Posted by Brian Axe, Group Product Manager, AdSense

As a past founder of a technology startup, I understand the elation of coming up with an idea that solves a real need, building a product, and seeing people use it to make their lives better. Even more satisfaction comes when you can do all of this and pay the bills too. As I mentioned in this article it brings a smile to my face to hear about entrepreneurs in the developing world who use AdSense to replace their day job with AdSense earnings -- simply by writing about what they know and love. The story says these people are on "Google's hidden payroll" -- I say let's not hide this opportunity any longer.

Posted by Nick Railston-Brown, Ghana Country Director, TechnoServe

The Google Foundation supports select organizations whose work addresses the challenge of global poverty in ways that are effective, sustainable, and scalable. From time to time we invite guest bloggers from grantee organizations to tell us about their work.

We’re pleased to report that TechnoServe and the Google Foundation are launching a national business plan competition this week in Ghana, called “Believe Begin Become.” It’s designed to help Ghanaian entrepreneurs develop skills, obtain seed or expansion capital and establish the networks that help transform their business ideas into successful enterprises. (Watch the video about the program.)

More and more, entrepreneurs are recognizing the value of gaining skills, tools and a strong business network, and we know from our experience in Latin America what this kind of competition can mean to entrepreneurs. The program helps establish a crucial business network that will carry on long after the competition ends.

Our Organizing Committee colleague Ishmael Yamson puts it this way: “There are many entrepreneurs out there with good ideas — but they need encouragement to translate those ideas into concrete activities. Believe Begin Become can help them to do that.”

Get in touch if you’d like to get involved.

Update: added link to Google Video at end of paragraph 1.

Posted by Pedram Keyani, Software Engineer

What do you get when Google and Nike get together and brainstorm? A sneaker-shaped server? A great TV ad for web search? No, you get Joga.com, an online football community that combines Google technology with Nike's unique sports content and access to players. Joga brings people all over the world together to celebrate their shared passion for the game of football (for you Americans out there, by "football" I mean "soccer").

What can Joga.com members expect? Three words: content, community, and players.

Content – Create your own personalized page to add your favorite pictures, videos and blogs, and view what your fellow fans have added. Members can keep current with Friend Requests, Alerts, and Messages too.

Community - Joga users can create their own teams, find local fields, and play other Joga teams in their community.

Players - Gain exclusive access to profiles and information about Nike players.

What does it all mean? Well, Joga.com comes from "Joga Bonito," Portuguese for "play beautiful," a phrase that symbolizes both any football player's desire to embody the grace of the game and our goal to offer a community site that helps promotes the sheer fun, skill, sportsmanship and community spirit that make football truly the world's favorite game.

Whether we've succeeded, of course, will be up to all of you to determine. We look forward to seeing football-crazy people from around the world playing as beautifully as possible at Joga.com.

Posted by Jason Goldman, Blogger Product Manager

The Google Blog was unavailable for a short time tonight. We quickly learned from our initial investigation that there was no systemwide vulnerability for Blogger. We'll let you know more about what did happen once we finish looking into it.

Update: We've determined the cause of tonight's outage. The blog was mistakenly deleted by us (d'oh!) which allowed the blog address to be temporarily claimed by another user. This was not a hack, and nobody guessed our password. Our bad.

Posted by Mihai Parparita, Software Engineer, Google Reader team

Mom always taught us to share and now we know why: it's fun. Google Reader, which keeps track of websites you like to read regularly, just added the ability to share what you like to read with your friends.

You can send a link to your starred items in Reader, and you can even put a clip on your blog with recent items from your reading list. For instance, I mark all of the interesting posts that I find as "linkblog." Then my friends can subscribe to my "linkblog" label -- even if they don't use Google Reader -- and visitors to my blog can see it in the sidebar.

Some other shared lists we've come across:

• List of Official Google Blogs (U.S. only)
• Jason's "hipsters" list
• Chris's recent activity
• Justin's "thought leaders" list

To get started with sharing, just click the "Share" link in Reader or see the help section.

Posted by Ellen Spertus, Software Engineer & Associate Professor of Computer Science, Mills College

Recently I was one of several Googlers who volunteered at the Expanding Your Horizons in Science and Mathematics conference at Mills, where I also teach. This annual event provides career panels and hands-on workshops to encourage middle-school girls to keep studying science and mathematics as they enter high school. I led a workshop, "How to Build a Computer," in which the students learned binary arithmetic and built a half-adder.

I don't know who had more fun, the girls or the volunteers! Google is a sponsor of the national Expanding Your Horizons Network, whose workshops have reached over 625,000 girls.

Photo by Barton Friedland

Posted by Greg Miller, Software Engineer

It's high time for us to release a small update for our Gmail Notifier for Mac (OS X). We've added a few things of our own and got some ideas from users too. Some of the changes are:

• it's a universal binary, so it will run natively on PowerPC and Intel Macs;

• it will notify you when a new version is available and automatically upgrade itself; and...drum roll, please...

• it has new icons (we know it's what you've asked for!).

Also, as many of you know, the Gmail Notifier supports plug-ins, and one of our users wrote a cool plug-in called Gmail+Growl that displays visual Growl notifications when new mail arrives. Very cool and worth checking out. So download the Mac Gmail Notifier once again, and we'll take care of the rest.