Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
“It sounds like you're almost saying that Google Earth is an ideological tool to bring
peace to
real
Earth,” I tell McClendon.
He doesn't hesitate for a minute. “Yes. I say that, and I believe that. If it brings people
thatwe'repurportedlyinconflictwithcloseenoughtous,thenit'sveryhardtostayincon-
flict. If everybody had that—if North Koreans had that and could see what it's like in L.A.
or small-town Middle America—they might not feel so isolated. But they have no access
ation
isn't
neutral, that on balance it's inherently good because of its power to help people
understand one another.
AtthedawnoftheWorldWideWeb,muchwasmade ofthefact that thisnew“Internet”
was a place without place—a geography-less void that was, like God, everywhere and
nowhere. Cyberspace was
analogous
in some ways to space, but it would be navigated vir-
tually,withnorelation toourrealthree-dimensional worldatall.Thereweretwoproblems
with this idea. First, it led to crappy “virtual reality” movies like
Virtuosity
and
The Lawn-
mower Man
. And second, in the long run, it turned out to be totally wrong. Fifteen years
later,the hottest trend in information is “geotagging”: ensuring that every bit ofdata onthe
Internet—every tweet, every YouTube video, every photo on Flickr—is coded with loca-
tional metadata tying it to a point on Earth.
Geotags may sound like a small change—just a latitude and a longitude on a Facebook
status, big deal!—but they have the potential to revolutionize the Web. The dominant on-
line search paradigm now is one of a librarian: we suggest subjects using keywords (“Tell
me about dinosaur fossils” or “Tell me about 401(k) plans”), and resources come off the
shelves.Butonthe“geoweb,”dataisindexedbyplace,notbytheme,andsothesearchen-
gineisatourguide,notalibrarian.Youask,“What'saroundhere?”(andthatqueryisprob-
ablyautomated,ifyouhaveaGPS-enabledphone),andtheanswersfloodin:thesefriends,
thesebusinesses,thesephotos.Infact,thedataisprobablycustomizedtothespecifickinds
of things you've decided you're likely to be looking for: these geocaches, these clients,
these Ethiopian restaurants. The Internet overlays itself on the real world like—well, like a
map, frankly.
In 2005, a DreamWorks animation tool developer named Paul Rademacher was looking
for a new place to live in the Bay Area. This being the primitive pre-geoweb era, he was
apartment hunting with stone knives and bearskins: a new sheaf of MapQuest printouts
every time he left the house. The programmer part of his brain knew that this was wrong.
It was inelegant. Google Maps had launched two months previously, and Rademacher ad-
mired its smoothly scrolling maps. Wait a minute, he thought. This map is just JavaScript
runninginmybrowser,sothereforeIcanchangeit.Whycan'tIjustcombineitwiththelist
offor-rentapartmentsonCraigslist?GoogleMapshadn'tyetreleasedanAPI—application
programming interface, a guide for users to interact with the software—so Rademacher
