Digital Media

Google updated AdSense this week, adding desktop-style ad support for high-end smartphones like the iPhone 3GS. The change led to Google's insertion of advertisements, alongside search results, into the iPhone Maps application.

Local iPhone map searches now display sponsored listings in the view and list modes of the Maps app.

We discovered examples of these ads on Monday, while searching for a Verizon Wireless store. We should also note that this is the first time ads have appeared within one of the iPhone's default apps, rather than in something we've downloaded for free or purchased from the App Store. Our search for "Verizon" resulted in the following list view:

Maps app search--"Verizon"

Tapping the white arrow in the top blue circle brought us to the "Sponsored Link" screen, which contained some additional information about the business under its name emphasized in italics, such as phone number, Web address, and physical address. In addition, there are options to get directions to or from the business, add it to one's contacts, share it with others, or bookmark it.

Sponsored Link results page.

A geocoding error caused 4 percent of all crimes reported on an LAPD crime map to be represented at a single location.

(Credit: LAPD)

The Los Angeles Police Department is battling a virtual crime wave in downtown L.A. caused by an Internet map coding error.

If the department's online crime map is to be believed, one might think that a downtown location just a block from the LAPD's new headquarters is the most crime-ridden place in the city. In the past six months, that location experienced 1,380 crimes--4 percent of all crimes mapped--or roughly eight a day.

The crimes were real, but the locations were off. A coding error within the system's geocoding--the process of converting addresses into map points--caused the crimes to be represented at a default location, according to a report Sunday in the Los Angeles Times. The mistake caused many crimes to be mapped miles away from their actual locations, causing false trends to be reported while masking real ones, according to the report.

The LAPD was apparently unaware of the problem until alerted to it by a Los Angeles Times reporter. Lightray Productions, the contractor that designed the site at a cost of $362,000, has promised to fix the problem, according to the report.

Besides the geocoding error, the system also faces challenges in how the streets are identified when typed into the system.

An LAPD spokeswoman told the L.A. Times that the department will work with Lightray to improve the system.

"It's not perfect," spokeswoman Mary Grady said. "We do the best we can with the software available."

The site gets 4 million to 7 million page views a month.

Imagine if all the hospitals, schools, churches, and government buildings that appear on online maps were nothing but blurs.

That would not only reduce the usefulness of things like Google Maps and Google Earth, but it would be a huge undertaking for Google and would probably violate the First Amendment.

But that's exactly what California Assemblyman Joel Anderson, a Republican from El Cajon, is proposing in a measure dubbed "AB-255."

The measure would apply to Web site operators and online services that make "a virtual globe browser available to members of the public" and fails to define what that is. It also specifies that a violation would constitute a criminal offense with fines of up to $250,000 per day.

So, all the government agencies that use Google Earth and want the public to be able to find their buildings could conceivably be in violation as well.

As justification for the proposed censorship, Anderson is citing terrorism.

"We heard from terrorists involved in the Mumbai attacks last year that they used Google Maps to select their targets and get knowledge about their targets. Hamas has said they were using Google Maps to target children's schools," Anderson told Computerworld. "What my bill does is limit the level of detail. It doesn't stop people from getting directions. We don't need to help bad people map their next target. What is the purpose of showing air ducts and elevator shafts? It does no good."

Google spokeswoman Elaine Filadelfo told Computerworld that the company hopes to talk to Anderson about the proposed legislation.

Privacy complaints have led Google to blur images of official buildings in several instances. The U.S. military banned Google from taking street view images from inside military bases and in 2007 India asked that certain government and military buildings be blurred.

Google Street View blurs faces.

(Credit: Google)

The company also began blurring peoples' faces in its Street View interface on Google Maps last year in response to privacy concerns.

(via Search Engine Land)

The refusal of the government in Victoria, Australia, to provide data for Google's bushfire map mashup limited its scope and highlighted glaring problems with Crown copyright provisions, the search giant's top Australian engineer said yesterday.

With over 1 million page views since Sunday, the Google Map overlay showing Victoria's bushfires has been invaluable for tracking the extent of the disaster.

