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Google Maps Now Has 45° Views For Some Cities

Drew Bowling — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 16:28:57 +0000

Google Maps is an amazing tool for inspecting the lay-out of cities and using the satellite view gives you a realistic visualization of what the city actually looks like. However, the 90° view of building-tops causes everything in the map to be indistinguishable and, were it not for the labels, it’s doubtful you’d ever see a building you recognize.

Google’s remedied that problem (to an extent) with the addition of 45° views to 24 cities (14 in the United States, 7 throughout the rest of the world) that give you a much more recognizable view of the cityscapes. With this new 45° imagery, Maps users can now see the architecture of buildings with much more stunning detail. For instance, let’s compare the 45° and 90° views of Ulm Minster, a Gothic cathedral in Ulm, Germany. Here it is seen at 90°:

And here it is in greater splendor (at the same magnification) at 45°:

The difference in quality is jarring. Like, how did any of us make any functional use of Google Maps in that 90° rendering? The beauty and depth of that cathedral is breath-taking in the 45° angle, whereas that 90° angle looks like the remains of some boot-squashed techno-beetle.

You can still toggle between 45° and 90° via the menu in the upper-right corner (but after demonstrating the dramatic difference above, why would you want to?). Google seems to know that you will want to primarily use the 45° view because if a city is included in the update, the satellite view will automatically switch to the 45° view once you’ve zoomed in far enough. Also, before you get ahead of yourself, you won’t be able to orbit around objects – you only get one 45° view of cities.

Satellite view on Maps, have to zoom in so far before it automatically toggles to 90 degree to 45 degree view. You can adjust this in the options menu that hangs in the upper-right corner of the map.

For instance, this is you flying over Baiona, Spain:

View Larger Map

This is you flying over Ulm, Germany:

View Larger Map

Here’s Memphis, TN – try to find Elvis Presley’s Heartbreak Hotel:

View Larger Map

If this is the direction that Google Maps is going with their their near-earth satellite views, then I can’t until they’re able to expand the imagery to cover the rest of the planet.

You Could Be Incepted Soon

Drew Bowling — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 21:55:36 +0000

We’ve already said that it’s only a matter of time before we’re just uploading knowledge into our noggins in order to learn everything from origami to piano so the next logical step in humanity’s quest to be “just like in the movies” would be a scourge of mind-thievery.

In other words, cue the intense music because researchers at Yale think it’s only a matter of time before people are able to use lucid dreams to not just learn abilities but possibly invade the dreams of others.

According to The Daily Mail, Yale researcher Robert Morgan thinks these regions of the brain can be accessed for improved social control and decision-making. “We know that by engaging circuits in the brain we can change its architecture,” Morgan says. The Daily Mail continues:

Being in command of dreams opens up opportunities to manipulate them for learning and training – although it may not be quite as precise as learning to play the violin while asleep. Instead, ‘lucid dreamers’ can control areas of their brain to open up and ‘learn’ while they sleep. What’s more, it seems that merely being a lucid dreamer seems to give you an advantage.

So as the subtitle above suggests, take a hint from Mr. Jack Donaghy:

Because the next time you doze off on a plane you may wake up with a stirring hunger for some kung-fu robbery. Be careful, readers.

Apple’s New Campus Knocked as “Retrograde Cocoon”

Josh Wolford — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 16:01:27 +0000

Apple’s proposed new headquarters in Cupertino, California is a giant 2.8 million square foot ring, complete with state-of-the-art curved glass windows and a massive emphasis on landscaping. In his presentation to the Cupertino city council in June, Steve Jobs said that the new campus could house over 12,000 people and over 7,000 trees.

And according to L.A. Times Architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne, it will be a “retrograde cocoon.”

In a piece published over the weekend, Hawthorne discusses his perceived problems with the expansive new campus. He uses Steve Job’s proclamation that the new building would be “like a spaceship landed” to criticize the proposed campus as “doggedly old-fashioned.”

