Philipp Lenssen reports that Google Calendar has added a gallery of public calendars that users can subscribe to.

The directory is cataloged by Top Picks, TV shows, Events, Sports, Entertainment, Miscellaneous, Holidays and By Google. Wouldn’t it be nice if the By Google category showed scheduled Google Search updates?

After you click on the calendar, it will pop open a preview of the calendar, you can then choose if you would like to subscribe to that calendar or not. There are more details on the gallery over here, plus if you want to make your calendar public, you can learn how over here.

Postscript: The Google Blog just posted about this adding more calendars:

Atlantic Records – See your favorite musical artist’s concert schedules.
Cordless Records – Find out where the latest independent artists are playing.
TLC – Keep up to date on new shows on the TLC Channel.
Disney – Plan your family vacation around special events at Disneyland.
Eventful – Track fun events in your local area.
Jambase – Know which live music acts are coming to your area.
NBA – Follow your favorite basketball team, and never miss a game.
Netflix – Find out when your favorite new movies are available on DVD.
Orbitz Deals – See special travel deals next to your personal calendar.
Wcities – Learn about cool happenings in cities across North America.
Zvents – Gather ideas for things to do this weekend.

Google has just launched a mobile version of Google Calendar, which is supposed to load for those visiting the Google Calendar site with a mobile phone. Google describes it more in a blog post today. It appears to work on a range of phones, including Windows Mobile.

Via Search Engine Journal, Google Blogoscoped has posted some screenshots of the service in action.

As I said on my blog:

This is part of a larger, holistic push in mobile for Google that includes voice search/directory assistance (Goog411), WAP, applications and text messaging. Gmail is also available for mobile.

Google Calendar is also a local events database (which will become important on the phone), though not as fully developed in that regard as a true events database such as Zvents, Attendio or Eventful.

Recently iCrossing surveyed mobile users and found that search was gaining traction in mobile and that the market share breakdown generally mirrored Internet search.

Expect Google to continue to roll out mobile versions of its Internet products and applications, including, I would imagine at some near-term-future point, iGoogle.

Note that Yahoo Calendar is also available on mobile phones.

The Google Blog announced new features for Google Finance. The features include:

• Events section now lists earnings calls, analyst meetings and other scheduled events relating to a company
• Add those events to your Google Calendar right from that page
• View and download historical prices (example for AAPL)
• You can download the latest portfolio performance and transaction details from your portfolio
• Links to the news RSS feeds for each stock ticker
• Google News now links to Google Finance if the company is listed

Here is an example of Google Calendar integration with Google Finance for Apple’s stock.

Here is an example of Google News integration with Google Finance for a search on APPL news.

The Google Mac Blog was hacked this weekend, at least the second time an official Google blog has been hacked. It was restored fairly quickly. In somewhat related news, Chris Pirillo noticed Google Calendar users storing their private passwords in their public calendars.

I noticed that the Google Mac Blog was hacked when I saw a post in my RSS feed that read;

Yo!

Yo! This is crazy.. I tried to register this and I could! :)

- Vishal

Philipp Lenssen has a screen capture of the hack.

Back in October, the main Google blog was hacked just after Google had posted a notice discussing how seriously the company takes security.

Also in October — a week after the main blog was hacked — an employee mistakenly posted a personal message on the official Blogger blog. Further back in 2006, the entire official Google blog got deleted, which allowed someone else to take control of the domain for a short time.

As for Google Calendar, Chris Pirillo doesn’t blame Google for the security issues in Google Calendar (which are down to users not being smart, rather than some type of “holes” or “hacks”), but he does wish for better user education.

In short, a search on user password in the Google Calendar “public events” area brings up some private passwords that people have left out in public view.

Hitwise reports that Google Calendar has increased its market share by 333% between June 2006 and December 2006. Google Calendar recently passed by MSN Calendar’s share and is quickly encroaching on Yahoo Calendar’s share. LeeAnn from Hitwise shows that “Yahoo Calendar received 48% of its upstream from Yahoo Mail or Yahoo Address Book” but Google only received “19% of its upstream traffic from Gmail for the week ending 12/30/06, and 42% from Google search.” This leaves me to believe that if Google can improve the promotion of Google Calendar via Gmail, it too can surpass Yahoo Calendar’s market share. At least those charts seem to show Google Calendar going in that direction.