Google Australia engineering director Alan Noble told the Broadband and Beyond conference in Melbourne yesterday that he became involved with the bushfire mapping effort after Google engineers woke in shock Sunday morning to read about the horrific fires unfolding east of Melbourne, which have claimed nearly 200 lives.

Noticing the Commonwealth Fire Authority (CFA) Web site was already struggling to keep up with demand for its online list of bushfire updates, Noble's team had the idea of overlaying the data onto Google Maps to produce a real-time map of the fires' locations, and intensities. The CFA, which manages fires on private lands and has therefore remained at the front line of the devastating fires, consented--and within four hours, the new map was live.

The search giant's search for data to plot fires on public lands--which are managed by the Victorian Department of Sustainability and Environment--produced an entirely different result. With no public feed of the fires' location and an explicit denial of permission to access its own internal data, the engineers were ultimately unable to plot that data on the map as well.

The culprit, according to Noble: legally established Crown copyright provisions, which assign copyright over all government-produced information to the government and prevent its use without explicit consent. Crown copyright is well established in Commonwealth law, but runs contrary to data protection provisions in countries like the US, where data produced by government agencies is held to be in the public domain.

Noble said the engineers' experience this week was an example of why Commonwealth data protection provisions must be relaxed to promote open access to publicly relevant information. "It's ironic that I can download detailed NASA satellite imagery (of Australia) more readily than I can get satellite imagery from the Australian government," he told the conference.

The bushfire situation wasn't the first time Google has crossed swords with Crown copyright. The company had similar problems recently when it asked the Commonwealth Department of Health and Aging for access to the data in the National Public Toilet Map, which it sought to offer as an overlay to Google Maps.

However, Google Loo was not to be: citing protection of the data under Crown copyright, the government refused to provide that information. Google's fight to open up government information sources follows on from earlier advice, in reviews like the Copyright Law Review Committee's 2005 inquiry, that government-produced data be made more freely available.

In a formal submission (PDF) to the Victorian Government last year, Google Australia argued that "there are considerable benefits that would flow to the Victorian Government and the wider Victorian community from the unfettered availability of publicly funded, non-confidential government information...By making public sector information available to all organizations on the same terms, there would be an equal playing field for the creation of innovative products."

Google's Alan Noble

(Credit: Google)

Many private enterprises have been similarly reluctant to provide information: the recently launched Google PowerMeter initiative, for example, is all about surfacing relevant usage information to drive smarter energy usage. "We've been very disappointed with the amount of information utilities generally provide to customers," Noble explained. "Where people can efficiently and easily monitor their power consumption, just having visibility into their usage is enough to cut power usage by as much as 15 per cent."

The need for open data has become even more pressing with the rise of geospatial mapping, Noble said. Google Maps has become an immensely popular way of representing geographically-linked data in everything from scientific endeavor to real estate. With the platform's application programming interfaces open to all developers, Noble said the company's goal is to let any developer add mapping capabilities to represent information in new ways.

Fully 60 per cent of the hits to Google Maps, he revealed, come through the APIs--indicating that they were from third-party sites. "When you open up all this information," Noble said, "it fuels innovation in ways we can't predict. APIs allow developers to build new products from existing components very, very quickly." Sites like Google Maps Mania track interesting uses of Google Maps to display specific data sets.

Noble sees the widespread availability of APIs as one of two critical engines for growth in online applications. The other, gadgets, "are doing for applications what RSS is doing for content," he said, by allowing Web sites to integrate fully-featured capabilities from other sites and create "third-party mashups" that combine best-of-breed functionality in new ways.

"We're seeing billions and billions of page views every week," he explained. "No one company could achieve that kind of scale. And the thing that makes this possible is the openness and innovation that open APIs and open data sets enable."

David Braue of ZDNet Australia reported from Sydney.

Google Australia engineers have created a Flash map to keep track of the deadly bushfires ravaging the southeastern part of the country and help reduce the traffic burden to the official sites coordinating emergency services.

