I have a confession: I've never been one of those geeks that plays around on Google Maps or Google Earth looking for interesting things. However, in light of recent events, that's about to change.
Last fall there was the island in the South Pacific that was there on Google Maps, but not there in reality. Now, Google has mined both public data and data collected by "citizen cartographers" to fill in the blanks of North Korea. It's this last one that really caught my attention, primarily because I had no idea that North Korea was a sea of uncharted white on Google Maps prior to Tuesday. Now there are roads, cities, hospitals, hotels, and even prisons.
Check out these amazing before and after maps put together over at The Washington Post.
If you need me, I'll be googling.
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Sweet, time to googlexplore forbidden places
I fired up Google Earth after reading this. There's this long stretch of little clusters of buildings where the prison they reference in the article is supposed to be. Each cluster consists of a few identical rectangular buildings, and each cluster has a wall around it. Kind of creepy to look at when you think that this is the place where the Kims send people they don't like or want to keep quiet.
Remember George W used it to visit his ranch in Texas: "One of the things I've used on The Google is to pull up maps..."
Last century, when I was a naval officer, we did not use maps when navigating or piloting at sea. We used charts, prepared by cartographers, not maps prepared by mapographers. Old sailors would be more comfortable if our esteemed Rachel would use the nautically correct term "charts" when discussing nautical matters. Although, we can never get very comfortable when contemplating a US Navy ship run aground.
Awesome! Somebody has been doing some homework.