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The atlas reinvented?
Photo by Pat Joseph

by Pat Joseph
Exhibits

Surely, you know all about Google. As the writer David Gates put it, it's only the most useful tool since the axe. Well, Google is on the exhibitor's floor at the Summit showing off one of its latest tools -- Google Earth, an astoundingly powerful geographical software application that puts the entire globe at your fingertips. It's the atlas, basically, reinvented for the Digital Age.

Inevitably, the first thing anyone coming to Google Earth for the first time does is type in their home address. Click "Enter" and you are flown directly to an overhead view of your abode. From there, you can zoom in on your neighborhood, tilt the landscape, look at it from a different heading, search for local businesses, look up census data, even check the earthquake history -- a little scary if, like me, you live just a mile or so from the Hayward Fault.

The thing is, after playing around with the program for a while (and believe me, you can kill some serious time playing with this thing), you begin to wonder just how you could really put it to good use. I'll try to write more on that later, but for now I'll just say that Google Earth has enormous potential for conservationists and environmental campaigners. That much became clear as Google's Patricia Boswell gave me a demo of the program, showing how a community campaign was using the program's mapping and data integrating capabilities to oppose a controversial logging plan.

While she made her way around the program she mentioned that the Red Cross had called to say that Google Earth had helped them save thousands of lives. How's that? It seems folks stranded in attics and on rooftops in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina were able to call for help on their cell phones. Those cell phone signals send latitude and longitude information. With those coordinates, the Red Cross could use Google Earth to zero in on the exact locations of the stranded.

-- 09/09/2005 Fri
5pm