Last year, we launched Google Transit in Wellington and Auckland to help make it easier for commuters to map the best route for getting around their cities using public transport. We’re pleased to announce we’re now working with Environment Waikato Regional Council and BUSIT! to bring this service to the Waikato region.
With Google Transit, people can view public transport information and stop locations in Google Maps and easily compare these to the walking and driving options available. For now, this applies only to the immediate Hamilton area but in the coming months this will be updated to include rural bus information.
We hope this new feature will help Waikato commuters to save time and perhaps choose a greener public transport option when they haven’t thought about it before, by being easily able to select the quickest bus route available and pinpoint their nearest stop.
To access Google Transit, go to www.maps.google.co.nz. Select your destination using the search function. Click ‘Get Directions’. Enter your start and end points and hit the ‘Get Directions’ button. Click on the ‘Public Transit’ link above your itinerary and you’ll then see the times, service numbers and routes available.
Posted by Annie Baxter, Google NZ PR Manager
What were you doing on July 24th this year? Perhaps you were one of the hundreds of Kiwis who grabbed a camera and created a video time capsule of their day for YouTube’s ground-breaking Life in a Day project.
Life in a Day is a global experiment aiming to create the first ever user-generated feature film, and when entries closed last weekend we found out we’d received 80,000 submissions from people around the world, representing 197 countries and 45 languages.
Among these contributors, nearly 400 New Zealanders entered short films which chronicled a day in their own lives and answering the questions posed by Life in a Day director Kevin Macdonald: “What do you love? What do you fear? What makes you laugh? What’s in your pocket?”
A selection of entries from around the world will be showcased in a video gallery on the YouTube Life in a Day channel in early September - so keep an eye out for homegrown videos!
The next step? Over the coming months, the most compelling and distinctive footage received will be edited into an experimental documentary film, produced by Ridley Scott and directed by Kevin Macdonald.
The final results will screen at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2011. We can’t wait to see the result, and find out if any aspiring Kiwi film makers will be co-credited as a director alongside Kevin Macdonald when the credits roll.
Posted by Ernesto Soriano, YouTube team
I whakarewa a Google Māori i te wiki o te reo Māori 2008 hei whakaterenga i te Rapu Google i te reo rangatira.
Nā, kua whakarewatia inaiānei tētehi papapātuhi ngohe Māori hei āwhina atu i te hunga e tāuru ana i ngā kupu Māori ki te pouaka rapu o Google.
Kei te reo Māori ētehi oropuare roa - he mea tohua ki te tohutō i runga i te oropuare (pērā i te kupu Māori). Ko tā te papapātuhi ngohe Māori hou he huarahi e tere tuhi ai i ngēnei tohutō ki runga i ngā oropuare roa.
I mua rā nā te tapahi me te whakapiri i tuhia atu ai ngā tohutō nei ki te pouaka rapu. Heoi anō ināianei, ka pāwhiritia te papapātuhi ngohe Māori, ka tīpakohia te pātuhi tāware nako [`], ka tipakohia te oropuare roa, ana, ka puta mai te tohutō ki runga i taua oropuare roa. Kei te taha mauī o runga i te papapātuhi QWERTY e noho atu ana te pātuhi tāware nako [`].
Kia whakakāngia te papapātuhi ngohe Māori, haere ki te Google Māori, ā, i reira kōwiritia ai te reo Māori. Ka kitea atu tētehi ata iti o te papapātuhi kei te taha katau o te pouaka rapu. Pāwhiritia taua ata ka whakaāheitia mai te papapātuhi ngohe Māori. Ka taea te whakauru ngā tohutō mā te papapātuhi ngohe Māori nei, mā tō ake papapātuhi (mā ōu matimati) rānei. Me whērā anō, ka tīpakohia te pātuhi tāware nako [`], ka tipakohia te oropuare roa, ana, ka puta mai te tohutō.
Ahakoa he iti, he tautoko, ā, ko te tūmanako he mea akiaki tonu kia whai oranga a reo Māori i tēnei te Wiki o te Reo Māori, otirā kia whai oranga a reo Māori i ngā wiki katoa o te tau!
In 2008, during Māori Language Week, we launched Google Māori, which lets people navigate the Google interface in te reo Māori.
Now, to make it even easier for users who want to enter Māori text into the Google search box we’ve introduced a soft Māori keyboard.
In the Māori language, some vowels are lengthened - these are represented in text by a macron, or bar over the vowel (as in the word Māori). The new Māori soft keyboard allows users to quickly type these macron characters.
Previously Google Māori users needed to cut and paste the macron character into the search bar. Now, when the Māori soft keyboard is selected, they can simply hit the ‘grave’ accent key [`], usually found at the top left of a QWERTY keyboard, before typing a vowel.
To enable the keyboard go to Google Māori with the Māori language interface selected. On the right hand side of the search box a small keyboard icon appears. Click on this and the keyboard is enabled. Macron characters can be entered using the soft keyboard that is displayed, or your standard physical keyboard. Again, simply type the ‘grave’ accent key [`], followed by a vowel, and the macron vowel will appear.
It’s a little thing we hope will make a big difference and encourage more of our users to keep te reo Māori alive in their daily lives - during Māori Language Week and throughout the year.
