google maps

To help highlight the immense destruction that befell Haiti as a result of the recent earthquake, satellite imaging company GeoEye has teamed up with Google to produce a plug-in for Google Earth that allows users to view shots of Port au Prince taken at 7:20 this morning. By toggling between the newer photos and older satellite images taken of the city, the full scale of the devastation becomes shockingly apparent.

While Google's obviously best known for its search, it's the company's advertising model that pays for in-house massage, a critically acclaimed cafeteria, and sky-high stock price. Now, a new patent indicates that Google wants to combine its 21st-century ad savvy with an old-school publicity mainstay -- billboards.

Australian Aborigine mythology begins in a period known as the "dream time", before the emergence of humanity. Many stories about the dream time include legends about stars, gods, or rocks falling from the sky. And new research utilizing Google Earth surveys of the outback show that many of those myths may actually be historically accurate.

Like most Internet applications, Twitter connects you with people who seem to exist in a vast, abstract, cyberspace. Now, a new iPhone app from the French company Presselite uses augmented reality to show you exactly where your friends are tweeting from.

Google Street View has typically depended upon camera-toting vans and cars to provide onsite visuals to Google Maps users. But a more recent addition to the wheeled fleet includes a trike pedaled by a Google employee who resembles a fit ice cream man.

I've always been a fan of the pixel-art illustration style, whether it's the latest eBoy poster or illustrations by Quick Honey featured in our own pages. But this, I'm afraid, takes the ultimate pixel-art cake: a ginormous, ultra-high-resolution pixel-art map of Hong Kong that's zoomable, brosweable and searchable just like a Google Map.

The image you see above is purportedly traces of the ruins of the Lost City of Atlantis, found on Google Earth. Let's weigh the evidence for and against, and see what we can conclude.

Conclusion 1: This Is Atlantis, Dammit!

As you're almost certainly aware, the State of Victoria is in devastation today after some of the country's worst ever bushfires have ravaged through the country, killing at least 108 people, destroying 750 homes and burning over 330,000 hectares of country.

Google's announcement of their partnership with Sensis' Yellow business listings reminds me of Dawn and Tim in the original UK version of The Office. Google Maps is like Tim - sometimes funny, sometimes entertaining, while the Yellow business listings are like Dawn - pretty in their own way, has an obvious attraction to Google Maps, but is stuck with some lout of a bloke (the rest of the Sensis stable) and so pretty much misses the opportunity to go off and get together with Tim... er, Google Maps.

Last week, Google released a beta application that provides walking directions in major cities such as New York, San Francisco, and Minneapolis. It's another sign that the search giant is getting even more specific about "organizing the world's information," right down to the sidewalk in front of your house. If you want to walk from your apartment in the suburbs to a restaurant downtown, Google will show you the best route with turn-by-turn directions you can print out or follow on your smartphone.

Here's my dream road-trip ritual: Pull up an address in Google Maps, beam it to the car by some wireless technology and load it to the nav system as a destination. If there's a relevant phone number, sync it with my Bluetooth phone. Then locate all the In-N-Out Burger locations in the area and cross-reference them with local gastroenterologists, just to be safe.

The world hasn't quite turned my way just yet, but BMW just introduced a fairly close approximation for US customers on its new 2008 X6 Sports Activity Coupe

Google is slowly turning its Maps application into a wiki and that looks to be a very good thing. Sidewalk—and later Citysearch—only ever had enough staffing resources to scrape the surface of any particular city. Google Maps, on the other hand, has the entire online populace at the ready. While Citysearch in recent years has opened its site to community reviews, it has not given users control over all the data. That's where Google Maps is headed.

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has teamed up with Google to give anyone with Web access a chance to see what life and conditions are like in a refugee camp. The initial iteration centers on Chad, Iraq, Colombia and Darfur.

Web surfers can explore camps through the visual, textual, audio and video information that's layered on top of the bigger picture. Pop-up windows throughout the images of the camps tell you what's going on, and what's needed. You can also move in close enough to examine the infrastructure, including schools and other facilities.