Yahoo! employee Brian Holtz extemporizes on corporate strategies:
It now kills me even deader that Keyhole was bought by Google instead of Yahoo. Not only are cable news channels using Google Earth for Katrina, but it’s even being used in U.S. Open tennis programming today.
Mosnews sometimes has stories of dubious quality, so it is by no means clear in this story whether their “source” speaks for the Russian Special Services, but he’s quoted as saying that with Google Earth “terrorists will see all that they need to carry out an attack in any part of the world.”
If the source is real, what scares me then is that the Russian Special Services are complaining due to ignorance of a fact that any intelligence service should know: These images have been readily available for ages. Either that, or they just hate openness. Or both.
Whenever somebody begins a rant with “Who gave X the right to…” I reach for my polemical guns. In this particular case, Sean Copeland at EarthHack.net begins badly by asking, “Who gave Google the right to web publish photographs of my backyard so detailed that I can see the details of my landscaping?” He’s “working on a legislative and lobbying strategy to drive action in Washington on this assault on our privacy.”
Does he really not know? The answer is: Because the technology and the imagery is available; because information wants to be free; because it is more equitable to have unfettered access to such information than to have access determined by the ability to pay or governmental fiat; because I’ll buy the high-resolution image of your backyard from a French company and overlay it on Google Earth and publish this to a German forum if I want; because somebody else will provide access to a server that does this for any region, from outside any jurisdiction you care to name, using any arbitrary web platform; because nobody cares about your landscaping, except for the people who do, who will find a way to see it; because the circumvention of whatever measures you propose will cost less in time and effort than the measures you propose.
Matt McIntosh calls Copeland’s stance privacy luddism. What a great term that is. (Via Internet Commentator)
PS You find privacy luddites in the strangest places.
PPS. Should I not post over the next 3 days, it’ll be because this place has no wifi.
Everybody is trying to figure out what it all means regarding Google, and depending on your focus, you get different answers. Daring Fireball’s John Gruber goes the Noam Chomsky route, where newspapers don’t sell news to readers but sell readers to advertisers, ditto Google with search, and Spatially Adjusted buys that argument:
For all those thinking Google Earth is the next GIS platform, think again. Google only views it as a way to push ads on to your desktop.
But I think that is landing a little too harshly on one side of the debate about what Google means. I think there is more room for nuance, certainly when it comes to Google Earth.
The alternative to the Google Earth way of portraying territories, where one “namespace” covers the entire globe and you either love the lay of the land or you don’t, is to make your own.
Hence the aptly named MapmyIndia, a year-old site pointed at by blog POV. It appears to be marketing itself as an India-centric alternative to the global mapping services, and it does indeed provide street-level maps of Indian cities, which others don’t.
Unfortunately, it might also just get you killed.
Continue reading This land is my land, this land is my land…
Many countries in Europe have national blog directories, and some of them also do location-based listings. si.blogs, a Slovenian blog list, uses a Google Maps/Earth implementation. Are there any others?
It’s natural for blogs written in Europe’s smaller languages to group together like this — these are natural blog microclimates. Blog community services like si.blogs play a valuable role in fostering a social landscape for blogs on a regional level… at least in the early stages — here in Sweden, blogging has exploded in the past 6 months, from 500 active blogs a year ago to around 10,000 today. This has somewhat overwhelmed the blog community services that operate on a national level, and bloggers have begun to seek other narrower criteria to define their communities.
(RE si.blogs’ KML feed: It too should be wrapped inside a network link before being delivered to Google Earth users, so that it is live.)
The Tao of Mac gets frustrated at the wait for a Mac version of Google Earth, so he goes under the hood to see what’s taking them so “long”.
I’m all for waiting for a cool-looking end-product, especially if the user interface were to look something like this.