Google learning on YouTube

I promised a couple of weeks ago that I would write a little bit about alternative sources of interesting online professional training (as opposed to academic training - see previous post here). This entry is a first step in that direction; Google on YouTube is an incredible source of interesting material from the (almost) undisputed masters.

Despite some misgivings about Google as an organisation and their constant march to world domination, there is no avoiding the fact that they are obviously doing quite a lot of things right. The host of presentational material.. or should I say propaganda.. that they provide at YouTube gives a real insight into some of these things:

• Google Code Talks: OK, I can't really judge the details of many of these talks, technophobe that I am, but they have some good stuff on OpenSocial, the mobile platform Android and integrating google applications into your own sites.
• Google techtalks: This is another developer-centric forum, but also has a bunch of presentations and workshops from within google's development organisation; how do they use agile processes? how do they get the user involved in development? what is their take on the python object model? These are sessions by google employees for google employees and are on the whole thoroughly informative.
• Life@Google: For those interested in google as an organisation (and I personally am!), this channel provides a range of perspectives on how the company ticks - much of it is banal, much of it is vlog-madness, but sift through it and you see an organisation that has much to be proud of!

Google being Google, I could continue the list almost indefinitely, but I will add just one more for now:

• Talks@Google: It doesn't matter who they are, they all want to talk at Google; Barack Obama (Candidates@Google), Salmen Rushdie, Noam Chomsky, Jeffrey Sachs (Authors@Google) or Wynton Marsalis (Musicians@Google)

Enjoy.