It was just a matter of time, but now it finally happened. Google Street View is a available for three Dutch cities: Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Groningen (and for a bunch of English cities as well, including London). I haven't been able to find myself yet, although I have seen a Google car passing by at least once in recent months.

Checking out some spots in Amsterdam, I am impressed by the amount of automatic blurring of faces and license plates. At least I expect it is automatic, I sure hope there aren't thousands of underpaid employees painstakingly blurring faces. I am sure all these new images will lead to some interesting discoveries. Me, I'll just bore you with an image of a bike taxi in Amsterdam.

Edit: it seems Firefox doesn't like the code to embed the map view, so I'll just give you a link for now and you can check it out for yourself. After a dozen tries (preview version help) I figured out the problem is caused by the link to Google's full page. I converted it to a tinyurl URL and now it works. No clue why, but I'm not in the mood to look into this right now.


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Or is there just something wrong with my computer or Google's service?




[Edited to add: for those who wonder, it lasted 15 min or so and then all was normal again. My guess is a Google hiccup.]

It seems every time Google brings out a new feature, bloggers flock to mention it, probably hoping to be the first or the one with the most insightful post. I won't try that. However, the Street View option in Google Maps is an interesting feature.

Only available for a couple of US cities at the moment, the street view feature lets you pick certain streets and view images from street level. Somehow I get visions of some poor schmuck driving around in a dinged up car taking 360 degree pictures every twenty feet or so. I guess the actual process of taking pictures is more advanced though. So if you want to know what the Eiffel Tower near the Bellagio (hey, I just watched Ocean's Eleven again this weekend) looks like without actual visiting Vegas, you can see it on Google Maps.

When you press Street View and zoom in on a city, some streets will be marked with a blue color. You will also see a little yellow guy that you can pick up and move around on the map. Either move the dude of click a blue street to get a picture of that street. Once you see the picture, you can zoom in/out, turn it left/right/up/down using the arrows or by simply clicking the picture and moving it in the desired direction. Want to pretend like you are driving around in Denver? Simply click on the little white arrows in the picture that show a direction and it will be as if you moved in that direction. It seems Google's link to this page button now creates links that include the point of view of the image.

And now we sit back and relax, waiting for the first people to post about seeing themselves, or cheating loved ones, in one of the pictures. As usual, it is an interesting feature, but one that could lead to plenty of privacy complaints. I understand that Google has worked with women's shelters to make sure no safe houses are recognizable in the pictures. Anyone who feels a certain image is inappropriate can click a report this image link. Google then asks why the image is inappropriate and provides as reasons that the image “contains inappropriate content”, “infringes on my privacy”, “presents personal security concerns” or “Other”. I wonder how difficult it would be to get an image removed. At least the option is available though, that is a good start. I wonder, would a robber caught in the act be able to get his picture removed?

If you happen to see yourself in an image, feel free to post the link in the comments. Looking around a strange city from time to time to see what people were up to (when the pictures were taken) or what the locality is like could be an interesting pass time.

Over four years ago, Google started its Google Answers service. People could ask questions and set a payment for a satisfying answer. “Volunteers” would then try to answer the question as well as possible, getting paid if their answer was considered satisfying by the person who posed the question. I signed up for the service way back, thinking it would be an interesting pastime. This was before I realized there's plenty of other ways to pass my time.

Today I found a mail in my mailbox telling me Google Answers will be discontinued soon. Tomorrow is the last day people can ask questions, Dec 30th is the final day for people to post answers.

When Google Answers started, there was talk of it possibly being a threat to librarians world wide. After all, Google is usually good at what it does, and with search engine technology at hand and plenty of people willing to spend lots of time searching for answers, the community should be able to outdo many a librarian. It seems the service didn't take off well enough for that. There have been plenty of questions and answers, but it never became the killer server some people figured. Still, there may be a librarian or two sleeping better tonight.

It seems I haven't been paying close attention to Google's antics these past months. At some point it added features to the Dutch version of Google Maps, Google Maps Nederland. Now it is possible to find specific addresses on the map, get directions to/from these addresses or find businesses in an area. In other words, it has all the functionality that made the US version great.

So, if you happen to hop over to the Netherlands for a brief (or longer) visit and you want to drive somewhere yourself, you can now get directions. Of course, you could also just rent a car with GPS, but what fun is that?

