New at Google: Google New
It can be hard to keep up with the amount of new stuff Google cranks out, so the company has started a blog to promote those new products and features.
A few weeks after starting a video series to promote the most popular searches in a given week, Google is starting a blog of sorts to promote its new products.
Google New went live today as a directory of new products designed to help call attention to the new products Google launches at a dizzying rate, the ones that may not get as much attention as say Google Instant Search or voice calls from Gmail. The site will pull together posts from Google's various product and policy-related blogs and it appears it will use some editorial judgment in how it lays out the site: Google Instant Search is in the lead story position, as opposed to product launches over the last 24 hours such as Rich Snippets in Google Maps or enhancements to Google's AdWords accounts.
For a company built on the back of advertising, Google hasn't done a lot of advertising of itself. That's definitely starting to change this year, with the company buying the mother of all ads--a Super Bowl spot--in January, and more recently rolling out plans to advertise its display-ad prowess as well.
But it's also doing more subtle promotion, such as the Google Beat video series and the new Google New blog. Google authors dozens and dozens of individual blogs, but the most recent promotional activities--Google Beat and Google New--seem designed for more of a mass audience than the niche blogs that focus on specific product categories.