Street Views

I'm a big fan of Google Maps. It's my first choice when looking for something. It has some nice features to plan routes, adjust them on the fly, overlay satellite views, etc. But Dianne just clued me in to the latest feature -- Street Views.

When you're looking for an address in a major city, click on the street view button and you're likely to see a view right from the location you searched for! And the view is from right in the street! But it gets even better, the image is a full 360 photo that you can rotate to see all the buildings around that location. It's the ultimate for situational awareness to help you expect what to see when driving to a certain spot. The interface also lets you move along the street just like you're driving down the road.

So how did they do it? This article explains it very well. Google worked with Immersive Media that installed 360 degree cameras on the tops of cars that have crisscrossed streets in 13 cities. Fortunately one of those cities is Cincinnati. I used the street views last week to find out exactly where a particular bus stop was located and what businesses were around it for reference. Pretty cool. Check it out next time you're using Google Maps.

Aviation Charts & Google Earth

One thing I find a little hard to do when making a cross country flight to a new airport is to spot the airport from a distance. Large airports are pretty easy. The small ones, with just a single runway, can be harder to see. They are easier to spot when you're up high, but you have to plan your descent to be at the right altitude when you get to the entry pattern for the field. That compounds the problem. Winter makes things a little easier as the dark runways pop out from the surrounding snowy landscape.

I've been using the top down satellite views available on Google Maps to get more familiar with the lay of the land. It helps to translate a chart view to the view of the area. An example is shown in the image below. The satellite image on the left has a green arrow showing the Blue Ash airport (KISZ). Compare that to the VFR chart view on the right where the Blue Ash airport is the red rectangle above the 100/50 numbers. (Click on the image to see a larger version) The satellite views help, but you never have that top down view when you're flying in.

Last week I ran across a site called Chart Geek. They provide aviation charts (sectional charts) that can be used in combination with Google Earth and the flying feature. It's a nice addition since you can get a view from the same perspective you'll have when flying in to a new airport. A neat idea. Here is a sample video from Chart Geek.

Sucking the Fun Out

Dianne has a nice post about Google's beta image labeler. I was using it this weekend and thought it was fun. Sometimes you click with a partner and your labels match right away and you move on to the next image. However, I just couldn't match labels from some partners on straightforward pictures. The interface tells you how many labels your partner has assigned. In many cases my partner would assign three and then stop. Nice effort I thought. I'm busting my brain trying to figure out how they'd label an image and they're not adding labels. I'd put in a half dozen suggestions without any luck. Eventually I'd get them to pass and move on to the next image. With that poor effort, we might only see 3-4 images over the 90 seconds. Boring.

After reviewing a few sets of images, I saw one image of a group of people that had a label of 'diphosphonate'. That term caught my attention because of my work in the bone field. Originally, disphosphonates were used as corrosion inhibitors in closed, circulating water systems and also as water softening agents. In the '60s, folks realized that the attraction diphosphonates have for calcium could be leveraged for bone diseases. Today, many of the osteoporosis medications like Didronel, Actonel, Fosamax, Aredia, etc. are all in the bisphosphonate class (another word for diphosphonates). I thought that was an odd label for a group of smiling people. How could that happen?

After several more sets, I realized holding the cursor over the top of a classified image showed the labels entered by your partner. When I was having trouble matching a partner, I looked at their 3 labels on an image we passed on. I think the image was the portrait of a woman and their labels were diphosphonate, carcinoma, and beleaguered. There is no way I would have matched those labels. Then it dawned on me, some idiots were trying to Google bomb the image classification. They were using odd, unique terms that would cause certain types of images to show up when Google searching for that term.

Those Google bombers just sucked the fun out of the Labeler for me. When I was having trouble matching someone, I'd check their labels immediately after passing on an image. If they were odd terms, I'd leave and start a new set with a different partner. Once again I'm reminded of the kids who didn't play nice in grade school. Were these crappy partners the crazy drivers I described the other week? Can't we all just get along and enjoy a fun little web experiment on image labeling at face value?

Beta Version of Writely

Writely is a new, web based word processing app being developed by the folks at Google. It's a beta version right now. Let me say it again, I know it's beta. I've used Writely for my last dozen or so posts. Here are my impressions.

The reason Writely is of interest to me is that I like to take notes on potential blog posts, let them simmer, and edit them before posting. You're probably thinking how can that be. I also use a few different computers. Having documents available on the web lets me work on them at work and at home without having to carry them around on a USB drive. Another interesting Writely feature is the ability to take a document and publish it directly to your blog. You set up the login one time and then it posts without having to log in and publish.

