19.132 London and the Google'd world

               Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 19, No. 132.
       Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
                   www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
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                     Submit to: humanist_at_princeton.edu

         Date: Sat, 09 Jul 2005 06:18:32 +0100
         From: "Ken Cousins" <kcousins_at_gvpt.umd.edu>
         Subject: Coverage of events in London

Thanks for the update Willard.

While slogging through my various listserv messages and routine blog
visits this morning, I came across a link to an ABC News report, that
integrates their coverage (and that of others) with GoogleEarth. I
must say, it's *quite* impressive, and got my mind rolling on how
this approach might be expanded in the future.

Summary, with links:
http://augmentation.blogspot.com/2005/07/interactive-news-maps.html

Since Google Earth made its API publicly available, a number of very
useful "hacks" have already appeared. Although many more have been
developed for Google Maps, I strongly suspect that the trend will be
towards the more feature-rich Google Earth. I've already seen hints
that communities are developing that link popular photo tagging sites
(e.g., Flickr) with the *.kml format, which may ultimately allow
Wiki-like annotation of local maps.

For example:
www.myjavaserver.com/~weathermaps/weather

  From there, it's not a huge leap to imagine all varieties of
geographically referenced knowledge communities emerging.

Boggles the mind, truly.

K

Ken Cousins
Harrison Program on the Future Global Agenda
Department of Government and Politics
3114 P Tydings Hall
University of Maryland, College Park
T: (301) 405-6862
F: (301) 314-9690
<mailto:kcousins_at_gvpt.umd.edu>kcousins_at_gvpt.umd.edu

"The important thing is not to stop questioning.
Curiosity has its own reason for existing."
         Albert Einstein

<http://www.bsos.umd.edu/gvpt/kcousins>www.bsos.umd.edu/gvpt/kcousins
http://augmentation.blogspot.com

>>> 19.128 recent events in London
...

Apart from the obvious, what's remarkable about these events is the
massive role all forms of (computer-mediated) communication are
playing in drawing people together, uniting communities, summoning
help, giving reassurance and contributing intelligence to the current
investigation. Communication has, I suspect, played a very large part
in helping to maintain calm and order amidst all the violence and
chaos. This makes me wonder to what degree terrorism as now practiced
depends on a certain level of public communication -- some, but not
as much as we now have at our command.
...
Received on Sat Jul 09 2005 - 01:44:43 EDT