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.

Another case of shoddy reporting compounding faux alarmism: Scotland on Sunday reports that the UK’s Office for Civil Nuclear Security (OCNS) sees Google Earth as a “security issue” with causes it “headaches” and “worry”. What kind of issues? Well, none really, if you read the full quote by a spokesman:

“It is an issue for us. At present the quality of the images is such as not to give concern but if the pictures were of a higher resolution then that would be a different issue.”

So there’s no story. Silliness does start when a “source” tells the paper:

“If there were to be high-quality detailed images made available of security-sensitive areas then we would intervene to stop things like that getting out. We would have to take steps to prevent security being jeopardised.”

Intervene, ay? Ooh, scary.

To spice things up a bit, the article has to go sensationalise the Australian episode, where a wayward nuclear energy official’s censorious zeal was quickly squashed by cooler heads in the federal government. Here is some accurate local reporting on the matter:

A spokeswoman for [Australian] Attorney-General Philip Ruddock said security agencies had factored the Google Earth website into their assessments of threat and found it posed no risk.

Which means, Murdo Macleod, that it is not true that “The Australian government has already demanded that pictures of a nuclear plant should be removed from the site,” as you wrote. Nor is it true that “The authorities in Australia have already called for Google to screen out images of a nuclear power station amid worries that the information might be of use to terrorists.”