Google Videos!

Google, as you know, has been extremely helpful to search for anything under the sun and read about them. Now, with the launch of Google videos (still in beta), you can view them too in your desktop. These are really wonderful instruments to learn stuff. Each day, newer contents are getting added to this site, and at an alarming rate. These videos deal with diverse topics, some of these deal with specific domains, technology, news analysis, and some of them just pure fun.

Google is a very technology savvy company and houses some of the brightest minds in industry. In the software industry, information and knowledge about it is the key to survival. For top class businesses like that of Google's, and to stay ahead of all its competition, this is most critical. Hence, very understandably, the company gives prime imporance to educating its employees of the latest happenings in technology. It constantly conducts workshops and seminars about technology for the benefit of its employees. Not only that, it captures some of these sessions in video and posts them on their website and makes them available to the general public (free of cost), through google videos. Google understands and appreciates the value of sharing, because it knows that this is one of the ways of keeping their own business ahead of the competion. Some of the videos that i really liked are

a. Being a Software Testing Expert by James Bach

b. On Exploratory Testing by Jon Bach

c. On Fitnesse, a Java unit testing framework by Rick Mugridge

There are lots more interesting ones, but i have'nt seen them all. I suggest those of you that are really interested, frequently visit http://video.google.com, and keep checking for newer contents. Better still, use the site's live feed to check for new videos automatically.

What is so great about all this, you may ask? After all, the concept of video blogging is not entirely new to the world. But, it has so far been not domain-centric, but used mainly for fun. One of the reasons i feel so greatly about this, is that most of us in India, don't ever get to listen (forget the videos) to some of the gurus in their respective fields featured through these programmes. This nice gesture from Google goes a long way to support the true spirit of globalization. Now, i have a lot more respect for this company, which I already had a great regard for, especially after reading the book Google story by David A. Vise and Mark Malseed.

Thank you, Google!

With peace,