Rotacoo

Borders Books today launched a global Where’s Wally competition on Google Earth.

Each day over the next week, a clue will lead you to a specific location on the Earth which you then submit here.

Brief inspection of the supplied kmz file leads to the following images, each of which holds the answer for the next seven days:

• Day One
• Day Two
• Day Three
• Day Four
• Day Five
• Day Six
• Day Seven

Which all makes it much easier!

Aside, I really wish people would switch off Word’s automatic “curly quotes” when writing degrees, minutes and seconds. The correct characters are the same as feet and inches, like this: 48° 51' 29.62" N / 2° 17' 40.21" E.

Thanks to Gearth Blog for the heads-up.

Recently I’ve been reading lots on the imminent Google Street View release for much of Europe, and have discovered a few titbits which I found interesting.

As you already know, the Street View images are taken by convoys of cars driving around major cities with 360° cameras mounted on the roof. You can see many photos of the cars on Flickr.

Throughout Europe the images are being taken by a fleet of Opel Astras which are mounted with the 9 directional cameras, a GPS unit for positioning, as well as SICK Laser Range Finders and 3G/Wifi aerials.

Driving these cars all over is a massive undertaking for Google, purportedly costing some 500 million Euros, so they’re obviously gleaning as much location based information as they possibly can while touring the world. The laser range finders are probably to help measure up 3D buildings, while the location of wifi networks will greatly improve the geolocation api and 3G network strength might be handy for a company that is developing mobile phone software.

In Europe, Google Street View is already available for cities in France and Spain. Other European countries where the car as been spotted, and it is assumed will be available “soon” include Germany, the UK and Italy (the Flickr group has a complete list).

Throughout Europe, Google have apparently been using the same fleet of Vectras, but re-plating them with the relevant country’s local licence plates. This seems to me an unnecessary effort – people drive between France, Germany and Spain all time – but I assume having local plates prevents any extra hassles from the local authorities.

The cars spotted in the UK are also Opel Vectras, which means they were not purchased in the UK (the Vectra is sold under the Vauxhall brand in the UK). However, they are not the same units used on mainland Europe as they, like all UK cars, are right-hand drive.

This means the cars must be from Ireland, where right-hand drive Opels are sold, and have then been re-plated with UK plates. The initial “LJ08″ tell us they were registered between March and September of this year in Wimbledon, London.

I can find no evidence of these cars being spotted in Ireland, or Street View being planned for Ireland. But if the cars started life there, and will presumably go back to Ireland once the UK mapping is complete, it must be quite high up the list of countries to be added.

So Who Is Next?

With this week’s launch of Spanish Street View, lots of folk were moaning about the lack of UK street view and, according to this French article we’ll have to wait a lot longer: it claims Germany is next in Spring 2009 before the UK and the Netherlands sometime later.

However, based on the Flickr car-spotting, I think this information is incorrect and UK and Italian Street View will be coming before Germany, and both before the Netherlands.

The Street view cars were first spotted around France in May of this year, and a subset of the images made it into Google Maps by July 2nd, just in time for the Tour De France. The rest of the images were added on October 15th, 5 months after they started capturing images.

Looking at the Flickr images of the Street View cars in various areas around France, all the photos that were taken in September and October are in areas that are not included in the October 15th roll-out.

Looking specifically at Paris, which was included in the October 15th roll-out, the most-recent images of the car driving around are July. Similarly, Flickr photos of the cars in Madrid (included in the October 28th roll-out) are dated late July and August, but it has not been spotted since then. So, I’m pretty certain that no images taken past August have made their way online yet.

The UK cars were initially spotted in London around the middle of July, and continue to be spotted around smaller UK cities well into October. It’s a similar story in Italy with the major cities being mapped months ago. However, the major cities of Germany are still being photographed as late as this week.

Meanwhile, sightings in The Netherlands have been few. The cars started out in Amsterdam, where the whole operation is based, but appear to have gone straight to France and Spain without taking pictures of the city.

For France and Spain the initial launches centred on a couple of major cities, although images have certainly been taken in much more of those countries. One reason for this is apparently bandwidth – serving the millions of images can overload even Google’s servers – but another factor must surely be that those images were simply taken first. In the UK and Italy, major cities such as London, Edinburgh and Milan were finished months ago while in Germany they’re still photographing Berlin and in the Netherlands they may not have even tackled Amsterdam.

For this reason I reckon that either Italy and the UK are the next countries for Street View, probably Italy first but both before the year is out. Then Germany and the Netherlands will come later on, and perhaps even Ireland much later on.

Update: And the day after I post this, Street View is launched in Italy! UK Street View may be sooner than I thought…

Thanks to byrion and ropesandpulleys for the CC licensed images.

Many sites, including Google Sightseeing, use the excellent (now Google owned) FeedBurner service to serve their RSS feed. FeedBurner helps “bloggers, podcasters and commercial publishers promote, deliver and profit from their content on the Web”, mainly by providing tools which provide statistical reports and analysis to help publishers capitalise on their content.

According to our FeedBurner stats, Google Sightseeing recently hit a milestone in terms of number of subscribers; we now average over 100,000 unique subscribers.