The fires, which have reportedly claimed more than 100 lives, are being tracked in real-time with information provided by the State of Victoria's Country Fire Authority via an RSS feed. The numbers on the map markers indicate the number of fires at that location and the colors represent the current containment status of that site (green represents safe, yellow for controlled, orange for contained, and red going).

"We hope that it's of some use to people who may be affected, to emergency services personnel, and that it takes some load off other websites which are being inundated," the team wrote in a blog posting. "The map certainly makes the scale of this disaster immediately apparent."

The team says it is working to incorporate additional information into the map and also offers tips for Web site operators who want to embed the map on their sites.

Additionally, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation has posted a Google-powered map on its site.

The blog Liako.Biz has posted an examination of how data portability allows for these maps to be created.

(Credit: Paul Ford)

The release of Google Earth 5 has further whetted the Googlebot's voracious appetite for new data.

Specifically, Google wants more views of the planet for the new historical imagery feature in Google Earth 5, which lets people see earlier views of a particular area, not just the present. The company established an Imagery Partner Program through which organizations can supply their data.

Don't expect to be paid for helping Google out, though. "We are happy to add your map content to Google's services at no cost to you, but we generally do not pay for content," the company said on its image partnership frequently-asked-questions page.

In fairness, Google offers some situations where sharing the data would be in the interest of a municipality, for example, that wants to be on the map but is tired of waiting for GeoEye-1's satellite camera to whiz overhead. There probably also are organizations with public-domain imagery that would like to see it made broadly accessible but that aren't trying to build some business out of it.

Plus, Google has a point that processing lots of geographic data is laborious. Who wants to orthorectify and georeference a bunch of data sets? Quoting some of Google's reasons for why people might want to share:

• Make a positive impact on your community and the world

• Simplify navigation and geographic analysis
• Raise awareness of land use and environmental issues
• Facilitate emergency management

• Boost tourism and foster economic development

• Enable visitors and tourism agencies to plan and present travel itineraries
• Support business site location planning

Google showed off new ocean views at its Google Earth 5.0 launch event.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)

Google announced the new partnership program on its Lat Long blog Thursday.

Mapping is getting more important in the digital world as new possibilities open up for navigation and finding nearby friends. Google has aggressively pursued this area with online maps and satellite views, and the company has begun testing advertisements in Google Maps and Google Earth.

Yahoo doesn't share quite the degree of obsession as Google, but it's working hard on geography too. On Wednesday, Yahoo announced that it has 100 million geotagged photos on Flickr, its image-sharing site. Geotagged photos have map coordinates built in, letting people find photos of a particular region or explore their own archive geographically.

Accepting others' data could help Google accelerate its geographic agenda, though. And who knows, maybe they can get somebody in Clarkesville, Md., to help fix weird purple arcs that show up in Street View.

These weird purple arcs appear on when checking out Clarkesville, Maryland using Google Maps Street View.

(Credit: Google)

SAN FRANCISCO--The fact that you now can explore the ocean through Google Earth isn't going to make Google much money directly. But the move is nonetheless smart.

Google generated early-stage goodwill from being the best answer to the online search problem. But the company is large and getting larger, especially as it shows a better ability to withstand the recession than rivals, and that goodwill won't last forever.

Google showed off new ocean views at its Google Earth 5.0 launch event.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)

Google Earth, though, gives the company a new way to bring its brand to the world, notably with students for whom the software will help supplant atlases and encyclopedias. And in the long run, as Google Earth and Maps--either as standalone software or used through a browser--will likely become a widely used virtual window on the real world. Google will control the technology and commercialization of that portal.

Will the visibility of the ocean depths on Google Earth make money directly? Not likely. But it adds incrementally to the overall utility of the software, which in the long run keeps it relevant.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt introduces Google Earth 5.0. Click photo for a slideshow of Monday's event.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)

"The near-term opportunity is in local search," for example people looking for restaurants or hotels, said John Hanke, director of Google Earth and Maps, in an interview.

