Bytes · Avoiding the O/S - StreetView - Gears

.. catching up again ...

The Guardian notes that 'Councils bypass Ordnance Survey for Google Maps', highlighting Brent's use and focusing on the savings against paying the ogres of Ordnance Survey.

Couple of other things:

1. Using Google Maps gets you into the much wider world of the web, widgets'n'all and gives you the ability to tap into exemplars in a way generally not available elsewhere in eGov. It bypasses 'has a council used that? too risky otherwise'.
2. It is risky. I could see Google charging for it, ad-free. This is why the Telegraph's dropped them.

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Raf Needleman reports on Webware that Google image search recognizes faces (it's in beta, live but unnanounced)

[Do a search], go into the address bar and stick this on the end of the URL: &imgtype=face. Go to that URL and you'll see just image search results of people.

You can also search for news results: Append &imgtype=news.

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Google Maps StreetView isn't new. Heard that? Virtually none of the shock-horror media seem to have noticed that A9 have been doing the same thing for ages.

Google Sightseeing has a Street View Roundup

Here’s a guy taking a pee into a bush in San Francisco!

Although, this all seems strangely familiar…

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Google sees Gears, which is open source and was much reported this week as a direct attack on MS, as a Standard.

“We feel very strongly about this being an industry effort and being a standard. We want this to be the one way that developers can add offline capabilities to their applications,” says Jeff Huger, Google’s VP of engineering, during the keynote for the company’s global Developer Day.

More on Tim Anderson's blog and Search EngineLand.

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• Venezuela's Radio Caracas Televisión (RCTV), banned by Chavez, is instead broadcasting via YouTube.
  
  
• Heather Hopkins @ Hitwise reports that stats show bad weather drives shoppers to their PCs.
  
  
• Inspired by blog coverage about a lack of Presidential Election widgets, a group of software developers has started to build their own.
  
  
• Nicholas Carr has discovered that Amazon allows suspicious tagging and thus has sections devoted to child nudity etal.
  

  Does Amazon really want to be known as a company that makes it easy for people to find movies labeled as containing "child nudity."

• Michael Kannelos for CNet examines How good is the censorship in China? His conclusion is either that it's not that good really or it's so complete it's very scary.
  
  
• The New York Times reports that Web 2.0 is also 'doin' it' for the Porn industry - sales are going down as amateurs flood the market.