Are you looking to read old magazines or search for some stuff?  Look no further than Google Book Search.

Google Book Search has added magazines into its ambit.  Google is partnering with publishers as diverse as New York Magazine, Popular Science and Ebony, to digitize archived and current magazines.  These magazines will have the original color and look of their paper counterpart - with an additional capability to search the text!!  It is interesting to see if Google can extend this initiative to Indian magazines too (I know there are many complications involved.  But it would be great, isn’t it?).  You can read more about this, in the Offical Google post.

This is an excellent initiative by Google, given the current green drive for online magazines (Check out Zinio here).

I am a lover of Google Charts API and used it in some of my applications. For those who are new to this:

Google Charts API is a dynamic chart generation tool. Charts can be generated at by passing suitable parameters to the API call and are rendered as images.

There is a good amount of documentation available for developers, who wish to use this service.

Recent features that are added include:

• Adding Markers to the chart
• Concentric Pie Charts and controlling their orientation
• Data labels
• Margin Controls and much more…

You might also wish to read the blog post about New features with Google Charts API.  Have fun charting!!

Grassroutes is a social venture by a non-profit society, Youth Factor. This is an initiative to “zoom in” on changes that are happening in various places of our country, spearheaded by many organizations not heard of at a larger scale. Grassroutes tries to handle this by forming a group of young minds who travel to the roots of change, meet the people involved, experience the change first-hand and share it with the outside world.

In addition, these people serve as ambassadors of organizations that are responsible for the change and help engage more people to contribute towards these organizations. Following links should help you know more about this venture. Great to know that there are many minds behind this from my alma mater, BITS Pilani.

Grassroutes Home

Grassroutes Program

Grassroutes Q&A

Grassroutes Blog

Grassroutes Team Blog