Sometimes I think about Google’s mapping and imaging “products” like Google Earth and Google Street View and wonder how exactly they relate to a search engine. Then I’ll spend more time using them and wonder again at their coolness. Here are tools made freely available which blow away any of the top-secret wizardry I used when I was a Navy spook. This technology is in a class by itself.
I keep coming up with cool ways to use this mapping technology: things like creating voter maps, showing how different zoning might affect adjacent properties, mapping crime, or creating a tourist guide to cool places downtown. I’d also like to learn how to add my own photographs to Google Maps and/or Earth, as well as how to stitch photography (such as aerial photography) into the imagery each provides. The KML and KMZ languages make this work: I just need to learn how to use it.
One thing I’m finding myself doing more of is looking up crime scenes and the neighborhoods of suspects. If a news report says a perp lived at 123 Main Street, I’ll pull up Street View for a look at what the house of a murder suspect looks like. Someone’s house get broken into? I pull up the house and suspiciously eye anyone who happened to be walking by when the photo was taken.
What I’ve found is that the neighborhoods seem to have little in common. They all look relatively safe. Perhaps that’s because the Street View cars appear to have been out just after sunrise one summer morning. Lots of places are safe at the crack of dawn.
These mapping tools are a great resource for seeing our world in ways we might not have considered. I hope to learn how to properly exploit them.
MIT has published list of 10 coolest new technologies (found it on slashdot). One of the technologies uses cell phones to monitor and study human behavior. Connect that with mapping tech and hmmm, did you stop to long in front of a store front with leftist educational materials… better check into this Turner guy… 🙂
It brings new meaning to Shakespeare:
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
that we may observe and use to the state’s
best interest…
Yes, this mapping is being used already. Every place your cellphone goes is being recorded right now and the feds don’t need a warrant to find out your location.
Scary, huh?
It is comforting to know that I may be boring the heck out of some fed in a basement room somewhere. 🙂
Of course the compassionate commie would want to help them.
We could blog to them with our camera phones: “Here’s my used bubble gum collection. My oldest piece is from Mrs. Cobb’s third grade class at Wilson school, it was actually on the side of the desk, not the bottom…”