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Technolog: Earth, wind and shire
In 1992, the author Neal Stephenson wrote a novel entitled Snow Crash, a post William Gibson, not quite sci-fi, not quite now-fi yarn. In the Snow Crash world, the Internet - still mostly an academic network in the early 1990s - is something you jack into with VR goggles. Stifle a yawn if you like, but it was 1992. It was original at the time.
The central character, going by the implausibly fictional name of Hiro Protagonist, finds himself in demand as a kind of techno detective, bankrolled by people for whom money isn't an obstacle. To help him in his investigations, he's given access to an enormously expensive piece of software called, simply, Earth.
To quote the book, Earth is 'the user interface CIC uses to keep track of every bit of spatial information it owns - all the maps, weather data, architectural plans, and satellite surveillance stuff'. It's an integrated rendition of data feeds from across the entire planet, viewable as a 3D whole or at any level of detail you like. Stephenson's Earth is a piece of software able to aggregate and display information from huge numbers of data feeds, almost in real-time; Google Earth is a piece of software able to aggregate and display information from a database of existing imagery. Not quite so good, but not far off. And you can download it now. For free.
The lovely thing about Google Earth is that it's only feasible because of the advances in computing that many of us have scoffed over. Practically every desktop PC in the Western world now has enough graphics power to run Google Earth's sophisticated 3D graphical interface. Up until now, even I've been guilty of questioning the point of routinely building powerful 3D graphics hardware into PCs that inevitably
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And it seems that, happily, just as hardware has reached the point at which the first incarnation of Google Earth has become feasible, we've developed too. Think of the HTML, text-based Internet as the sandpit we all played in, metaphorically peed in and then had to carry on sitting in, pouting and wishing we hadn't done the peeing bit. The Wikipedia project has proved that for the most part we've grown up, we're more responsible and at least marginally less likely to get back in the sandpit and do the same thing.
Despite this, the Google Earth Community service could suffer from the same problems as Google the search engine - a low signal-to-noise ratio at times and continuous adverts you don't want for things you don't need. But the beauty of the visual Earth metaphor is that there's a defence against that: layers. Contrary to the rest of the Web, the Google Earth interface has the ability clearly to separate official and potentially paid-for services (data layers like road networks) from layers with less reliable origins (the Google Earth Community layers). Imagine having a view of the whole Internet, with a checkbox marked 'hide the dross'. It beautifully marries the editorial controllability of an encyclopedia with the unfettered accessibility of the Internet.
It doesn't end there. The more you use it, the more you realise Google Earth is essentially a search engine interface that's inherently and perfectly attuned to human strategies for assimilating and digesting data: we live in a spatial world and like visual, localised interface metaphors. A spatial interface is an incredibly effective way of sorting through and finding what's relevant to you. Think for a minute about how - if you've already downloaded it - you fired up Google Earth for the first time and entered a simple seven-digit postcode. Google Earth instantly flew you to your house, a process so natural that what it was actually doing needs pointing out: it was tearing its way through terabytes of data to present the tiny part that mattered to you. Geographical metadata makes information enormously easier to find: the spatial metaphor is an extraordinarily powerful data filter.
