Rotacoo

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to the RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Google Sightseeing has been up and down (mostly down) for the last 24 hours. The cause of the issue hasn’t been fully identified but we’re working on it as best we can.

Edit: It’s all sorted now

Geo-conference Where 2.0 has launched in San Jose, where all the big players in everything geo will be giving presentations and launching new features.

Microsoft seem to be first out the gate with loads of new imagery for Virtual Earth, including Bird’s Eye coverage of London.

Google have also launched new imagery in the form of street level views for 5 U.S. cities. It’s similar to A9’s version, but with a much nicer interface.¹

Culminating with the end of the conference is the Google Developer Day, to be held in ten cities worldwide. Google will surely be launching a few new features at this event, whilst teaching all those in attendance how to best make use of their various APIs.

I’ll be at the London Developer Day, but unfortunately it’s too much of a trek for Alex to make it down from Edinburgh. So, if you are at the event and you see a man in a Google Sightseeing T-shirt please come and say “hi”.

Well if you haven’t seen it already, here’s Google Maps being featured on The Simpsons!

In fact, a naked sunbathing Homer? That seems to ring a few bells for some reason…

Mobuzz.tv seem to have spotted the link to Google Sightseeing too (skip to about 1:20), mentioning our mass digging¹ as well as linking to our Top 10 Naked People on Google Earth post.

It would be lovely to think that the writers on The Simpsons had been stealing their ideas from our site!

If you like Google Sightseeing, then why not vote for us in the Blogger’s Choice Awards? We’ve never gotten anywhere in these blog polls before, but maybe that’s because we don’t beg our entire readership to stuff the ballot boxes on our behalf…

Anyway, if you’re a fan, then you can vote for us as the Best Geek Blog, the Best Blog About Stuff, the Best Travel Blog, or even the Best Blog of All Time!

Oh, and feel free to tell your friends of course…

This weekend Edinburgh was graced with Scotland’s first “proper” web conference: The Highland Fling. The speakers were all excellent, and gave me loads of ideas for things I’d like to implement in both my day job and night job. Stand-out talks were Mark Norman Francis on Graded Browser Support and Andy Budd on some of the best features we should be trying out from CSS3. Olly has a good write-up of the day.

The next day the tables were turned, and some of the speakers from The Highland Fling saw what Scotland had to offer at the Refresh Edinburgh conference. Matt Riggott and John Sutherland were the hosts, and Matt’s employers, Line had kindly offered up a fantastic venue. The room promoted a laid-back feel with Tennent’s artwork and a Tuk-tuk in the corner.

Read the rest of this entry »

Google Maps greeting site MapMsg recently updated with a fantastic new feature - custom crop circles!

You can draw your circle anywhere on the globe that you like. I’ve chosen a rude field near Edinburgh airport…

Create your own crop art at Mapmsg

Thanks: Google Maps Mania.

After years of not much happening, there’s been a sudden surge of Web Development related events happening around Scotland.

The only proper web conference Edinburgh has had in the past was WWW2006, but the cost was stupidly prohibitive (£750 a person!) so I didn’t bother attending.

Now, over the next couple of months, there are at least 3 major events on my calender:

March 3rd - BarCamp
I’m still holding out for an invite to this year’s Foo Camp, but the “anyone’s welcome” un-conference of Bar Camp will be a good start.

April 5th - The Highland Fling
The Highland Fling is all about “Progressive enhancement” and has lots of big name speakers over the course of one day.

April 6th - Refresh Edinburgh
Refresh is about “refreshing all aspects of new media endeavours in and around Edinburgh”. There’s plans to hold an event the day after the Highland Fling where Scotland’s developers and designers can get together and get drunk.

Myself and Alex are planning on doing a short presentation about the technical underpinnings of Google Sightseeing at Refresh, so if you are near Edinburgh please come along and heckle us.

It’s a popular week for Google Sightseeing in the news - the LA Times have yet again mentioned our blog in an article on Google Earth entitled “Intrepid armchair explorers“.

The article features quotes from Google Earth user Andre Mueller; John Hanke, Director of Google Earth; Stephen Lawler of Microsoft Live Search Maps; Hill Penfold, a moderator of Google Earth Community and ends with a snippet from Frank Taylor of Google Earth Blog.

Bizarrely, the article is accompanied by four photos of the two founders of Bird’s Eye Tourist (it’s basically Google Sightseeing but for Live Local), even though the authors are barely mentioned in the article. Instead, there’s quote from Thomas Baekdal, a Danish reader of the blog. I wonder if they tried to get in touch with our No. 1 commenter rob?

I was just interviewed for Pods and Blogs on BBC Radio Radio Five Live to talk about Google Earth and Google Sightseeing.

The show will air in a few hours at 2AM GMT on Tuesday 6th February but I’ll update this post with the BBC “Listen Again” link when I have it.

Updated: Here’s the link, jump to about 16 minutes.

To celebrate our 1000th post on Google Sightseeing, we’re officially launching our company blog, called Rotacoo, with a rundown of the highlights from some of the stats and figures generated over the past 22 months since we launched Google Sightseeing.

• There are currently 1000 posts and 10,998 comments, contained within 197 categories
• We’ve posted 60 site news entries
• We’ve had to move host 4 times because we kept outgrowing them
• Our most popular category is Buildings with 196 entries
• Our most popular country is the United States, followed by the United Kingdom, Canada and then Germany
• Our most popular state category is California, with 99 entries
• We currently have 11,315 RSS readers through Feedburner
• Akismet has protected the site from at least 83,351 spam comments since we installed it last year

Visitors

In May of 2005, just one month after the site was launched, Google Sightseeing had 196,228 unique visitors. We only installed Google Analytics in November of that year, so the following chart only begins half-way through that month.

Daily Visitors, 13th Nov 05 - 31st Jan 06

Daily unique visitors as reported by Google Analytics (Click to enlarge).

In September 2006 we posted the infamous topless sunbather, which (thanks to a major Digging) was seen by over 60,000 people in one day.

The enormous interest in the story meant that over the course of the month we clocked up over 1.7 million page views, making it our busiest month ever (even despite our extensive downtime). The second huge peak was our followup story, the Top 10 Naked People in Google Earth (again getting picked up by Digg), although it’s only higher because we’d moved hosts by that time and the server was better set up to handle the traffic.

The graph represents a staggering 3,194,852 absolute unique visitors to Google Sightseeing since the 13th November 2005.

Browsers

When we first launched nearly 2 years ago, we inititally got discovered through del.icio.us, which was brand new at the time, and frequented by many “early adopters” - which might explain why in the first month, only 48.2% of our visitors used Internet Explorer, and 35% used Firefox.

Amazingly, the growth of Firefox has meant that today’s more balanced stats show Internet Explorer accounting for 55% of all our users, and yet Firefox still makes up 35%! Of the 55% who use IE, 31% have already upgraded to IE7.

Comments

We’ve had an incredible 10,998 legitimate comments on the site (most of them correcting our facts and/or spelling), and here’s the top ten commenters based on the email address supplied:

1. Alex (admin) - 306
2. rob - 215
3. cookie monster (under various aliases) - 197
4. James (admin) - 130
5. Tim - 120
6. Keith - 98
7. Luke - 87
8. gIMpSTa - 68
9. Peter - 66
10. Propaganda - 64

So that brings us to the end of this celebratory first annual report. Thank you to everyone who helped us get this far, including all those who blogged or wrote about us, everyone who linked to us, and especially everyone who contributed on the site through comments or submissions.

See you in another 1000 posts!