Month: June 2008

Mapmaker Review

Google MapMaker is out. There are several geowiki projects, but when someone like google decides to have a go at the problem you have to take notice. First thing to note is that the MapMaker is open for a limited set of countries, one of which I have blogged about earlier. So let’s see what the uptake of MapMaker is by looking at Karachi (a city of ~20million, metropolitan and where locals are cultured with a strong entrepreneurial spirit) it appears there is very fast uptake from the locals. Here is what has happened in the course of a few hours

compared to OSM: superior UI -> superior results

Burrnesha

Pashe Keqi recalls the day nearly 60 years ago when she decided to become a man. She chopped off her long black curls, traded in her dress for her father’s baggy trousers, armed herself with a hunting rifle and vowed to forsake marriage, children and sex.

Had she been born in Albania today, she would choose womanhood.

“Back then, it was better to be a man because, before, a woman and an animal were considered the same thing. Now, Albanian women have equal rights with men and are even more powerful, and I think today it would be fun to be a woman.”

Google Trends Defense

In the trial of a pornographic Web site operator, the defense plans to show that residents of Pensacola are more likely to use Google to search for terms like “orgy” than for “apple pie” or “watermelon.” The publicly accessible data is vague in that it does not specify how many people are searching for the terms, just their relative popularity over time. But the defense lawyer, Lawrence Walters, is arguing that the evidence is sufficient to demonstrate that interest in the sexual subjects exceeds that of more mainstream topics and that by extension, the sexual material distributed by his client is not outside the norm.

wherein hypocrites all across the lands are unmasked