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via NSGIC blog

Why the iPod Touch Didn’t Get Google Street View

Charlie Sorrel at Wired gives a less-than-satisfying answer. What does Apple say?

Quote of the Week

“She [Catherine Litvack, executive director of the Crossroads of the American Revolution Association in New Jersey] said the groups are trying to arrange with Google Earth to snap a photograph of the light show.”

The light show in question will be on Tuesday night and will cover 108 miles from Beacon, N.Y., to Princeton to mark the day 225 years ago when the last British troops boarded ships in New York harbor and sailed away, leaving behind a free nation. Xenon spotlights will be mounted atop spots that approximate the sites of Revolutionary War beacon fires (map). Tuesday is one of the Evacuation Days celebrated in the United States. Here in Massachusetts we celebrate when the troops left Boston on March 17 (also St. Patrick’s Day).

- The Daily Record

Where On Google Earth Will You Be On Waitangi Day?

Waitangi Day is New Zealand’s national day and New Zealand’s national indigenous broadcaster, Maori Television, is running a campaign to have nationals post message on Google Earth noting where they’ll be on that day. This news, and the headline in the title, comes from a “publicity release” on the event.

Now, I have no problem with the idea or the use of Google Earth for collecting the data. I have to admit use of “Google Earth” instead of just “Earth” gives me pause. The real question is where on Earth will people be? They’ll be using Google Earth to represent that location. They could use another software solution, of course. Somehow this use of Google Earth implying that Google “owns” the Earth goes just a bit too far for me. I’m ok with “google” as a verb and I applaud Google for naming Google Earth as it did. (Compare Virtual Earth/Live Maps/Live Search Maps and you can see the lost branding opportunity.) Can we just leave the “real earth” as “earth?”

Times-Picayune: How New Orleans is Shrinking

One key stat in the first few paragraphs of an article exploring the challenges of managing the shrinking city:

ESRI, a leading market research firm, projects New Orleans will gain only 15,000 residents in the next five years.

The city now has about 300,000 residents, down to about 1/2 its peak population of 627,000 in 1960. Now, here’s the part that I didn’t know: “About half of the population loss of the past 50 years happened before the levees breached.”