update on google maps

Yo! google maps just did the greatest thing ever! It allows you to drag and drop what route you want to take! Since i take back-roads to places when i'm working, i'd always want to get google to give me directions taking bootleg routes.

Hooray for google!

The future history of google

I was talking to a fellow "futurist" and was telling him that the future of information really is Google, and the applications people develop for it really. I was telling him that someone is going to write a program that indexes historical information to google's map program. So when you research Thomas Jefferson, google will have a site that tracks thomas jefferson's travels through Europe, across America and so forth. This wouldn't just be any map, it'll be a historical map that accurately reflected the size and shape of cities back then. This'll be even cooler because some geek would create a program that made 3D models of the buildings, so you could do a virtual walk-through.

Then there's the question of historical debates, for instance, what ethnicity were the Harappans (Indus valley) or even the Ancient Egyptians (Kemet) for that matter. I guess fury would arise if anyone modeled Muhummad as Islam allows no images of their Prophet. And what would happen if someone created a Jesus with lambs wool hair and black feet!

I think for this we would need to create choice-points and explanatory tangents to educate the explorers of the past. This would be in the form of some floating symbol that is clickable or something like that.