I guess had I opened Google Earth before I had read this, my reaction
would have been one of surprise at how fairly lame and useless it is
to toss up a bunch of seemingly undifferentiated points and call them
a geographic web.
Then I might have picked up on the Panoramio logo issue and would
have thought it to be at best an unfortunate choice. I have been
through some logo designs myself and know how hard it is to not bump
into someone else's ideas yet keep some kind of an evocative theme.
I think Google Earth's stance is pretty clear. They care first and
foremost about getting their product out there and tend to show they
have a very introverted or at least self-centered corporate culture.
There may well be legions of GE marketing types who know nothing
about either open standards or open source. I see this as a result of
GE's genesis in the "black" world of
The sad fact is that 99% of GE users will look at this and think it's
revolutionary. But we know better. It's Red Dot Fever (thanks to
Schuyler for that term!)
Vote with your mouse. Turn the layer off.
Allan
On Dec 9, 2006, at 15:08, Mike Liebhold wrote:
I clicked on google earth today, to follow my daughter & husband's
journey from brazil into argentina, and found an unexpected new
default view.
I don't know which is more offensive:
1, That google would add a new default selected layer called
"geographic web" that is - no way - a "geographic web"
or
2. that that the prominent logo on many proprietary kml placemark
pages from these "geographic web" points is so derivitive/poached
from the widely recognized OSGEO logo. see panoramio.com
And it's kind of counter-intuitive to see some non-editable
wikipedia pages have mysteriously been imported into google's own
non-standard kml format.
If google earth actually supported standards, starting with html
and georss, wfs/wms/gml I guess they could claim a "geographic
web". Until then it looks like a clearly blantant appropriation for
private advantage of the term "geographic web" that explicitly
means open standard hypermedia, to most rational people.
check it out.
- Mike Liebhold
--
Allan Doyle
+1.781.433.2695
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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