Google TV sounds like a great idea. Sure. But one large downside has just surfaced, which should surprise no one. Google is in the advertising business after all, so Google TV product manager Rishi Chandra has confirmed that ad skipping will not be allowed.

Many of us are used to skipping ads on our set-top boxes. Google really has to arrange things so that somehow the user sees this as a win. I’m not sure how they would do that. You know what would be great? Putting the ad on my remote. That way I can set it down and ignore it.

Google is no stranger to cleaning house when it needs to. There are too many older web browsers out there and so the search engine giant has announced that its popular Google Reader will be ditching support for older browsers like IE6, Firefox 1.0, 2.0, Safari 2.0, 3.0, and even Chrome versions 1, 2, and 3.

Google says that the move will allow it to spend its time improving Google Reader instead of fixing issues with these old browsers. If you’re still using an old browser version, why? And hey, you better upgrade.

This made my day. This weekend’s Google doodle, celebrating the 30th anniversary of Pac-Man, is the best yet. The image is actually a playable 256-level Pac-Man game. Crazy right? Yes. And completely awesome.

It has all the elements of the original game. Just hit the “insert coin” button and you can even play 2 player mode with the WASD keys on your keyboard. Go play now. I can’t wait to see what else Google is planning for their Google Doodle.

Google is finally launching Google TV, which brings regular TV and web video to your TV. Plus, Android apps. Should be very powerful, given those factors. Google says that there’s the web, which lives on your laptop and your phone, and the TV world, which lives on your TV.

Google wants to incorporate both of those worlds into “a single seamless experience.” They want to give you the same experience at home on your TV as you get on your computer. A Google search box lets you search and find results from your TV and from the web. If you select the TV channel it goes to your TV channel. Pretty straightforward.

Some time ago Google purchased a company called On2 and many expected Google to open-source the VP8 video codec that came bundled with the company. Sure enough, Google has announced its new format called WebM, a video format that Google claims is efficient enough to be played on low-powered devices like netbooks, tablets and handheld devices.

WebM is open-source and licensed royalty-free under a BSD-style license. Many big names have already shown their support for WebM, including Firefox, Opera, Adobe, AMD, ARM, Broadcom, Freescale, NVIDIA, Qualcomm and Texas Instruments. Mozilla in particular has also decided to include support for it in the Firefox nightly builds from today, like Chromium, while Opera says that support is also on the way.

Google Storage for Developers is coming. The company has officially confirmed it, calling it a RESTful cloud service built on Google’s storage and networking infrastructure. Developers will be able to connect their applications to fast and reliable storage that is replicated across several US data centers.

It also offers Multiple authentication methods, SSL support and convenient access controls for sharing with individuals and groups. The service will be introduced to a limited number of developers at first. During the preview, each developer will receive up to 100GB worth of storage, and 300GB monthly bandwidth for free.

You’ve heard the debates on Flash vs HTML5. Steve Jobs hates flash blah blah blah. Enough bickering. From the Google I/O keynote: HTML5 support will be more or less complete on all “modern” browsers, says Google.

I’m assuming that means IE will have to wait? Is this the beginning of the death of flash? How will it affect cute cat videos? Is Steve Jobs laughing right now? So many questions.

Get ready to fill up your Chrome OS app page Google fans. Google just announced its new online web app store. Some of what they are showing off includes Dark Room for image editing, a nice version of TweetDeck, to name a few. Paid-for software will be offered. For instace Dark Room is $4.99.

Nothing on a launch date yet. Engadget says that the demo of Sports Illustrated’s interactive magazine is impressive, fully searchable with embedded video and “some pretty clever tricks” with geolocation. The web store for Chrome and Chrome OS will hit the dev channel very soon.

Google started selling its Nexus One handset directly to customers back in January. The handset didn’t exactly sell like hot cakes or the iPhone. The reason was that many users simply wanted to get hands on the device before buying it.

ITProPortal has announced that Google has officially stopped selling the Nexus One via its website direct to customers. The publication reports that Google will instead focus on selling the device through retailers.

Google has decided to introduce a new look to their search results, making it even easier to search for and find exactly what you’re looking for. There’s some simple left-hand navigation the new Google look, but we’ll let the video tell you all about it.

I’ll just say that I happened upon the changes by accident last night and was quite pleased with what I found. In general, contextually relevant, left-hand navigation has been added to the page, while the overall look and feel has also undergone some slight changes.

Google isn’t content to just make public domain books freely available for e-book readers. Google has just confirmed that its Google Editions e-book service will be launching in late June or July. Looks like the service will let users buy digital copies of books they find through Google’s existing book search service, and let retailers sell Google Editions on their own site and retain the “bulk of the revenue.”

We don’t have a ton of details yet. Nothing on pricing or which publishers involved, but Google has said that it planned to make between 400,000 and 600,000 books available with prices to be set by the publishers.

Sony is planning to introduce its new TVs, which are powered by Intel chips and Google software next month. Sony and Google will be talking about the new products at a conference in San Francisco on May 19th and 20th.

Logitech has even been given the assignment of designing the remote control for the new set-top box, which will include a keyboard for navigation. The set-top-box will be powered by the Android operating system, and of course require an Internet connection. In this market, Google will be competing with the likes of looks likes of Cisco, Motorola, Microsoft, Apple, and TiVo.

Remember back in February when that retailer allowed google into their shop to take pictures of the place? Well, as it turns out, Google really does have plans to make easier for you to check out stores from your computer.

With Google Places, you can check out the interior of places like restaurants, cafes, hotels, spas, salon, gyms and retail stores, all from your computer. The pictures are taken by Google photographers who arrange a photo shoot with the business owners. Right now Google is running a trial in about 30 cities across the US, Australia and Japan.

It’s a scenario old as Google itself. You have an argument and you settle it by comparing the number of Google search results. You wouldn’t think they could make a whole Wii game inspired by it, but they have done just that.

The game was developed in cooperation with Google and players have to choose which of the several search terms is most popular. There are 14 mini-games in total. Chances are it won’t be released outside of Japan, but for those in the land of the rising sun it will be out on the 29th of April.

You knew that Google was looking to take over your living room at some point and the NYTimes has the details on Google TV, a platform to deliver web content to Android-based set-top boxes and TVs through partnerships with Sony, Intel, and Logitech.

Google hopes that the platform can succeed where many others have failed to seamlessly integrate web content onto TVs, bringing services like Twitter and sites like YouTube, and of course games, webapps, and more.