Of course directions are in Dutch if you visit http://maps.google.nl, but you can always change the language by adding ?hl=en, so http://maps.google.nl/?hl=en uses the English language.

Google has launched the (Google News) News Archive Search (I'll call it GNAS for now). GNAS lets you search news items from newspapers and web sites going back at least 200 years.

A lot of the content is from subscriptions sources, or pay-per-view. At this time, it seems the choice of news sources is fairly limited, I keep seeing the same ones over and over again. But perhaps this was related to my searches. At first glance, GNAS offers the basic simple search box for your search. Simply type in a term and you'll get a bunch of results. Whenever Google knows you will have to pay to access the full article, it marks the article so you can easily tell before clicking through.

There is also an advanced search page, which (among other things) lets you set a language and source options. So if you are only interested in articles from TIME, you can set add source:time to your search. You can also just search for that to get all TIME articles. Once you set an advanced option, the search page changes. After the initial advanced search, options are offered on the search page so you can easily change them. E.g. if you search for John Wayne in articles with no price, an option to search for price structure appears for your next search. The same thing happens when you search, e.g. for Dutch news about John Travolta (or your own icon of choice). Results can also be displayed as a timeline, which simply means all articles from a certain year are grouped together and results are displayed in chronological order.

I think Google News Archive Search can be quite a valuable resource for people looking for older news articles. Of course the success of the service depends on the amount of free or very cheap content Google can offer/link to. As long as the main content is stuff people have to pay for, I think a lot of people will pass. I know I wouldn't be interested in paying $3 for a newspaper article from the 50's.

When writing your own software, you can work hard to write your own version of something dozens of other people have already written before you. Or, you can try and find existing code and use it or modify it to suit your needs. I have mentioned several code search engines back in March, but now there's another site to add to the list.

At Krugle, you can search code from a number of programming languages, including JavaScript, C++, and PHP. When searching, you can search all of a file, but you can also limit the search to sections such as comments, function calls or class definitions. Although I don't really write any code myself, I sometimes find myself looking for a way to rewrite existing code. This kind of site helps me with this. Once I have a piece of code, I can enter it here and see what other people did with certain functions, such as window.open.
[Source]

When designing a web page (either personal or at work) or creating an electronic course (at work), one of the hardest things to do is to find appealing images to include. Images can be a great way to “spruce up” a page that would otherwise contain only text. Yes, I know one should only include images if these actually have a function in the instruction itself (from a purely pedagogic point of view), but I think a lot of people are more drawn to pages with graphics on them. And it's not just the young people who seem to prefer pages with pretty pictures.

It can be difficult to find actual free photos/pictures to use in your own creation. LibrarianInBlack mentioned everystockphoto.com, a terrific site to find pictures. Everystockphoto.com searches photos that are made available using one of the Creative Commons licenses. No matter what your topic, be it waves or books, you are bound to find something useful here.

Each picture contains a link to the appropriate attribution license, so it is easy to check out the specific limitations for use of the picture.

I kind of missed this when it came out, and never really checked it out since. Until today that is. Google has a search site that focuses on blogs. Google Blog Search searches information from blogs, and it aims to “to include every blog that publishes a site feed”.

One thing I really like about this specific search site, is that I can create an RSS feed for interesting searches without having to sign up for a membership. Technorati lets me watch searches too, but that requires a membership. Google's RSS feed is easier to just subscribe to. Of course, right now Google Blog Search is extremely basic and doesn't have any of the extras specialised sites like Technorati have.

Remember how cool it was to see live traffic info on a map of your neighborhood at Yahoo! Maps? Well, Yahoo! is back with a beta version of the new and improved map service.

Yes, it's another major search engine with another mapping/satellite/hybrid picture option. Do I ever get bored of these? Not as long as they all have different levels of detail when it comes to my most favorite US spot. Which I won't link to, for privacy reasons.

Yahoo! Maps is presented as a Flash application, and has the usual zoom in/out and dragging around options. There is an option to add a map to My Yahoo! and to mail it to someone. I was unable to find an easy to use “link to this location” option. Oh yeah, and it seems the site does not display correctly in Firefox.

The gimmick of Yahoo! Maps is its ability to display live traffic info overlayed on the map. This even works in hybrid or satellite view. Try it with the directions for a trip from LAX to JFK to see plenty of traffic info. Just zoom in to see the detailed info. Next time you plan a trip, you can zoom in on the map and find out if you can avoid paving operations by cutting through someone's yard.