Rotacoo

The Guardian today reports that Google Street View has been cleared as safe to launch in the UK.

Sightings of the conspicuous cars began last month, prompting the country’s crappest newspaper to devote the front page to scare-mongering of what they called a “burglar’s charter” of photographing EVERY door in Britain. The horror!

The Street View car navigates roadworks in Edinburgh (picture from GazH on Flickr)

Of course, this was just silly: a burglar could discover a whole lot more about how to go about stealing your plasma by getting off the internet and actually walking down the street. The only advantage street view will add is that he won’t get lost on the way.

Luckily, the Information Commissioner’s Office were not swayed but the Daily Mail’s nonsense and ruled that:

“We are satisfied that Google is putting in place adequate safeguards to avoid any risk to the privacy or safety of individuals”.

Quite right. Google are staying quiet about exactly when the service will launch, but the camera has been spotted in major cities all over the country, including London, Cambridge and Edinburgh.

If, like me, you spend a lot of time inspecting websites with Firebug you’ll have got into the habit of clicking the little bug in your status bar, clicking “HTML” and then clicking “Inspect”.

But, in the most recent versions you can get there with just one click, all you have to do is add the toolbar button!

You can find the button in the View menu, under Toolbars > Customize…. Drag it onto your toolbar, and inspect away, with two less clicks to get there.

The icon is awful, and doesn’t blend in with the new Firefox 3 theme on the mac, but it looks slightly better when you install the GrApple theme.

Yesterday Microsoft’s Virtual Earth blog announced a whole host of new features for their Live Maps service (that’s their version of Google Maps) and Virtual Earth 3D (that’s their Google Earth competitor).

For me, the key feature of the announcement is “Neighbourhood Subscribe via GeoRSS” which provides an RSS feed of your area, aggregating geo-located content that Live Maps has scraped off the web. Sounds great!

But, when I tried to actually use Live Maps, by clicking an example link to Virtual Globetrotting sights in Spain, I found myself at the homepage of multimap.

Surely I must have clicked the wrong link? Nope, turns out any UK visitor to maps.live.com gets “helpfully” redirected to multimap. The Multimap blog explains how, since being acquired by Microsoft, they are now “the lead consumer mapping experience for Live Search in the UK”.

This would be fine if Multimap was just a re-branded live maps, but in fact it only offers just a small subset of the Live maps features! All the information in that Virtual Globetrotting link above is ignored and you end up at the useless homepage.

The Multimap blog acknowledges that “it may have been a while since you last used Multimap.com”, but there’s a reason for that – it’s rubbish. Adding a few of the Live maps features only makes it slightly less rubbish, and for UK visitors breaks every link to a specific map.

For now, you can around the redirect by going to this Live maps link or by adding “mkt=en-us” to the URL parameters, but that’s not really enough.

If the goal is to lure visitors away from Google Maps then Microsoft are going about it the right way with Live maps, and the very, very wrong way with Multimap. Hopefully they reverse this decision sooner, rather than later.

Updated: Well everyone shouted and eventually they listened: Live Maps UK has been restored.

Tony Farndon’s fantastic Minimap sidebar has quite rightly won a grand prize in the Extend Firefox 2 contest.

Tony presented the plugin (originally as a Flock extension) during last year’s Refresh Edinburgh event, and we were very honoured to see that he’d even built in support for Google Sightseeing sights to be easily loaded into the map.

Since then he’s ported it to a Firefox extension and added even more features. I’ve been using it for months and it got to the point where I’d forgotten it wasn’t a standard part of Firefox (which may explain why I took so long to write this post…)

You can install the plugin from its homepage.

I’ve just managed, for the very first time, to get my Google Reader unread count down to zero. And I’m very proud of this achievement.

I’m not the best at keeping on top of my 257 feeds, and having recently moved house I’ve been without the internet for a week or two. So the unread count was waaaaay over 1000, which is where Reader just calls it “1000+”. This is presumably because it thinks you’ve given up trying to read everything.

The reason for undertaking the mammoth task of actually reading my feeds was today’s announcement that top Mac newsreader NetNewsWire has been made freeware, along with web based access via Newsgator and syncing between computers.

I wanted to move my reading to NetNewsWire, but OPML (the standard file format for describing feed subscriptions) doesn’t support keeping a track of what I’ve read. So to make the jump I had to get everything read, and then start afresh. Which is what I’ve done!¹

Oh dear, NNW tells me I have 20 unread posts in the time it took to write this post…

Last night James (the Oxford branch of Google Sightseeing) did a very quick, but thoroughly entertaining, presentation about Google Sightseeing at this month’s Oxford Geek night. You can watch the 5 minute video of his Micro Presentation in mp4 format directly via this link.