This week’s Google I/O keynote fiesta brought plenty of big, exciting, game-changing announcements, but nothing more immediately exciting to me than the launch of the Google Font API (Read Google’s blogpost). Suddenly adding sleek, new fonts to any web page is as easy as visiting the Google Font Directory, copying, pasting, and voila.

There are a few key reasons why I’m so excited about this and I’ll elaborate a bit below:

1. The fonts are all open source-licensed
2. It works on all current browsers (cross-platform)
3. The fonts are cool and the possibilities are endless

There might be hundreds of fonts pre-installed on your Microsoft Office or Adobe Creative Suite software, but only a fraction of these will be recognized by most web browsers. Standards take time to develop and our perception of time in the web era is ridiculously skewed. It’s been less than 15 years since Netscape 2.0 became the first widely used browser to support tags in the first place! 1995 was also the year that the first standard HTML spec was published (HTML 2.0) and around the same time momentum started building for a CSS standard. In the earliest days of the web as we know it, it was all Times New Roman all the time.

“In Radiohead’s new video for ‘House of Cards,’ no cameras or lights were used. Instead, 3D plotting technologies collected information about the shapes and relative distances of objects,” according to the band’s YouTube channel.

After hearing about Radiohead’s first-of-its kind video, Google:

[A]greed with the band that it would be great to give you a deeper look into how all of this was done, and even a chance to play with the data yourself, under a license that allows remixing… You can view the video, watch a short documentary about how it was made, interact with the video in 3D, download some of the data, and download an iGoogle theme and gadget – all at http://code.google.com/radiohead.

Radiohead – ‘House of Cards’

Watch The Making of ‘House of Cards” below:

“[T]he data (although not the music) used to produce this music video are being made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License on the Google Code site,” according to Creative Commons board member Joi Ito. “This combination of Open Source licenses for code and Creative Commons licenses for data/content is very “good idea”…. Thanks to Aaron Koblin (the guy who wrote the code), Radiohead, Warner-Chappell and DeWitt Clinton and his team at Google for taking the lead on this.”

Also, In Rainbows is streaming for free at Last.Fm.

DISCLAIMER: I work for Warner/Chappell Music, Radiohead’s publisher

This grant not only recognizes Open Source for its top-notch, hourlong, nightly public radio show (and internationally popular podcast, but, also “‘in support of the innovative use of internet-based tools in the production of a daily public radio program.'” Brandon of Open Source said:

[T]heyâ€re developing tools at Open Source that are going to be useful in the future to a lot of people. People in public radio, people in public television, people tiptoeing toward that fantastic beast weâ€re beginning to call “public media.”

Congrats and keep up the good work. Hopefully soon we’ll hear you not only via podcast but also on Southern California Public Radio.