With Life in a Day just five days away, it’s time to start pre-production. This coming Saturday (July 24), you’ll have 24 hours to capture a few minutes of your life on camera and upload it to YouTube for consideration by Oscar winning directors Kevin Macdonald and Ridley Scott for inclusion in the first ever feature-length film to be created from YouTube content.
To help you get in touch with your inner director, we’ve pulled together a few tips to help you create your Life in a Day submission. Shoot your own lifeGo out and film very personal and very creative footage about your own life. Specific is better than general. Show the world what it is like to be you. For more guidance on what to shoot, Kevin MacDonald is asking participants to answer the following four questions through their videos:
High-resolution video is good but not requiredThe videos will eventually be edited into a feature film, so higher resolution will look better on the big screen. That being said, users with mobile phones are equally capable of capturing riveting footage, so don’t hold back if you don’t have access to high-quality equipment.No music, but good sound is a mustDon’t use music in the background of your clips. Instead concentrate on getting the best sound possible from your camera. Beware of background noise and wind, and don’t touch the microphone. Use the video camera’s internal mic only if the subject is three feet away. A few video clips on producing better sound on your videos can be found here and here.Don’t worry about editingThe directors want to see raw footage when they pick the best clips so don’t spend too much time editing your footage. If you need to trim or combine clips, you can use YouTube’s online Video Editor.Make it social
Plan a “film up” on July 24, during which you and your friends can meet up and film together. Before that, see what other users around the world are planning by subscribing to the Life In A Day channel. Make videos about what you plan to film, and post them to your own YouTube channel to get feedback.
More tips from Kevin MacDonald and Ridley Scott can be found on the Guidelines page of the Life in a Day Channel. And you can also check out this video by Campbell Live regular, the Fully Sick Rapper, to see how he interpreted the theme and presented a day in his life.
Time to get rolling!
Editor's note: This a guest post by The Fully Sick Rapper about his involvement in YouTube's special Life in a Day project, announced yesterday afternoon)
Life in a Day is a unique collaboration between YouTube, Hollywood (director Kevin Macdonald, producer Ridley Scott) and the YouTube community, to create a documentary that will capture one day in the life of thousands around the world - July 24, 2010.
After being asked to help out, I have submitted a video to help promote the launch of this global collaboration, by capturing one day in my own life, and showing YouTube users an example of the kind of thing that they might like to submit.
I suppose my experience as a YouTube user is a unique one, so I tried to capture that with this particular video. For the first six months of this year, I have been living within an isolated negative pressure room in a Sydney Hospital, and have been using social media to stay connected to the world. A large part of this has been through YouTube, as The Fully Sick Rapper. This started as a way to give a few mates a laugh, and keep myself busy, but it fast became a way for me to keep myself distracted from the health issues I have been facing, share my experience with the world, bounce positive energy off people going through similar circumstances, and escape the four walls of my quarantined room. Over the six months I spent in hospital, I posted about 12 videos that racked up around 1.5million views on YouTube alone.
My videos before this one have all been comedic, and have been made just as much for my own laughs, as for the laughs of viewers. However, this particular project made me think about what it would be like to show people what a real day in my life involves. Yes, I have fun, and I dress up funny, and try to make myself and others laugh, but that wears off very quickly, and in the times when I'm not dancing around in front of the camera, there is a lot of very quiet, very lonely, me time. I believe that I used this time as best I could for self-reflection and personal development, and I feel as if I have come out the other side of this time in hospital having grown a lot as a man, but it hasn't been easy, and there has been times throughout my stay that I have looked at myself in the mirror and thought that I couldn't handle it any more.
This video captures my 180th day in quarantine, and is set to a poem and a piece of backing music that I wrote and recorded, from within my isolated hospital room. At the stage I made this, I had no clear picture of when I might be going home, and in fact it was only three days later that I was told the wonderful news that I could return home and spend a couple of weeks in isolation within the comfort of my own home, before being able to return to the community.
I have had some awesome support from YouTube viewers, and I plan to continue making videos to share online. In my time in hospital, I have also been working hard on a web-series called the "Fully Sick and the Side Effect Project" with my brother, which we plan to launch on YouTube soon.
Posted by Christiaan Van Vuuren, aka the Fully Sick Rapper
We're heartbroken to see the All Whites bow out of the World Cup after an amazing (and undefeated!) run. However there's still one Kiwi on the football world stage who needs your support - 13-year-old Southland student Holly Pierce, whose Google 'doodle' is up against designs from 16 other young people from all over the world in the first-ever international Doodle 4 Google competition, "I Love Football".
The global voting is open until 28 June - we’d love to see Kiwis showing some more of that incredible patriotic support by voting for Holly’s design (left) at www.google.co.nz/doodle4google.
And if you're still needing a FIFA fix, why not check out some of the most-viewed World Cup-inspired videos on YouTube below? (And if you head over to YouTube, keep an eye out and be sure to click on the little football icon visible on some of the videos for an authentic South Africa 2010 sound!)
If you are a member of the press, please email our communications team at: press-australia-nz@google.com For all other inquiries, please visit our Help Center.
