"Google Beat will give you a snapshot of some of the topics that prompted people to turn to the web over the past week," the company says on its official blog. "Searches can be unexpected, and sometimes what's popular one week could never have been predicted the week before (think of Falcon Heene, last October's "balloon boy" or Steven Slater). We're looking forward to seeing what our data will reveal."

It's interesting to see Google get into the podcast world. Weekly tech wrap-up shows seem to be all the rage lately, with Leo Laporte's "This Week in Tech" podcast being one of the longest-running. Unfortunately for Google, Leo already has a very popular "This Week in Google" podcast which is hosted by What Would Google Do? author Jeff Jarvis and Lifehacker founder Gina Trapani.

Investor and entrepreneur Jason Calacanis took the "This Week in" brand of podcast to the next level with his podcast network of the same name (which he uses with Leo's permission, of course). Google's new show brings some very high production quality to the genre, and hopefully it's just the first of many more shows to come from Google.

The Obama administration announced the joint project with Expert Labs in a blog post earlier this month. As Trapani described it today: "The President has identified a series of scientific and technical challenges that are as important to the future as the moon landing was. And we want to help drive feedback on that list, and even suggest what other items should be on there that haven't been included."

Trapani has been one of the foremost voices in tracking the ways the web can improve everyday life and work. She focuses on making new developments accessible and is also a respected software developer.

Pelotonics describes itself as a group collaboration system built with "an eye toward adding certain intuitive pieces of functionality that Basecamp did not and would not launch." We wrote about the company once before, when it integrated popular note taking service Evernote into its software.

It's exciting to ponder what Pelotonics plus Trapani will come up with. When it comes to web based productivity, Trapani literally wrote the book on it. She now writes regularly at a personal blog called Smarterware.

For the sake of disclosure, and because it's interesting, I should note that Pelotonics is a past client of my consulting practice (I have no ongoing financial interest in the company). One of the first things I advised Pelotonics' Troy Malone to do was reach out to Gina Trapani - it was easy advice to give as their work couldn't be more related, both live in San Diego and Gina is among the nicest people in the industry. For the firmly un-opportunistic author to join the company is a real surprise, though.

Anyone interested in the future of workplace collaboration will now be all the more well served by keeping an eye on Pelotonics.

After four years leading what's become the most widely read productivity blog and one of the biggest blogs period on the web, Trapani announced at the start of the year that she was leaving her position as Lifehacker lead editor. She posted a long goodbye and look back at the site's history two weeks later. Trapani has been one of the most important figures in the rise of the blogging medium. She's also one hell of a nice person.

If you can't get enough of Gina, you can follow her on Twitter and on FriendFeed. At the very least, we're sure you'll want to join us in subscribing to Smarterware.org.

Photo CC by Will Pate.