The first announcement involves the formal release of Gmail contextual gadgets. These gadgets are extension capabilities that transform email into an integration point. Now that these capabilities are opened to developers, they can build more gadgets that integrate with other systems.

“It’s really making your inbox more useful,” says Glotzbach.

In addition to releasing Gmail contextual gadgets, Google announced updates to Google Apps Script. This software tool, launched at last year’s I/O event, can now be integrated into Google Docs, Google Maps, and third-party services through the new Java Database connectivity. According to Glotzbach, it is a similar concept to what you see in microlanguages, but it is done in a very open way.

Google also announced a partnership with VMware in regards to cloud computing collaboration. Although cloud computing adoption is becoming more prevalent, there are still a number of hurdles involved with it.  Often times, developers have a non-standard toolset to work with and are forced to choose a cloud to deploy from up front.

At Google I/I, the two companies revealed their effort to give developers a familiar set of tools to work with and to allow them to deliver their applications to any number of targets. The companies hope to give developers and businesses the tools, portability, and openness to encourage cloud computing.

In conjunction with the partnership with VMware, Google also announced Google App Engine for Business. This feature brings the power of Google App Engine to businesses. It contains both management and support capabilities.

Deb furthers this thought by saying:
“Also too much tweaking on a blog is tempting – see if one tweak makes any impact. The advice here is to do a little at a time.”

Because of the focus shift towards social media and linkbait, it is also essential to make your blog easy for your audience to socially bookmark it. Including some of the various social bookmarklets is an effective way to facilitate this process.

Google opened its Gmail to anyone who wanted to sign up for it last week. Now they are doing something Google rarely has to do – advertise. It’s not a multi-million dollar TV and print campaign. It’s Gmail Theatre, presented on YouTube, narrated by an engineer, and conducted by a group of puppets. The video covers Gmail’s features, like spam blocking and chat. They won’t make anyone forget Kermit and Miss Piggy, but the puppets are cute.

Digg has banned a number of sites from being submitted as story sources. A number of those sites fall into the SEO category, which has created bad blood between Digg and some SEO’s. Even though Digg doesn’t say who is banned, Dave Naffziger has done some research to get an idea. He found one-hundred eighty-three sites out of Alexa’s top 10,000 and Blogshare’s top 1,000 that stop at Digg’s Great Wall. For some reason, Digg has banned a few gossip sites too.

Just like AOL’s Netscape, Yahoo, and Dell, Microsoft has fallen in love with the Digg model. In Belgium, Norway, and the Netherlands, Microsoft has MSN Reporter in beta testing, and it comes a lot closer to the Digg experience than clones at other sites. Unlike those copies, TechCrunch noted that Microsoft lets people submit stories from outside MSN. That encourages people to leave MSN to visit those sites. Microsoft not being a control freak? Must be the weather.

Web traffic toolbar Alexa, a standard analytics tool for online marketers, got a few upgrades this week. Perhaps the most useful new feature allows users to break down traffic geographically.

For example, say if you want to know where the bulk of Google-owned Orkut.com visitors come from, the new tool will show that nearly three quarters of them come from Brazil. You can also see how that particular site ranks in other countries. In India, Orkut is the second most visited site.

We don’t have mention the drawbacks of a tool like Alexa, but we will anyway just to be thorough. The data collected by the toolbar is limited to users who have installed it on their browsers. And unlike other traffic indicators which base samples on the whole, Alexa data is typically limited to search engine marketers.

This is why, perhaps, a few months ago, Matt Cutts blog was ranked higher than Ask.com. And while the Kentucky native is quite popular in the SEM community, he’s not quite THAT well-known.

Anheuser-Busch’s* Bud-TV may be getting skunked by the law. Attorney generals from twenty-one states have complained in a sharply-worded letter to the brewer that they don’t do enough to keep underage people from their marketing on the video site. The company wants to create viral content to promote its brand to the 21 to 34 year old crowd. But since the videos can be shared, the age verification Bud-T-V uses on the website can’t be extended to every iPod and computer out there.

Google has been known for its fascination and research into artificial intelligence. They may be a lot farther along than anyone has realized in creating it. Google co-founder Larry Page told the American Association for the Advancement of Science about Google’s work. Page said a few people at Google were working on large scale artificial intelligence. “It’s not as far off as people think,” he said. If Google does create it, they’re going to have to answer a lot of concerns about it.

A group of Polish poets may think Google is already using artificial intelligence. They are being sued over registering the Gmail dot PL domain. To Google, it is infringement on the name of their web-based email service. The poets see it differently. Gmail is just an acronym for the group’s name in Polish. They also claim not to be in it for the money. “We didn’t buy this name just to sell it to Google. As a matter of pride, we’re refusing to give it up,” the group’s representative said.

YouTube gave up a user’s identity to Fox after the network filed a subpoena to find out who uploaded four episodes of the new season of “24″. The person who went by the user name of EcoTotal put the first four episodes online a week before the new season began. If EcoTotal hoped that YouTube’s new owner Google would fight the subpoena on privacy grounds, as they have over search data, he got a wakeup call that was about as subtle as Jack Bauer dropping out of his ceiling.

Yahoo Music may compete with Apple’s iTunes, but their executives agree that D-R-M needs to go. Dave Goldberg, the head of Yahoo Music, told Silicon Valley Watcher’s Tom Foremski that he’s been in favor of dropping copy protection from the music they sell. When Yahoo Music has done experiments in selling music without D-R-M, it boosted music sales. He had another reason why D-R-M should go, saying that that Microsoft D-R-M Yahoo Music uses “doesn’t work half the time.”

Gmail is really open to everyone now. Lots of people reported last week that Google would drop the cellphone number requirement to get a Gmail invite, but it didn’t happen until now. Back when Gmail launched, people were selling invites on eBay. Unlike other free email services with very small inbox sizes, Gmail waved a generous gigabyte of storage at its users, which made it very popular. That’s a lesson for anyone doing some last-minute diamond shopping today – size matters.