I've only scratched the surface, but there are some quirks with the beta version. First, when adding hyperlinks, Writely adds a space after the highlighted text (if there is punctuation after the highlighted item it's 100% and other times occasionally). That's annoying. Second, if you paste formatted text into Writely, it's not always to possible to reformat it (e.g. to un-bold text). That's annoying. Third, if you copy from Writely into a Blogger post you're creating manually, you don't always get what you copied and it's hard to reformat the text. I found that very difficult when using a bulleted list. Fourth, the connection to blog publishing isn't solid right now. I thought going from Writely to Blogger, both under the Google umbrella, would be seamless. Unfortunately, that's not the case. The Writely blog post preview looks good, but when I publish to my blog the title is missing. So if you use this, you still have to log in to Blogger and edit the post to add a title. And heaven forbid you try to edit a post in Writely and republish. For one post in particular, I had so many problems with the edit/reposting that I ended up logging in to Blogger to delete the post to fix my blog. That status didn't get updated in Writely, so you couldn't republish again. Argh! Back to the manual posting procedure.

Bottom line, the concept is intriguing and the possiblities useful. However, the beta version is far from ready for primetime. It's good for working on text, but don't count on all the formatting and publishing options. I'd be curious to hear how the collaboration feature has worked -- leave a comment if you've tried it.

Word of the Day

My new vocabulary phrase of the day is ‘Google bombing’ and the word for the day is spamdexing.

I was poking around some random blogs and saw a post about doing a Google search for ‘failure’ or ‘miserable failure’. They had a screen shot of the results. Although I understood the top hit shown on the search results, I was nevertheless surprised. Given my skeptical nature, I didn’t believe it so I went to Google to try it for myself. Try it at Google or click here to see the results. Pretty hilarious and it makes perfect sense given his approval ratings over the last few months.

Google has now added an explanation up front that led me to the Wikipedia entry for Google bombing. In short, it’s a way to raise the ranking of a search result as a joke or for “political intentions.” In real life or in cyberspace, someone is always looking at ways to exploit a system.

Google, Ask, and Blogger Search Results

Dianne had a nice post about blog tracking and the use of MyBlogLog. I get less traffic than she does, but it's still interesting to see where people are coming from. A couple reminded me of posts made long ago that brought back some memories. I was actually surprised to see that people doing a search would actually click on a search result that takes them here. Obviously not very discriminating with their searching. Here are recent searches (Google, Ask, and Blogger) that led people here.

• hogey carmichael biography who was

Took them here. Probably didn't stay long with my Hogey comments. I did see Lauren Bacall on the Oscars and she looked really good.

• cincinnati rollergirls
• blu bayou cincinnati and "blu bayou" cincinnati
• blu bayou roller derby
• sadistic sadie
• 739.27 t213e

A lot of traffic associated with the Rollergirls. The last one took them here. I wonder if they were looking for The Librarian or actually looking for the book.

• tracking blog traffic

• creative cubicles

Took them here.

• clocks that display time floating in air

Took them here.

• wrist fracture physical therapy

Took them here or maybe here. They probably would have found Dianne's post funny. By the way, my shoulder continues to improve and my range of motion, although not the same as the right side, is fairly close. I feel for anyone dealing with a frozen shoulder.

• wedding lion dance august 20, 2006

Took them here.

• earl world

Someone was actually searching for this blog?

And just today I had a hit on this search:

• where in Hawaii can you find a fountain pen by earl?
  

It took them here because of this post that has the phrase "...see if you can find us..." and this post that mentions "...a fountain of feet...". They must have thought Google failed them on that search.

Films From National Archive

Google Video has more than 100 films from the National Archive available for viewing or downloading. Here is a link to a few from the Department of the Interior. There are several WWII documentaries and a few films about space flight. There are a lot of interesting films -- some that remind me of films I saw in grade school. I watched a documentary about the making of Boulder Dam (warning -- a huge download for a 30 minute film). There are some interesting shots covering the whole process from diversion of the river through to the finished dam. Having visited Boulder Dam a couple years ago, I was astounded by the construction feat as well as the conditions the workers had to endure. It was really hot when we were visiting. I can't imagine establishing the infrastructure necessary to build a dam under those conditions.

I'm sure by now there is a lot of trash on Google Video. However, it's nice that films like these are available on the web for a wide audience.