if you check out New Orleans this morning, you will now see distinctive blue tarpaulins on rooftops, construction in progress along the dykes, and a city that — from the air, at least — looks like it is springing back determinedly from Katrina.
In other words, Google Earth has just updated its imagery for New Orleans following a hue and cry after it became widely noticed that the existing imagery in the default layer was from before hurricane Katrina.
Giving people what they want is obviously the best way to defuse PR “crises” such as these:-)
Google did the RIGHT thing and as a native New Orleanian I thank them. I was in the city this weekend and it was a buzz of activity. Out of respect for the people rebuilding the destroyed city, this is what should have been done in the first place.
It’s worth noting that Google had post-Katrina imagery for the last 18 months or so. The hue an cry was because they reverted to pre-Katrina imagery, without explanation. That made it seem like the disaster “never happened,” which freaked a lot of people out.
What’s strange is that so many people didn’t get freaked out back when the reversion to pre-Katrina imagery actually happened, almost 7 months ago. They only got freaked out when the newspapers told them to get freaked out. Anybody who’s actually been paying attention to Google Maps knows it’s been showing pre-K data for months now.