Though the planned building has a futuristic gleam — Jobs told the council “it’s a little like a spaceship landed” — in many ways it is a doggedly old-fashioned proposal, recalling the 1943 Pentagon building as well as much of the suburban corporate architecture of the 1960s and ’70s. And though Apple has touted the new campus as green, its sprawling form and dependence on the car make a different argument.

Not only is he critical of the design and the implied anti-green effects of the new campus, but he also criticizes the Cupertino city council for not pressing Jobs enough on the details behind the new project.

At Jobs’ initial proposal, the city council appeared giddy with excitement. This led to a lot of chatter about their “fanboy” reactions to Jobs. Hawthorne asks why the council didn’t press Jobs about the actual architect behind the project. He discusses Jobs’ tight-lipped practices when it comes to design, saying –

In his appearance before the City Council he said Apple had “hired some great architects to work with — some of the best in the world, I think.” But he never mentioned the high-wattage name of Norman Foster or the London firm Foster + Partners, whose logo is stamped on the preliminary plans for the campus. (Those plans are available for download on Cupertino’s website, cupertino.org.)

It is a measure of Jobs’ tight grip on Apple’s reputation for in-house design innovation that even after hiring a celebrity architect like Foster he would keep that architect’s name under wraps; even now, three months after Jobs took the plans public in that council meeting, the Apple press office refuses to confirm that Foster + Partners indeed designed the project.

You can see Job’s proposal and the council’s reaction in this video -

In a nutshell, Hawthorne’s criticism is that the new campus “wraps its workers in a suburban setting,” away from the connection of the city. The new campus can be described as isolated and disengaged from civic space. Does the city council’s “enthusiasm” for the new project serve as a promotion of a “car-dependent approach to city and regional planning” that was good in the 70′s, but not so good anymore?

It’s all about connection, or in this case, the lack therof -

Still, the new Apple campus, which the company describes as “a serene and secure environment” for its employees, keeps itself aloof from the world around it to a degree that is unusual even in a part of California dominated by office parks. The proposed building is essentially one very long hallway connecting endlessly with itself.

What do you think? Does a huge suburban campus like the one proposed by Apple promote isolation?

Read more about the actual plans at cupertino.org.

Moscow’s Saint Basil’s Cathedral Gets Google Doodled

Josh Wolford — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 16:44:39 +0000

It has many names – Cathedral of the Protecting Veil of the Mother of God, Cathedral of St. Vasily the Blessed, and of course St. Basil’s Cathedral to most English speakers. But whatever you call it, the beautiful Russian church is the subject of today’s Google Doodle.

The Cathedral, which sits in Moscow’s Red Square, has been part of the Kremlin and Red Square UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1990. It was begun in 1555 at the behest of Ivan the Terrible and completed in 1561, and is celebrating its 450th anniversary.

Here’s how it is described on its official site, saintbasil.ru -

It is for nearly 450 years now that this architectural ensemble of inimitable beauty and grandeur has been filling our hearts with joy, excitement and pride.

The Cathedral of the Protecting Veil of the Mother of God upon the Moat was built in fulfillment of a vow made by Czar Ivan the Terrible before his campaign against Kazan in 1552 and with the blessing of Metropolitan Makary. The cathedral was constructed under the supervision of Russian master builders Postnik and Barma in 1555-1561. Uniquely conceived by Metropolitan Makary, the cathedral was to epitomize the image of the Holy City of Jerusalem.

As a result, its nine churches, most of which were consecrated in memory of major events of the victorious Kazan campaign, were built on a single foundation.

It has been secularized and now operates as a state museum.

Here’s a photo from Wikipedia -

And here’s an awesome Lego version -

Also, here’s some YouTube video from inside the cathedral -

What do you think of today’s St. Basil’s Google Doodle? How does it rate in comparison to other recent Google Doodles? Let us know what you think.

