.

We’ve learned a lot and been excited to see real estate companies use Google Maps in innovative ways to help people find places to live, such as Coldwell Banker’s use of Google Maps and YouTube, or Realtor.com’s Android app that lets you draw a shape on a map to find all properties you’re interested in.

Yet we recognise that there might be better, more effective ways to help people find local real estate information than the current feature makes possible. We’ll continue to explore this area, but in the meantime, Google offers other options to home-seekers: you can still access other information in Maps such as local businesses, directions and transit times, as well as aerial and Street View imagery to explore where you might want to move, and also use Google search results to find helpful real estate information and websites.

Real estate companies can also continue to use tools from Google to help connect with buyers and renters who use the Internet to research properties. For example, companies can use the Google Maps API to embed customised maps that are useful to potential clients right on their own web pages. Our Google for real estate professionals site contains various methods for generating leads and improving real estate business operations.

Posted by Brian McClendon, VP, Google Earth and Maps

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.

Queensland Flood Emergency Information

The flood emergency in Queensland continues to unfold.

We’ve been working over the last 24 hours to access the latest information from authorities about river levels and projected road closures due to flooding and to display the information on a Google Map. You can view the map here to see layers of information including which roads are projected to be closed or river levels in a particular area.

Update: We've updated the map to include layers for river levels in New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania. We have also included a layer for road closures in Victoria.


We hope this map is of some use to people who may be affected and that it takes the load off some other websites that are coping with lots of queries. We will let you know of any additional updates on this blog.

If your personal safety is impacted by floods, please visit the official sites:

Queensland Government Flood Information

ABC emergency website

New South Wales Government Flood Information

Victorian Government Flood Information

To donate to the flood relief appeal visit the Premier’s Flood Relief Appeal site.

For eligible charities working directly on flood assistance, we have made available additional emergency funding through our Google Grants program. More information for charities not currently participating in the program is available here.

Our thoughts are with everyone affected by the floods, and we add our thanks to those from around the country for the work of emergency services personnel and SES volunteers.

Posted by Anthony Baxter and James McGill, Software Engineers
(on behalf of the team of willing Googlers who helped out on this)

YouTube Symphony Orchestra 2011: We’ll see you in Sydney!

This is a cross-post from the YouTube Australia Blog.

A few months ago, we announced the second YouTube Symphony Orchestra to be held at the Sydney Opera House, and sent out a call to you, the YouTube community, to Play Your Part. We were blown away by the amazing videos we received in response, and the YouTube community voted on their favorites and visited the channel in their millions.



Today, we’re proud to present the 101 musicians from more than 30 countries around the world that have been selected to form the YouTube Symphony Orchestra 2011.

These outstanding musicians range in age from 14 to 49 and hail from five different continents, including 4 winners from Australia:



Brent MIller, Timpanist, overcame a neck injury and spinal problems to return to full-time secondary schooling in Toowoomba, Queensland, where he has performed with the University of Southern Queensland Orchestra, Toowoomba Concert Band, and the Queensland Youth Symphony



Mathisha Panagoda, Celloist, has toured Europe and China with the Australian Youth Orchestra, and has even performed at the 2000 Olympics! He has established his own chamber orchestra in Sydney, the Sydney Camerata, which is made up of young, talented musicians from around the country.



John Burgess, Bassist, was born in Queensland, Australia but grew up in the rural Mid North Coast. He began to take an interest in music at age 9, first on piano, then soon after picked up the bass guitar. He will be performing an improvisation to Mason Bates’ Mothership.



Rollin Zhao, Violinist, started playing music when he was two, and could read music before he could read words!



Also among the group is a vuvuzela-fixated trombonist from Germany, an Arizona-based clarinetist who has never left the U.S., and a Guzheng player from China whose instrument is one a lot of the world has never seen or heard before.



The orchestra and winning improvisers will be joined in Sydney by Michael Tilson Thomas, Mason Bates, and a number of professional musicians and mentors from the London Symphony Orchestra, The Berlin Philharmoniker, and the Sydney Symphony, to participate in a week-long celebration of music, creativity, technology and the arts. The week will include several ensemble concerts, classes for Australian musicians, events in and around Sydney, and the Grand Finale performance on Sunday, March 20 to be held in the Sydney Opera House concert hall and streamed live to the world on YouTube.



Everyone can participate in this celebration of creativity and technology. We’ll post videos and behind-the-scenes footage of the orchestra, from rehearsal and master classes to performance, to the YouTube Symphony channel, and to our mobile apps (which you can download on the Android Market by searching for ‘YouTube Symphony Orchestra’ or on the Apple App Store.

Be sure to tune in for more details on the week’s events.



Next stop: Sydney.



Ernesto Soriano, YouTube Australia, recently watched “Synergy: Unsung Heroes” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qq_sBkNkGpY