Google Earth is Not God! Rant!
Everyone loves it! No one questions it. Everyone just uncritically plays with it! And then everyone tells carto types to develop tools just like it!
It has done tons to get people looking at the world, democratized the process of annotating maps, spearheaded a great mashup movement, inspired, got people where they want to go and has pushed the geomatics industry to simplify and make useable their esoteric tools. Bravo Google!
Google Earth, however remains a corporate beta, not open source and very proprietary inaccurate tool that leases proprietary data about our planet from big data sellers and re-sellers. It is also not an analytical tool, it is a viewer and a toy! And that is why geographers play with it, and well, play with it. No one does analytical work with it cuz it ain’t an analytical too!
Read the following correspondence between gaia - opensource 3D interface to the planet and Google. gaia tried
to reverse engineer famous Google Earth and implement its functionality in open, portable, customizable and extendable way.
So, have fun with the toy, and now that you know how great enjoying data is, push your governments to give you your civic data so that you can stop playing with pictures of the world and start studying the world to make it a better place! Or keep your government accountable! Or play but on your own terms! Or just plain be an informed citizen participating in the democratic process.
