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Nanaimo, The Google Capital of the World
eldavojohn writes "Time.com has up a story on Nanaimo, a British Columbia coal mining town of about 78,000 that has had everything conceivable mapped into a Google database. Citizens can track fire trucks real time. The results also include Google Earth data for Nanaimo. 'The Google fire service allows people to avoid accident sites by tuning electronic devices to automatic updates from the city's RSS news feed, says fire captain Dean Ford. Eventually, Nanaimo plans to equip its grass-cutting machines with GPS devices, so residents piqued by the apparent shabbiness of a particular park or grass verge can use Google to find out when last it was groomed by the city's gardening staff. And the city's cemeteries will soon be mapped to allow Internet users to find out who is buried in each plot, says Kristensen. A new multi-million-dollar conference center, opening in June, will have 72 wireless access points to allow out-of-towners to use their laptops to navigate the Google Earth version of the city.'"
they'll plant RFID tags in every citizen so you can track THEM on Google Earth...
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
So where as you used to just cheekily shout "You've missed a bit!" - now you get to email them with co-ordinates and a satellite photo as proof... and then blog it all.
This is one of my favorite things I've seen google do so far.
It really is neat to see how google has gone from a company that indexes web pages, to a company that stores and indexes your email, to a company that stores and indexes maps of the world, to a company that will literally tell you ANY available information about an area on the map.
As much as the privacy advocates are going to hate this (and please, somebody tell me WHY without using a slippery slope argument), this is really where I would like to see mapping go. Maps hadn't really improved in the past couple of hundred years, but now we're starting to see just what mapping can do.
Should be an exciting next few years.
NewslilySocial News. No lolcats allowed.
Adding all graves will make it so much easier to visit the graves of your relatives. It's already possible to visit the cemetery through Google Earth/Maps, but it can be hard to locate your passed loved ones.
However, I feel there's a need for an additional service to be developed: put flowers and candles on the grave. As soon as that's implemented, you'll never have to go to the cemetery again!
Surely with all of that intense technology eldavojohn or Time could have figured out that coal mining stopped back in 1938 in Nanaimo. Since then it is primarily known for being one of the finest examples of really bad urban planning, for at one time having more square feet of shopping mall per capita than any place else on earth, and of course for theNanaimo International Bathtub Race.
To quote Ember Swift: "This is the city that Engineers enter to demonstrate just how not to build a city centre This is the city used as a symbol of haste. "
Three Squirrels
Actually, most of the cool features are built on the KML file format and RSS. If MS would support it, it would work on Virtual Earth. You could create a tool to do it. They are not loading up google with data, they are publishing the data in a very easy to read XML format, and suggest you use google earth to view it, since it is currently the best tool out there.
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
I've always wanted to be able to see where the city buses are in real time. In Ottawa, they all (well, most anyway) have GPS units on board, so it probably wouldn't take much to have them transmit their location every 5 minutes. It really sucks when you end up waiting in the cold for 20 minutes because the bus is late. If I could see ahead of that it was going to be late, I would just stay inside until I knew the bus was close.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I don't think any privacy activists will mind greater transparency in government. Privacy for the government isn't a privacy that should be promoted or protected in any free society.
You have two groups:
1) The government - has the monopoly on the legitimate use of force
2) The people - controlled by that government, but, hopefully, with enough of a democracy to keep the government from beating the liberty out of them with the police, military, judicial system, etc.
One of the most important tools in keeping that democracy working is knowing what the government is doing. Getting this level of information about the government and using the internet to dole it out to this degree is fantastic for the people.
Yeah, that sounds awesome.
As someone who takes the bus to and from work every day, I'd love this.
You know what's the only thing worse than the bus being late? The bus being early. Nothing like standing out in the cold for 20 minutes past the time the bus is supposed to arrive only to realize it must have passed your stop 15 minutes early.
I support the Center for Consumer Freedom
The town of Nanaimo has completely vanished, leaving behind only a flat and barren landscape where there was once a thriving, interconnected community. One relative of a Nanaimo resident reported receiving a phone call from the town shortly before it vanished.
"I got a call from my brother Earl in Nanaimo," said Harry Wacker of Fresno, California. "He was babbling on about how they may have gone too far in connecting the town up to the intertoobs, and some sort of hogs pizzle about a 'singularity' or something. Utter nonsense, but that's Earl- loonier than a sack of weasels. You'd have to be to move to gol-damned Canada. Broke his mother's heart, he did."
Other relatives and friends have reported hearing the voices of former Nanaimo residents coming from their game consoles, computers and other Internet connected devices, but these reports are unconfirmed.
I live about an hour north of Nanaimo, and I just told a bunch of my co-workers about the characterization of Nanaimo as a "coal mining town", which caused a pretty good round of laughter. Vancouver Island coal mining has been nearly dead for about a half a century.
The economy here is doing fairly well, considering that coastal BC seems to be one of the few places in North America where real estate is not plummetting, but I don't think they'll be making any man-made islands soon, especially since we have no shortage of natural ones.
Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
What's not to love about this? As governments want more and more information about us, we should demand more information about them. This is our tax dollars at work. We should know where our money goes and how it's being used. If governments were to provide all this information, we'd have an army of fact finders going through every detail of every budget, every purchase, every opportunity to defraud the public or waste time, money, or manpower. The people would become the watchdogs over government instead of journalists. This is probably a good thing, as it's pretty clear that the journalists haven't been doing their job properly for some time.
Obscure? Have you never heard of Nanaimo Bars? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanaimo_bar
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.