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.”

Mark Newman (Cartogram guy) on NPR

If you’ve not yet read about or seen Mark Newman of the University of Michigan’s election maps or hisAtlas of the Real World: Mapping the Way We Live, All Things Considered provides an introduction.

Will News Focussed Mapping App Mapwith.us Make It?

The original vision for the mapping app, once named GeoMonkey, (that’s still the name of the company, Q&A) was as a social networking app. But that didn’t pay the bills for its creators, students at the University of Washington, Vancouver. So the app was updated and renamed as Mapwith.us. One use is as a community mapping site, where users can save their own maps and post photos and the like to them from GPS-enabled phone apps (iPhone, Blackberry, Android, Java).

The second use, is more interesting: an app to map news of professionals and citizen journalists.

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NZ Firm Drops its Mapping Service for Google

TradeMe is currently offers its Smaps, a mapping app developed by Wellington firm ProjectX as a stand alone site and to power its TradeMe auction site. Smaps will shutdown December 1, and TradeMe will move to mapping built on Google’s platform. A second site from the same company, TravelBug, already switched over. Smaps received high praise and stats, but the company wants to focus on its strengths.

- Stuff.co.nz