New Google Earth Updates

Looks like there’s a whole plethora of new Google Earth features that have just been launched. First up is the Ocean. Seriously. Although Google Earth did display some texturing to indicate depth and undersea features, it has now been dramatically expanded. It will now feature a detailed bathymetric map that will allow you to actually drop below the surface and move around the various trenches and ridges of the 3D seafloor. There is also a large collection of video and image data points of ocean life and surf spots, and logs of real ocean expeditions.

Next up is the new Touring function. With this you can create your own fly-through tours to share with other people.

Google Earth has also expanded the extra-earth destinations it has available with Mars 3D. In collaboration with NASA, Google Earth now gives you the option to fly to the Red Planet and view stunning high-res 3D terrain and imagery. They’ve also included various info points regarding the landing spots that have seen earth explorers touchdown on.

Finally is Google Earth’s new Historical Imagery. Up to now it was only possible to view a single image from a given location. With this new function you can move backwards and forwards through time, viewing images from various decades. Watch as a city explodes with growth.

So if any of this tickles your fancy, get over to Google Earth 5.0 and download yourself a copy now.

Great Words from Seth Godin

I thought these particularly inspiring words in the face of our current economic climate, and Brian Cowen's 4pm speech.

Grave new world

Creativity loves a problem, but it hates a lousy audience.

If everyone around you is sure the economy is tanking, that the end is near, that time is up and the company is headed for the tubes, it's almost impossible to find a creative solution.

Creativity changes the game, whatever game is being played. "We're going to run out of cash by the end of the year," is accurate unless you count creativity into the equation. Then the accurate statement is, "Under the current rules and assumptions, we're going to run out of cash..." Big difference.

Creativity demands exposure to market needs, and insulation from market fears. Give it some time to work, some support, some breathing room. That's when creativity has a chance to change the game.


Cheers Seth.

Breaking News on Wiki

We're all familiar with the plane crash on the Hudson recently, and hopefully you're also familiar with the fact that the story and initial pictures all broke on Twitter. What's also especially interesting is how the story developed on Wiki, and thankfully someone recorded it!

Fill it up with water?

I was excited to learn that production is planned and approved for the Genepax car, which was originally unveiled last June by the Japanese car company of the same name. The car can travel approximately 80km/hr, for over an hour, using just 1l of water to fuel it's engine. By taking hydrogen electrons from water, the car produces electricity to power it's electric motor. Exciting stuff.

'Human Error' to blame for Google Issue

Following on from my earlier post, it has been announced by Google that this morning issue was due to simple human error. When importing the malware list from StopBadware.org, someone accidentally included ‘/’ as one of the URLs and added every website.

Google’s VP of Search Products Marissa Mayer gave the following explanation:

If you did a Google search between 6:30 a.m. PST and 7:25 a.m. PST this morning, you likely saw that the message “This site may harm your computer” accompanied each and every search result. This was clearly an error, and we are very sorry for the inconvenience caused to our users.

What happened? Very simply, human error. Google flags search results with the message “This site may harm your computer” if the site is known to install malicious software in the background or otherwise surreptitiously. We do this to protect our users against visiting sites that could harm their computers. We work with a non-profit called StopBadware.org to get our list of URLs. StopBadware carefully researches each consumer complaint to decide fairly whether that URL belongs on the list. Since each case needs to be individually researched, this list is maintained by humans, not algorithms.

We periodically receive updates to that list and received one such update to release on the site this morning. Unfortunately (and here’s the human error), the URL of ‘/’ was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and ‘/’ expands to all URLs. Fortunately, our on-call site reliability team found the problem quickly and reverted the file. Since we push these updates in a staggered and rolling fashion, the errors began appearing between 6:27 a.m. and 6:40 a.m. and began disappearing between 7:10 and 7:25 a.m., so the duration of the problem for any particular user was approximately 40 minutes.

Thanks to our team for their quick work in finding this. And again, our apologies to any of you who were inconvenienced this morning, and to site owners whose pages were incorrectly labelled. We will carefully investigate this incident and put more robust file checks in place to prevent it from happening again.

Thanks for your understanding.

Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP, Search Products & User Experience


I guess everyone makes mistakes ;)