SES – Successful Site Architecture

Stoney deGeyter — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 19:51:08 +0000

Fundamentals Track, Tuesday 4:45 – 6:00 PM
Successful Site Architecture

Moderator: Barbara C. Coll, CEO, WebMama.com
Matthew Bailey, President, Site logic Marketing
Derrick Wheeler, Senior Search Strategist, Acxiom Digital

Of all the sessions today this is the one I am most looking forward to. I believe site architecture is one of the most important aspects of SEO. Actually, it’s about making your site search engine friendly… SEO comes later but you can’t SEO effectively without being search engine friendly first. Barbara Coll pointed out a site that she said has the best site architecture she’s ever seen. I took a quick look and, um, well, respectfully disagree. I saw a number of things that were not very search friendly. But maybe she doesn’t get on the web much!

Derrick Wheeler starts off with some of the basics of the site architecture. He gives us the code for links and what search engines see. He points out good and bad links from a search crawler perspective. He says some JavaScript links can be spidered, but you’re at risk if you rely on the search engine being able to figure things out. You’re better off ensuring that you use all html links.

Derrick talks about linking inconsistently can hurt by creating dupe content and a poor user experience. You want to make sure that the URL to get to any one produce (regardless of how the user gets to that product) is consistent. This is especially important in regard to using breadcrumbs. Using breadcrumbs that pull dynamically from the way the user got to the page you can get all screwed up. You’re best keeping your breadcrumbs consistent as well as your URLs. Derrick presented a whole lot of other information, all excellent and useful, but more than I can cover here.

Matt Baily is up next. Matt says that the goal of successful site architecture is to get the search engines to your site before you think about doing (or completing) even a single search engine submission. SE submission should be removed from the vocabulary.

It’s important to read through the Google Guidelines and refer back to them for changes as well as checking out the accessibility guidelines from the W3c. Matt answers the question whether validated code or CSS help a site rank higher. He says there is an indirect benefit in that it helps the search engines focus on the information that is valuable to them and that it can be adequately indexed.

Great session with loads of good information. Much of this reinforced some of the stuff we already knew and have been doing but provides us with a better platform of knowledge. If you have time for a shameless plug, you can purchase a pretty stellar site architectural and usability report from Pole Position Marketing that will easily help you save far more than the money you’ll invest in the report itself.

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Google Earth To Showcase Beautiful Buildings

Doug Caverly — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 22:28:31 +0000

Architecture is one of those subjects that appeals, on some level, to just about everybody; from your basic suburban house to St. Basil’s Cathedral, it’s just too entwined in our lives to go unnoticed. Now architecture is being noticed by Google Earth – The American Institute of Architects (AIA) has helped design two new 3D layers for the software.

RK Stewart, president of the AIA, seems extraordinarily pleased about the arrangement. “I’m ecstatic to announce our partnership with Google Earth to launch these new layers in celebration of our the 150th anniversary,” he wrote on the Official Google Blog. Stewart also encouraged users “to explore architecture’s most popular structures and take away some ideas to help enhance the communities we live in.”

That may not be practical – I’m not sure how many rural towns can pony up for their very own version of the Sydney Opera House. Still, there’s a lot of neat stuff out there, and the new Google Earth layers provide a great way to find it. As Stewart noted, many of the points of interest on those layers even qualify as “America’s Favorite Architecture . . . (as selected though a national poll announced earlier this year).”

For still more information on the project, users can turn to a YouTube video posted by “AIA150Google.” The clip gives some background and technical information, but, to be honest, your time is probably better spent looking at the actual buildings.

The new layers will allow you to look at 150 different structures, “including many with just created 3-D models of the buildings, ballparks, bridges, and memorials that characterize architecture in the eyes of Americans.” So have at it. Just don’t set your heart on building another Thomas Jefferson Memorial.

SL, Open Source and Franchising

Savio Rodrigues — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 14:18:45 +0000

Interesting news that Linden Labs have open sourced the Second Life client source code under GPLv2.

Why open source the client? Well, with 2.4mil residents, 800,000 who have logged in during the past 60 days, the value of Second Life is in the community, not necessarily the code. Today’s move helps drive community growth.

I found 2 very interesting points when reading the Linden blog post about the client open sourcing.

