New Google service for webmasters - Sitemaps

Google has introduced a new tool to help webmasters by generating Sitemaps which the Google crawlers can then use to better index their sites.

Google Sitemaps is an experiment in web crawling. Using Sitemaps to inform and direct our crawlers, we hope to expand our coverage of the web and improve the time to inclusion in our index. By placing a Sitemap-formatted file on your webserver, you enable our crawlers to find out what pages are present and which have recently changed, and to crawl your site accordingly.

Hattip to Technology News for beating me to this bit of Googleholism.

Google Page Rank

Those of you with the Google Toolbar may be familiar with Google's "Page Rank" score, a 1 to 10 ranking based on the relevance, number of links and general "authority" of a particular website. Sites like Yahoo, MSN, Amazon.com and Google get a 10. (Google reportedly actually gets an 11.)

This blog has a PR of zero. Which is actually not bad for a very new site, since it is at least ranked. (Unranked is less than a zero.) The interesting point? This blog's Google cache has a Page Rank of 3.

Summer of Code

Google has announced an initiative to get students involved developing Open Source software.

The Summer of Code is Google's program designed to introduce students to the world of Open Source Software Development.

This Summer, don't let your programming skills lie fallow...Use them for the greater good of Open Source Software and computer science! Google will provide a $4500 award to each student who successfully completes an open source project by the end of the Summer. (payment details can be found in FAQ)

Hat tip to Google's (Official) Blog.