Google has begun experimenting with advertisements on Google Maps and Google Earth, added Peter Birch, product manager of Google Earth, at the launch event. Since people often need to discover information about a place before going there, Google Earth and Maps could prove a lucrative endeavor. It may take years to get there, and it'll cost Google dearly in server hardware and network bandwidth, but Google has shown patience in subsidizing long-term projects.

Though Hanke wouldn't reveal the expense of Google's geographic services, some of the economics are in the company's favor. Just as Google's search engine takes advantage of innumerable information that others put on the Internet, Google Earth is a platform that houses information supplied by outsiders that Google doesn't have to pay. It's the Internet's user-generated content story, but this time it's data that can be overlaid on a map of the Earth.

And in the case of the ocean work, there are prestigious users generating high-quality content. Many ocean researchers gathered at the Google Earth 5.0 launch, and several showed there's pent-up demand for a way to conveniently display their data somewhere. And it's not just to share sea surface temperature data with fellow Ph.D.s, but also to try to educate the public.

Ken Peterson, communications director for the Monterey Bay Aquarium, was excited about his layer in Google Earth that shows the location of various types of fish--along with ratings for people about whether they should eat those varieties or substitute others. Barbara Block of Stanford University and Patrick Halpin of Duke University were eager to show the tracks of shark travels recorded by radio transmission to satellites. Ross Swick of the University of Colorado-Boulder showed a Google Earth animation of the gradually shrinking Arctic ice cap over the last 29 years. And Philip Renaud of the Living Oceans Foundation has supplied underwater video of the Red Sea as part of the foundation's mission to chronicle the state of coral reefs.

Hanke envisions much broader information, though, including consumer-oriented material such as the best dive spots and kite-surfing areas. Ultimately, he wants "every single location" on Earth, land or sea, to have information.

Projects like Google Earth give Google cachet with influential people such as Al Gore.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)

"We're trying to encourage our users to annotate all the places in the world. Part of what we're doing is seeding that ecosystem of spatial information," Hanke said. "That creates an opportunity for Google to provide location services on phones, mobile devices, in cars in the future, to guide people to the best places. Being a valued guide, the go-to source of information about the best places to go--that will be a powerful and valuable thing for Google."

Think of it as a second Internet in a way, only instead of using abstract names to locate information, you can use actual locations to locate information. Some refer to the idea as the "geographic Web."

The clearest illustration of the indirect benefits Google Earth can bring is the fact that the company could persuade former Vice President Al Gore, whose climate change documentary won him an Oscar and a Nobel Peace Prize, to bear the Google Earth standard. In effect, he provided an eco-halo that can offset the more down-to-earth capitalistic realities of Google's operation.

Google seems to share the altruistic, educational motivations of many researchers. But it's also got business in mind with Google Earth.

"We try to create products people love to use," Birch said. "We create value, then think of appropriate ways of monetization."

• Click here for more stories, and images, on Google Earth 5.0.

Images: Google Earth 5.0 travels oceans, time, and space

Massachusetts police used cell phone tracing via GPS and Google Maps to track down a 9-year-old girl who was allegedly kidnapped by her grandmother, the Worcester Telegram & Gazette reported on Wednesday.

Police arrested the 52-year-old grandmother at a motel in Natural Bridge, Va., on Tuesday after she allegedly failed to return her granddaughter to the home of her legal guardians in Athol, Mass., the report said. The grandmother had picked up the child for a weekend visit on Saturday and allegedly threatened to not return her, according to the report.

With help from the cell phone provider, authorities were able to trace the location of the child's cell phone and followed the journey of the grandmother and granddaughter by using GPS coordinates that updated every time the phone was used.

They were able to track the phone to an intersection on Virginia Route 11 in Natural Bridge and then used Google Street View to view the intersection, where they saw a building with a red roof that looked like a motel. Then they searched on Google maps for motels in the town and located the Budget Inn-Natural Bridge and confirmed the location using Google's satellite view on the map, the report said.

The case is "an interesting first (at least as far as we're aware)," Pablo Chavez, Google senior policy counsel, wrote in a blog post.

The Google Street View of the Virginia motel where a missing Massachusetts girl was found with her grandmother.

(Credit: Google)