Sent in my annual report, sent out the list of prioritized gotta-have-to-go-live items, and spent a few minutes eating figs and reading Bloglines. Glad I didn’t have fig in my mouth when I read that Microsoft’s new mapping service doesn’t include Apple’s home in Cupertino.
What struck me was not this amusing omission, but the purported reason. Apparently this data is fourteen years old. Yet if I read the “credits” for MSN Global Dominion or whatever they really call this mapping service, I get the vague impression that most of the content dates at least from this century.
I love the idea of a world run by Microsoft and Google (with audio by Apple)… a world of old, misleading, and omitted data. But it’s Free, and isn’t that what information wants to be, anyway?
Posted on this day, other years:
- It was a dark and stormy neocortex... - 2007
- Eight Tips for Healthy Meetings - 2007
- Read Michael's LTR - 2006
- The Talis Teleconference - 2006
- No Internet Librarian for Me This Year - 2004
I was showing these two tools to patrons in the library yesterday. One of them lived in the East Village previously and so, like many people, wanted to see a satellite image of her house. Imagine our surprise to see the World Trade Center towers still standing on Virtual Earth.
Google Earth shows an empty lot, complete with contractor trailers (it appears anyway).
According to Stewart Brand, he never meant “information wants to be free” in a cost or pricing sense, but in an availability sense. The freedom of the reader to gather material is proportional to the freedom of the material to be distributed. Thus a for-pay New York Times is more “free” than a classified document. Speaking of a for-pay New York Times, Paul Ford of Ftrain posits an interesting theory on why that’s probably good for web content in general:
http://www.ftrain.com/NYTimesCharges.html