Live updating figure

Unfortunately the number of people actually reading the feed on any one day is likely to be far below that, but it’s still seems like a pretty massive number to us. Because FeedBurner numbers are public¹, for any site that uses the service, you can use a free service called FeedCompare to chart their subscriber number against anyone else that uses FeedBurner. Which is how I created the following graph:

(The red line is Google Sightseeing, and the regular drops were due to a long standing bug that incorrectly returned a very small amount of subscribers)

This shows the number of subscribers reported by FeedBurner over the past 24 months, for Google Sightseeing (red), GEarth Blog (blue), Google Earth Hacks (green), and Google Maps Mania (purple).

The big jump in reported numbers back in February ‘07 was when Google took over and Google Reader result began to be shown in the figures, but what’s really interesting is what happened to the Google Sightseeing feed immediately after that…

As you can see, once the Google stats were included, our figures began a steady rise that has continued on exactly the same trajectory ever since. The figures for the Google Earth Blog and Google Maps Mania have remained about the same, whilst GEarth Hacks has had several large jumps – this probably makes sense, as when a site gets a big link from somewhere you might expect a sudden increase in subscriber numbers².

Given the relative flatness of the other graphs, why is it that Google Sightseeing has had such steady growth over the same period?

Although we can’t be sure, and of course the high quality of Google Sightseeing promotes people to tell their friends, but I think this may well be due to Google Reader’s suggestion feature.

So, if you read Google Sightseeing, how did you find it?

Last Friday, due to a technical error with our Sat Nav (aka “pressing the wrong button”), I drove through London’s city centre congestion charge zone.

You have until the following day to pay the charge, so even though I’d only driven through it for the final 10 minutes of the day, I went online to pay the extortionate £8 charge.

The process was simple, and once I was done I opted to receive a receipt via email, as I’m sure most people would do.

The next day I received the following email:

From: customerservices@cclondon.com
Subject: London Congestion Charging System

This is a Sample Body Text. Please change this text with valid information.

Pardon? The receipt was certainly attached, but I couldn’t believe that they’d sent out all their emails with this placeholder text – they’ve been running this system for 5 years!

So I emailed back to report the issue:

To: customerservices@cclondon.com
Subject: Re: London Congestion Charging System

Dear Transport for London,

This was the first time I have paid the congestion charge but I believe it has been active since 2003.

I am astounded that in all this time you are still sending email receipts with the below placeholder text. Is it really that difficult to write a small bit of copy?

Regards,

James Turnbull

At 9am the following morning I received a reply from the “Customer Services Operations Manager”:

Dear Customer,

Please open the attached file to view correspondence regarding the central London Congestion Charge.

If the attachment is in PDF format you may need Adobe Acrobat Reader to read or download this attachment. If you require Adobe Acrobat Reader this is available at no cost from the Adobe Website www.adobe.com

Thank you for contacting Transport for London.

Joanne Marsh
Customer Services Operations Manager
Central London Congestion Charging

Well, they’ve obviously managed to write that generic email copy. Attached to the email was an HTML file containing Ms. Marsh’s reply.

It said the following:

Dear Mr Turnbull,
Central London Congestion Charging – 1859908/RB

Thank you for your email received on the 28th September 2008, about your suggestion.

We always aim to give the very best Customer Service possible.

We also work hard to listen to any suggestions our customers make for how we can improve the Congestion Charging Scheme, or the level of service we provide.

Your suggestion is important to us and it may be taken into consideration when changes are made to the Scheme in the future.

If you have any questions, please call us on 0845 900 1234, (or Textphone 0207 649 9123 if you have impaired hearing), or contact us via our website www.cclondon.com.

Yours sincerely

Joanne Marsh
Customer Services Operations Manager

For starters, why on earth couldn’t this text have just been in the email? Even an HTML email would have been better than having to load a separate attachment.

But, even more annoying, it’s clearly a bunch of standard responses seemingly cobbled together by some poor AI, and totally fails to respond to my email!

Worst of all, in retrospect, I asked for such a useless reply: by complaining about a lack of copy text, I invited a response composed from other bits of copy text, as if to prove they have managed to write something! The cheek of it!

Here’s an email we received from Twitter the other day:

Hi, Google Sightseeing.

andy_murray (andy_murray) is now following your updates on Twitter.

Check out andy_murray’s profile here:

http://twitter.com/andy_murray

Best,
Twitter

We’re proud to say that, after Andy Murray received some flak from the Guardian because he wasn’t following enough people, he has chosen to follow our Google Sightseeing Twitter Feed!

If you haven’t already got a Twitter account, you can get one by signing up for free at twitter.com, and whether you’re famous or not, we’d love it if you chose to subscribe to Google Sightseeing updates at twitter.com/gsightseeing.

Later on this month I’ll be attending Google Developer Day 2008 in London, a free one-day conference for developers using Google’s many APIs and platforms.

Last year’s event was simultaneously held in various countries, and I sort of liveblogged the experience. It was a great day, but the “worldwide” aspect was a let-down, with the last session of the day being wasted on watching a live video stream from the states. So that’s been sorted, and this year the events are staggered out. It also looks like the London even is going to be huge – it’s being held at Wembley!

The day before I’ll also be attending the Geo Developer Meetup at Google’s London office, where there’s going to be a couple of geo-specific talks and maybe a beer or two with fellow KML fans. I’m also hoping to find an API developer who I can bend the ear off, regarding my unresolved Google maps API issue.