“A lot of the Second Life development work currently in progress is focused on building the Second Life Grid – a vision of a globally interconnected grid with clients and servers published and managed by different groups.”

This seems like a great play by Linden. Let other groups publish and manage Second Life servers in different geographic regions, (as long as you’re approved to do so by Linden I would imagine). Borrowing from a recent discussion with Roberto Galoppini, Linden appears like they’re becoming a open source franchisor.

After reading this CNet article on Linden’s architecture, I think it makes a lot of sense for Linden to enable other (approved?) groups to publish and mange Second Life servers. According to the article, Second Life servers handle a maximum of 3 users per server at peak load. This is compared to 116 users per server over at EverQuest 2. Linden’s server architecture uses cheap servers that can be thrown into the server pool, just like Google’s approach. But with a growing user base and increasing electricity and real estate (to host the servers) costs, could Linden have realized that franchising the publishing and managing of Second Life servers may be a more profitable venture? Linden is already spending $$ on developing the software and has a large community, the latter of which is a strong control point. So why keep spending on the low-value aspect of managing servers (i.e. weak control point)?

The second interesting point in the post:

“At Linden, we have always been strong advocates of the use of open standards and the advantages of using open source products. Though Second Life makes abundant use of non-standard technologies, our basic UDP protocol message system for example, we rely on open standards and open source implementations when appropriate and available.”

Takes us back to the question of whether the use of open-standards is a necessary requirement to be classified an “open source” product.

PS: As with everyone, I’m hearing more about Second Life every day. And as with those of us that hear about it, but haven’t tried it, I have a difficult time doing everything I need to do in my First Life. Which is why I don’t know when I’ll get around to trying Second Life.

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I am taking a semi-break from IBM life as I return to finish a PhD in Industrial Engineering. I’ve held roles in market intelligence, strategy and product management. I’m ex-product manager of IBM WAS Community Edition, and blog about enterprise open source topics.

A Simplified ERP for IT Architecture

Charles Betz — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 21:27:10 +0000

Here is a simplified IT systems model.

The intention is to represent all the necessary tooling to run a large IT capability.

At this level of abstraction there are many ways to partition the problem and draw interfaces – how do you think of it?

(click for larger view)

Definition of element management:

Element management tools are the control consoles and utilities used by operations and infrastructure staff.

The common characteristic of such tools is their support for the most detailed non-programming work in IT management:

network administration
database administration
middleware administration
storage administration
operations management (where not otherwise covered)
and so forth

Element management tools represent important sources of information and visibility into complex IT operations, including resource unit costs, and the ability to integrate them is desirable.

-ctb

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Charles Betz is a Senior Enterprise Architect, and chief architect for IT
Service Management strategy for a US-based Fortune 50 enterprise. He is author of the forthcoming Architecture and Patterns for IT Service
Management, Resource Planning, and Governance: Making Shoes for the Cobbler’s Children (Morgan Kaufman/Elsevier, 2006, ISBN 0123705932). He is the sole author of the popular www.erp4it.com weblog.

Oracle Appcasts

Richard Byrom — Thu, 11 May 2006 14:00:12 +0000

I talked about Oracle Podcasting in a previous post. They now have a more Applications oriented podcast available called Oracle Appcasts.

I’ve been commuting quite a lot recently so stacked up these podcasts on my mp3 player and had a listen. I have to say I’m quite pleased with the offering. According to the Oracle site:

Oracle AppCasts are online audio interviews with Oracle customers, partners, product and industry experts, delivered via RSS podcasting or on your computer at www.oracle.com/appcasts.

A listing of what’s available to listen to now:

Richard Byrom is the founder and author of OracleAppsBlog, which documents the daily experiences and learnings of Oracle Applications Consultants and Implementors. He is also an Oracle Applications Consultant, Speaker and Author.

Content Layering :: Using Site Architecture To Improve SEO

Rob Sullivan — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 15:43:24 +0000

Many times, a site gets very large and its ability to rank well in competitive markets decreases in part because of the size of the site.

While we in the business know that content is king, more often than not it is a combination of content and effective site structure which will ultimately help your pages rank.

