Google® Business Solutions All-in-One For Dummies®

Chapter 2. Adding Google Media to Your Web Site

In This Chapter

• Understanding what Picasa Web Albums and YouTube can offer your site

• Choosing a resolution

• Embedding multimedia

• Creating and inserting a Picasa Web Albums slideshow

• Creating and inserting a YouTube video

Using your Web site to host traditional Office-style documents is a wonderful capability — as described in the previous chapter. Using Google multimedia in your Web site has many similarities to using Google documents, but there are key differences as well.

The two main channels for multimedia in Google Sites are based on Web properties that Google owns, one for photos, the other for videos. These are Picasa Web Albums, which is fairly well-known, and YouTube, which is a Web and cultural phenomenon, and one of the top few sites on the Web — along with Google itself.

What both have in common is that they import data from fairly complex Web sites. These sites incorporate a tremendous amount of functionality and are used to manage data that's hard to create — and hard to change, especially by anyone except the creator.

Embedding Picasa Web Albums presentations of images — usually photos — and YouTube videos in your Web site is, in a sense, more traditional and less truly collaborative than embedding Office-type applications. This is simply because of the difficulty of collaboratively changing the data that's being presented in the Web site.

With Office-type documents, individual chunks of data — words in a word processing document, ...