Google Sidewiki: The first 50 days of valuable entries and new API features

News from Google

It's been just under 2 months since we launchedGoogle Sidewiki and we've already seen a great number of valuable entries that have been written worldwide.From product tips to online petitions and from expert health advice to programming help, Sidewiki users are finding many useful and creative ways to help others. We've been really excited by these uses of Sidewiki and wanted to share 10 of these great entries with you:

• Jason Young speaks from personal experience and gives detailed insight into tuning a bass guitar on EMG's Bass Tips site.
• Antony Carthy, a programmer in South Africa, wrote tips on how to find latitude and longitude coordinates on Google Maps.
• Google's own Matt Cutts warns visitors about a deceptive website.
• Shalin Gala of PETA calls on readers to sign a petition next to an article about animal mistreatment.
• Ron Burk suggests a missing reference for a medical article.
• The Mayo Clinic uses Sidewiki to welcome visitors with a special webmaster entry on its homepage (this one requires Sidewiki to view).
• Jesse Poe from New York offers up great insights in a review of an iPhone app by Daniel Johnston, one of his favorite musicians.
• Alfonso Grandis from Italy talks about his eye-witness account of a recent earthquake.
• David Davis, a software engineer from California, improves a snippet of code in a programming tutorial.
• Michael Roizen from the Cleveland clinic adds his advice about H1N1 vaccinations.

If you haven't used Sidewiki yet, you can download it at google.com/sidewiki as part of the Google Toolbar for Firefox and Internet Explorer. If you're using Google Chrome, Safari or other browsers without the Google Toolbar, simply install the Sidewiki bookmarklet.

We're also releasing a top-requested feature for our API today that makes it easy to retrieve all Sidewiki entries for an entire domain. With this addition, you can look for new entries created on any page of a website and also subscribe to them via RSS (such as this RSS feed for all Sidewiki entries on the Google Blog). See our Sidewiki API documentation for all of its details.

We look forward to seeing many more great entries and keeping you posted with new features — follow us on Twitter for the latest news and highlights. Try using Sidewiki right now to add your feedback to this blog post and read what others are saying!

Ario Jafarzadeh, Sidewiki User Experience Designer

googleblog.blogspot.com

published @ November 13, 2009