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Short news: Gaia redux; UK cities demand more updates

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  • Ivan Serezhkin Anonymous, he of Gaia, [Ivan is the hoster]posts his correspondence with Google Earth CTO Michael Jones online (with Jones’s permission). “Please note, that I did it on my own will, not being treated or something. Please do not consider me a victim. Michael explained the possible outcome of my work pretty good.” Indeed.
  • Marketers for Liverpool, Birmingham and Manchester are “disappointed” that London gets to have all the updates in Google Earth. They get both the BBC and the Guardian to write about it. Says the BBC:

    Jenny Douglas, planning director of Liverpool Vision, said: “The current Google Earth images show roofing work still under way at Lime Street train station.

    “This work took place between 2000 and 2001, which means the Google Earth images are at least five years old.

    “The city centre has changed dramatically since then. It is important that the millions of people using Google Earth have access to the latest images showing the city’s transformation.”

    The Guardian:

    Liverpool, which marks its 800th anniversary as a city next year, is facing a battle to win over hearts and minds before it takes up its role as Capital of Culture. ‘Google Earth is a fantastic search engine I use all the time,’ said Douglas. ‘That is what makes it really disappointing that it seems so out of date. ‘

    Google has a novel response:

    Rachel Whetstone, a spokeswoman for Google, said that the site relies on third-party external companies to provide their pictures. ‘We can only update things as soon as we have the data,’ she said. ‘We want to give people the best service we can, and so not doing it for London just because we can’t do it for other cities would seem wrong.’

    Much better to have this problem than a situation in which people are calling for censorship, or — even worse — nobody cares.

2 thoughts on “Short news: Gaia redux; UK cities demand more updates”

  1. Of course the fact the virtual earth has great coverage for the entire uk means that the data is readily available for google to use (at least to purchase) so really google mean that their preferred map data provider does not have this data.

  2. agreed. Virtual earth has way better coverage for the UK.

    having said that, if Liverpool are complaining, why dont they hire a plane to take aerial shots , and then send the data to Google?

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