In this article I look at how to most effectively structure your site to take advantage of this.

I read this great article on layering on the SEOmoz Blog http://www.seomoz.org/blogdetail.php?ID=789 and while it does a good job of explaining what content layering is, I feel it could be improved just a little bit.

I’m not saying it is wrong in any way. In fact the tactic outlined will be very effective for a small to medium sized site, however I have also found another way to organize your site which can be more effective if done properly.

In the article, it explains how you use layers to organize your site. Now we’re not talking about CSS layering or anything like that. It’s more of a site structure issue than anything.

According to the article, one can layer their site through the use of sub-folders. By creating layers of sub-folders and then placing all related content within that sub-folder you can layer your site to help specific sections of it rank higher.

This is a great way to organize a smaller site because it allows you to place topical pages together, and promote links within the pages to help improve overall positioning of these sections.

Further, it helps reduce the dilution factor often felt by sites that attempt to cover multiple topics in a flat file structure.

For example, if you sell widgets you could organize the sections by some common element, such as color. That way your site could be: http://widgetts.com/blue/page1.html and all blue widget pages would go into this sub-folder. You’d then organize all other sub-folders in a similar style.

Like I said, I think this is a very effective strategy for a smaller or medium site. There would be a much greater chance of blue widgets ranking highly in a structure like this.

However, I feel that for larger sites there’s an even more effective way to organize your content.

Through the use of sub-domains one could further organize this content. This would make it even more relevant to search queries and more likely to rank. If one sold a larger variety of widgets yet still wanted to organize them by color then the structure of the site would be: http://blue.widgetts.com and all site content relating to blue widgets would appear within this sub-domain.

The reason I say sub-domains would be more effective is because search engines tend to treat a sub-domain as its own site. In other words, a search engine sees http://blue.widgetts.com and http://widgetts.com as essentially 2 different sites.

Keep in mind that such a strategy is of the most benefit to larger sites. If you don’t have a large site, or don’t foresee your site growing to become a large site then I wouldn’t recommend the sub-domain layering tactic.

This is because, as I’ve said, the search engines will treat your sub-domain as a unique site. So if you’ve only got 10 or 15 or even 50 pages in your sub-domain, chances are it won’t rank as competitively as it would have as a sub-folder of a larger site.

Now, to make your content even more competitive, why not combine these two strategies – use a sub-domain and sub-folders to provide you even more control in site organization as well as an even greater chance of ranking.

This is because the broader sub-domain can rank competitively for the broader terms while the sub-folder content can rank competitively for the less broad, more specific terms.

What you are doing by combining the two strategies is getting more bang for your buck. This is because you are covering more area on the web, allowing your site to rank for both broad and specific terms.

Then, with some good strategic interlinking you will be able to even further promote the broad areas of your site by linking all your internal pages to the pages above it.

While I’m not entirely dismissing the layered content theory presented above, I am saying consider your situation. If your site is a smaller site, by all means use the layered content approach. If it’s larger then use the sub-domain approach.

Also remember that there could be multiple ways to organize the same content.

For example, in addition to organizing your sub-domains or sub-folders by color in the widget example, also consider organizing them by features. This way, a chosen widget could be linked to from multiple related categories.

Not only that but you’ve now bulked up your site with a bunch of additional pages. These new pages are required to help create the sub-domains and navigation required to drive visitors to the individual widget pages.

This type of multi-category linking is common among many large sites. One good example is Ebay. It organizes its top auctions into sub-domains like antiques, art, autos and clothing. Then, within the categories the sub-folder structure is used to further segment the site.

In conclusion, if you’ve been looking for a way to most effectively organize your site while helping to improve rankings, consider these options. Through the use of sub-folders, sub-domains or a combination of both you can effectively organize your site, segment your products and target searchers more effectively.

Rob Sullivan is a SEO Consultant and Writer for http://www.textlinkbrokers.com. Textlinkbrokers is the trusted leader in building long term rankings through safe and effective link building. Please provide a link directly to Textlinkbrokers when syndicating this article.