Rant: Enough of the “Google Saves All” BS
Written by Chad on August 1st, 2006Ok.. I said it in the topic so you don’t get confused. This is a rant, I am just blowing off steam. A Google Earth rant mainly. But a rant in any case. Feel free to stop reading now.
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Still here? Ok.
I am so sick and tired of “Google earth does this and Google earth does that”.. Google Earth DOES NOT DO ANYTHING ORIGNAL. It is the AOL of the virtual globes.. bringing no nothings to the globe!
I can accept that people think that if GE didn’t do it.. it never existed before. The only thing that Google earth really has up on something like World Wind is the “more high res areas covered” which is not a major selling point.. I stopped looking at houses two years ago. GE is also mostly moron proof.. which really limits what you can do with it.
Now, on to what REALLY irked me. I loaded up Planet Geospatial to see if anything interesting happened last night and I found this post which linked to this Google blog post. Which is about this:
The Google Earth team was recognized last week by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency for their work last year to bring timely satellite images of the areas devastated by Hurricane Katrina to the public (and to rescuers).
I call bullshit! I saw the “work” that came out.. a sloppy and unusable mess. And came out AFTER the real work was done by the open source community. This data mainly was done by members of the World Wind community (two versions, original was just for Katrina and the replacement add-on that covered other 2005 hurricanes) and telescience.org. Getting the imagery directly from NOAA within hours after it was taken. The add-on created for World Wind also had imagery from the United States Army Corps of Engineers which GE never had which covered an even larger area.
All the GE team “did” was a poorly looking and hard to use image overlay KML, and anyone could do that, you had to click and download each image and they were not all properly lined up. You also had color correction issues. How that was useful I have no idea. The work telescience did and the world wind OS team had a proper imagery layer where the images were stitched together properly and color corrected and available to people all over to use a day or two after they were taken.
So, Google does a pisspoor job and gets credit and others do a much better job and because they weren’t Google, get the snub and zero credit for the work that was done. I am a follower of the old “Credit where credit is due” and I really feel that this wasn’t done at all in this case. I know this was all for the “greater good” that the imagery was out there, but is still doesn’t stop me from being irked.
Just STOP thinking that GE does everything first or without GE it doesn’t exist.
Ok, ranted out for now. In any case.. 2006 is going to be a better year for hurricane imagery. The process has been work out and fine tuned from last year. and the NOAA group that does the imagery will also be providing the metadata needed at the same time (they didn’t realize the importance last year) so we can have the arial imagery processed and online within hours after it was taken.
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Hear hear! I am so sick of the Google fanboys on the geospatial blogs. It\’s some sort of sick hero worship. I think that things will turn a little more sour for them after they start advertising.
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Good post. The positive thing about Google Earth is their marketing power which helped Virtual Globes get knowned. However, I believe all this awareness could have happened *without* GE! My hopes are with the 1.5 version of World Wind, which is suppose to support Linux and MacOS X (see http://technology.slashgeo.org/article.pl?sid=06/06/01/169252 ). In my opinion, it was bad design to code WW with .Net …
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Once someone does a spatial query with ArcGIS Explorer they will wash their hands of GE.
Some consultant cornered my boss and got him all excited about GE. And this was YESTERDAY. I was sickened as I had to listen to the whole “see your house” routine.
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Trust me, you’re not the only one who’s sick of Google Earth grabbing the headlines. What really makes me bitter is that Google didn’t even invent the product, they just bought the innovators Keyhole and took all the credit.
The only value GE has brought to GIS is the immense amount of hi-res imagery (which anyone could do with the amount of money Google makes) and raised a popularity for virtual globes (which any company with their monopoly could do). But for any product to have mass appeal, it has to be dumbed-down initially so the users can be educated to use something they’ve never even considered before. Heavyweight GIS programs like ArcGIS et al just won’t be understood by most folk.
Hopefully one day all of the virtual globe programs will have been in the public domain for long enough that the people who deserve the credit, the money and the popularity will actually get it rather than those who just happen to be in the right place at the right time.
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Why does it make you mad that Google got the award, or that they get recognition? So what. What if they don’t deserve it? Does it hurt you that they got the award? If they didn’t get it would you? No.
Honestly GE is a good program (the best? maybe not) that brought easy navigation of satelite imagery to the masses. Call me a Goolgle fanboy, or whatever you want, but lay off. They’re doing something right.
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Cliff the point is this is going to get google more money, profitting off a disaster is bad form imho, this article just points out that many other people have gone un-recognized for their efforts in helping after Katrina.
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Well, did Google campaign for the award? They got it, and the people who gave the award must have felt that Google deserved recognition for increasing public accessibility to virtual globes. While GE may be “dumbed down” compared to older virtual globes, they found what worked for the most people. While World Wind deserves credit, it’s not right to complain against Google for simply being in “the right place, at the right time.” How many innovators in history have succeeded due to just the right circumstances? Xerox PARC did great work with early GUIs, but what do most people think of when you ask them what the first GUI was? A Mac, or Windows? Just as Xerox PARC never even makes it into the conversation, I’m afraid great projects like World Wind will never, either. The point is not to despair and rage at Google Earth, though. Rather than frustrate over GE’s popular acclaim, World Wind and other virtual globes must take GE’s success as inspiration to improve their products and introduce innovations that are new or that Google can’t implement, while striving to improve their own recognition and ease of use without sacrificing quality. A positive and un-embittered view can really brighten your outlook. Try it.
Mysterius
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John Hanke (director of google earth and google maps) cofounded keyhole corp in 2000. Keyhole EarthViewer Wins Award at SIGGRAPH 2001:Keyhole Inc. received a Golden Lasso award for its EarthViewer 3D technology in the Web3D RoundUP, a competition of the latest 3D technologies and applications. The competition was held August 15 in Los Angeles as part of SIGGRAPH 2001.
World wind was written in 2003.
Skyline recieved it’s patent in 2002.
SINTEF initial version for demonstrations on ScanGIS 2001.
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Google Earth works on Ubuntu. World Wind doesn’t. I’ll stick with Google Earth because of that. No offense.
Interesting thing about the Katrina tragedy though.
This whole argument reminds me of the GNU and Linux thing, even though I wasn’t even a teen when that happened.
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A lot of this rant–and perhaps moreso the replies–sound petty and ultimately, reveal a lack of pragmatism that really illuminates a lot about the situation. GE fanboys? I don’t much use GE, but it is a product that works well for the ‘common man’. Period. (And, if you think about it for a moment, that probably was a large reason for it getting the use by rescue teams that it got–not everyone is completely tech savvy)
As Albert Einstein so eloquently said it, “Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex… It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.”
Google didn’t invent search engines (okay, they did innovate certain algorithms, but bear with me)–what they DID do was create a stream-lined product that catered to what people wanted. That meant not being graphic heavy and keeping away banner ads.
But, why can’t we just appreaciate that these people did something good? Did you do something good, too? Great, nifty. Well done. It doesn’t always get recognized. Perhaps you are acting for the wrong reasons, though, if this bothers you so much. It should simply be enough that you did it.
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