14 Comments

1. Patrick Shields on October 26, 2009 at 7:56 am

   That's funny! I had been considering emailing the google team requesting them to visit Keene a couple weeks ago, but never got around to it. This is a very positive development–Google Street View is very helpful to scout properties and get a sense of the city without actually visiting!

2. Puke on October 26, 2009 at 10:24 am

   Neat!

3. iawai on October 26, 2009 at 10:48 am

   You bunch of free riders, benefiting from the actions of another party without compensating them!

   Google, according to the conventional wisdom of the state, should not bother to do any projects at all that have secondary benefits to free-riders. Yet there they are, wasting fossil fuels just to take some pictures that they plan to give away for free! Certainly the state would (a) indiscriminately tax all citizens, no matter their intended benefit from the project, (b) take twice as long to accomplish any street-mapping, after having spent millions on feasibility studies, and (c) charge for the access to such information (or at least tax again to produce maps "for free" for citizens).

   The free market, without forced subsidy or forced redistribution, is best served to give ALL people what they want at the cheapest price. The best that the govt could ever hope to accomplish would be to provide the majority what they wanted at ludicrously high transaction costs.

   If the state were in charge of cartography, we'd (the general populace) still think that the Earth was flat.

4. Paul on October 26, 2009 at 11:36 am

   If the free market is in charge of it, only the rich will have 3d interactive maps!!

   Oh wait.

5. bil on October 26, 2009 at 2:09 pm

   For years the 'state' has been in charge of cartology-where do you think those easy-to-get,inexpensive topo maps come from? Although the sale of the maps obviously doesn't cover the cost of making them,the information gained from the maps is invaluable.The free-market maps are the 5 buck ones at the gas station.So which method is better? How the hell do I know? Who cares anyway?As long as no-one gets thrown in a cage to make them,I guess. —bil

6. xrazorwirex on October 26, 2009 at 7:40 pm

   I'm still trying to figure out how google makes it's bajillions of dollars providing these services like google voice and gmail and gmaps for free; adwords & adsense are huge but that can't be it, can it?

7. Patrick Shields on October 27, 2009 at 2:49 am

   @RazorWire: I think it's all ultimately part of their hosted services / advertising scheme. For example, you can list your business on Google Maps (maybe you can pay to advertise it to map viewers?) And businesses pay good money to have Google manage their email and documents, probably the new voice features too, soon.

8. bil on October 27, 2009 at 3:55 am

   It is all part of a complex scheme,where we all get hooked on the free services,so much so that we can't do anything for ourselves.Then they start charging us up the ass for the free stuff,and we are stuck paying for something we never would have wanted if it wasn't free in the first place.

   As an aside,I recently had a site I am on crash-the members had no way of contacting each other,because we didn't know who most of the real names were.Some of us knew each other,but in times of trouble,an alternate method of comunication should be in place.We now use the 'cell' method.No Google required. —bil

9. Keith on October 27, 2009 at 6:36 am

   It looks like only some streets are done. Maybe half of Keene has been done?

10. Paul on October 27, 2009 at 9:05 am

    Wow — they went out by my old house in Surry. That's incredible — how many armies of people do they have doing this?

11. bil on October 27, 2009 at 3:32 pm

    If you have never seen this done,it is interesting.I watched them do a section of 'Frisco last year.A small station wagon,packed to the gills with electronic equipment.On top a rack with video cameras pointing in all directions at head-height.They jusgt travel slowly up and down the streets in a predetermined pattern,and are hooked up with a GPS system.They catch images from several angles and directions.They update also,as I was in the picture twice in differant places,but only one place now.BTW,a few months ago a small town in Scotland got upset at them and trashed the equipment.Privacy issues.Source: LA Times.As Britian is one of the most monitored countryies,they are a bit touchy.Or rightly suspicious.Pick one. —bil

12. Lpviper on October 27, 2009 at 4:15 pm

    One source of revenue I know about (credit to FTL) is Google selling data about people's health related searches to the CDC. Hearing that was enough to prompt me to switch my homepage to startpage . com

13. kalmia on October 27, 2009 at 8:39 pm

    The cameras on the cars are ridiculously large. You would definitely notice it going by.

14. Mike Barskey on October 28, 2009 at 8:54 am

    Too bad they didn't drive by during a 420 celebration. 🙂